unmediated

anonymous network, offering both UDP and TCP modes

"I2P is an anonymous network, exposing a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send messages to each other. The network itself is strictly message based (ala IP), but there is a library available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (ala TCP). All communication is end to end encrypted (in total there are four layers of encryption used when sending a message), and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys)."

The Associated Press reported about a high school in Sparta that ordered its students to remove their online diaries from the Internet, citing a threat from cyberpredators.

[via the Boston Globe]

The school's principal told the school population in an assembly earlier this month to remove any personal journals they might have or risk suspension.

ficials said students aren't being silenced but rather told that they cannot post online writings about school or their personal lives. The Associated Press found no postings by users who mentioned the school. Profiles posted by other users include photos and detailed personal information on topics such as musical tastes, body measurements and sexual history.

Kurt Opsahl of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the rights of bloggers, said there have been several attempts by private institutions elsewhere to restrict or censor students' Internet postings.

is the first time we've heard of such an overreaction," he said. "It would be better if they taught students what they should and shouldn't do online rather than take away the primary communication tool of their generation."

A spokeswoman of the school said parents of students who enroll in the schools sign contracts governing student behavior, including responsible Internet use.

That could dilute the students' free speech claims somewhat, acknowledged Ed Barocas, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

The iPod’s screen is by no means large, but if you understand the basics of codecs and video compression, you can make video podcasts that look really sharp.

" 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."

Yahoo has teamed up with Target to offer image printing to members of its online photo-sharing service, Flickr.

WiMAX World, running Oct. 26-28 in Boston, opened [yesterday] with a flurry of announcements. It's billed as the world's largest exclusively WiMax show. The show features 160+ sponsors and exhibitors and 130+ speakers.

The WiMAX World program covers every aspect of WiMAX and mobile broadband trends over 3 days and is said to feature the largest exhibition in the world of wireless and mobile broadband solutions.

The seven main conference tracks include:

• WiMAX Business Track
• WiMAX Technology Track
• WiMAX and Wireless Broadband for Municipalities
• WiMAX and VoIP Track
• WiMAX Deployments- Case Studies
• WiMAX Broadband Backhauls
• WiMAX Ecosystem led by WiMAX Forum

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

: The Online Publishers Association (OPA) has released a white paper making recommendations for local website audience measurement. It compares data from these services: comScore Media Metrix, NetRatings, Scarborough Research, and The Media Audit.
Here's the ridiculousness of data: For LATimes.com, visitor data differed by one million between two services. The Media Audit, which uses phone surveys to report data, projected about 1.5 million visitors to the Southern California news site. ComScore's Media Metrix panel reported half a million readers.
A good guide, all in all.
Download the full white paper here (PDF file)

The director of the Women’s Game Conference says that games fail to attract as many women as men not because of the games themselves (as “there is such diversity in design”), but because there’s “an exclusionary system in place that uses advertising and magazines to create an environment that is hostile to many women.” (Exhibit A: midlife Lara Croft.)

Suzanne Freyjadis-Chuberka claims that having a few female readers of (or even women staff on) specialist mags only proves that the most persistent females have nothing else to read (or that they “buy into the lad culture when they write about themselves.”) Of course, a rebuttal from the major game mags was posted the day after, but a quick look at the pubs involved would seem to confirm the conference director’s outlook on the ads, if not her final analysis on media as a whole. (Exhibit B: Bloodrayne.)

The issue of women in games—and how to get more to play them—is not a new topic in the media by any means, but can anyone recall a game marketing campaign that was geared mainly towards women in the recent past (and not “primarily built on male fantasies”)?

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"Videoblogging and education go together like peanut butter and jelly. And all of sudden, there are a lot of sandwiches being made. Here’s some links to some recent activity on this front:"

The NEtROBOt project aims to establish a new concept of communication over the Internet, getting a feel of existence in the virtual world by using an actual robot "AIBO" as interface.

3D models of AIBO are displayed on a web page, and the physical AIBO reflects the communication of the AIBOs in the web 3D world. You can operate AIBO avatars on the Internet, and you can also make a music session with two or more other avatars by typing and hitting keys.

NEtROBOt uses "un-simultaneous session system", in which players do not need to operate in "real-time". You can play sounds and add on the past log.

If you make your actual AIBO dance manually, the virtual AIBO will synchronize and dance (AIBO2PC). A reverse flow (PC2AIBO), i.e., "AIBO operation on your screen, -> operation of actual AIBO" works similarly. AIBOs which met on the network can enjoy a dance and a music session as a "dance battle. The motion and sound will be recorded on a server as a log, and will be used in a session with the player of the future un-simultaneously.

Photon started NEtROBOt started in April 2002, and today there are hundreds of thousands of players.

Videos on the website.

NEtROBOt Project is exhibited at "META VISUAL:10e Anniversaire du Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography", Centre des Arts, Enghien-Les-Bains, through December 18, 2005.

jg21 writes "A brief essay on the SOA Web Services Journal claims there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'. The piece claims that we're entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need. On example given is VOware like Groove, which is likened to IM on steroids. From the article: 'The ingredients for another wave of new companies are all around us - pervasively all around us. They include new wireless extensions of the wired network and the further exportation of technologies such as XML.' Intriguingly optimistic."

You tell Behaviour which elements do what and it adds the events for you... like CSS if you applied functions instead of styles

Paul Conley: "A portion of my life these days involves trying to explain blogging and the world of conversational media to B2B journalists. And these journalists are divided into three distinct camps."

Is there a connection between sound, vibrations and physical reality? Do sound and vibrations have the potential to create?

[Yet another] flickr for video. Revver lets you share your videos with thousands of people and earn money whenever someone watches. Revver is free and getting started is easy.

How quickly things change. For years, US telcos have been claimed that there was no need at all for network neutrality regulations, because they would never (never, ever, we promise!) block usage of their connections. They even pointed out that, if they did start blocking stuff, it would be a publicity nightmare and they'd probably lose customers over it. However, since that time, a few things have changed. High bandwidth apps have become more popular and a few service providers have been able to get away with blocking competitive applications. On top of that, new tools are coming out that will make it easier than ever for service providers to block or simply degrade applications like VoIP. So is it any surprise to see Broadband Reports point out that BellSouth refuses to promise network neutrality and reserves the right to block whatever they want to? Of course, this wouldn't be much of a problem if there were real competition in the broadband space, but the same FCC that won't fully mandate network neutrality has determined that a duopoly is enough competition for everyone.

DirecTV subscribers may be getting more HD programming this fall, thanks to DirecTV's recent contract with LG Electronics to supply them with "next gen" HD set-top boxes. The new set-tops are designed to transmit satellite broadcasts in MPEG-4 HD, basically compressed HD, as well as up to 150 channels in normal HD. This is all part of DirecTV's recent push for increased HD programming. LG Electronics has already started production and will begin shipping its boxes soon which in DirectTV terms means "in five years or so." Definitely a good sign for DirecTV subscribers who've already invested a chunk of cash in their HD-capable TV set.

Next Gen DirecTV Set-Tops [Digital Media Thoughts]
DirecTV Contracts LG for MPEG-4 HD Set-Tops [ExtremeTech]

MIT and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Nokia Research Center today announced a research collaboration to advance the state of the art in mobile computing and communications technologies.

CSAIL and Nokia will establish a new research facility - the Nokia Research Center Cambridge - near the MIT campus, where researchers from MIT and Nokia will work closely together on a new vision for mobile computing.

"By carrying out long-term research in these fields, including novel uses of hand-held devices, MIT and Nokia will make new communication opportunities and services available for people around the globe", said MIT President Susan Hockfield." [via Moco News]

Britons are communicating more frequently than ever, but many feel that the rise of text-based digital services has made communication with friends and family less personal, according to a new survey, reports Netimperative.

... Despite mobile phones and the internet, nearly 50% of people felt that they have less time to keep in touch with friends and family now than in the past. Neil Armstrong, head of marketing at PlusNet, said: “When you’re busy, it’s tempting to send an email or text, rather than pick up the phone.

Other communication trends revealed by the PlusNet research included a high proportion of people resorting to using email, text and IM in situations where they are trying to avoid confrontation or find communication uneasy_

-- Two-fifths (40%) of respondents found new technologies less confrontational and used them to flirt (27%), apologise for missed birthdays (22%), and to inform their employers about being sick (19%)."

PC as Personal Companion for Computer Studies"
Chicago Flame (10/24/05)

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $520,000 grant to support the development of a personal computer that will act like a student and assist students in solving problems. University of Illinois at Chicago associate computer science professor Barbara Di Eugenio will develop a "dialog agent" along with Pamela Jordan and Sandra Katz, research associates at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to developing a dialog agent that can think, respond, and speak like a college student, the researchers have to design a unit that college students, including female undergraduates, would want to use. The researchers will also work with David Allbritton, a psychology professor at DePaul University. The computer has to be able to answer questions if it is to interact with students, says Di Eugenio.

A former student leader who helped topple Serbia's Milosevic teams up with a company that designs combat simulations for the military. The result? A game that teaches how to topple governments through nonviolent resistance. By Chris Kohler.

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

http://unmediated.org/irc

(thx shawn.)

Since my presentation in Edmonton was about pervasive computing, transduction and protocol, and I still haven't managed to get it online, I thought I'd quickly point to some related reading:

Steven Shaviro writes on Simondon on technology and individuation

Mark Hansen on Deleuze and Simondon on internal resonance

Multitudes 18 (2004): Politiques de l’individuation. Penser avec Simondon.

Adrian Mackenzie at Lancaster

Glen Fuller reads and comments on Mackenzie's Transductions

Mackenzie on Protocols and the irreducible traces of embodiment: the Viterbi algorithm and the mosaic of machine time (pdf)

Alex Galloway at NYU

Steven Shaviro reviews Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Jason Lesko also reviews Protocol

Village Voice: This Is Freedom? NYU prof Alexander Galloway unmasks the inner workings of computer networks

Dan Glicksman thinks so: Hollywood lobbyist concerned about protectionism [pdf]

Hollywood’s top lobbyist has fired a warning shot against countries that might be emboldened to use the newly approved UNESCO convention on cultural diversity as a means to block Hollywood movies.

“No one should use this convention to close their borders to a whole host of products,” Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, told representatives of an annual French film industry conference held Friday in the Burgundy wine capital of Beaune, in eastern France.

“If countries start passing laws that are in contravention of World Trade Organization rules, there will be conflict,” he warned.

[…] “It appears to be more about trade than the promotion of cultural diversity. The World Trade Organization is the place for (trade),” Glickman said. “What’s to stop a country saying that it’ll only take 20% of U.S. films, or taxing our films but not its own?” he asked.

Glickman was a lone voice in Beaune not heralding the U.N. convention as a major triumph for free expression as a way to affirm cultural identity.

(I never understood cultural imperialism until I heard Celine Dion playing from loudspeakers in rural Yunnan. ;) -kc.)

I missed this last week, but I find this new service from Hutchinson’s 3UK called See Me TV incredibly interesting:

See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of millions.

budding star has to do is submit a thirty second video clip to the service displaying their talents in front of or behind the camera. The clip will then be uploaded to the ‘See Me TV’ channel for other 3 customers to view*.

Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of cash.

Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and then a transfer made via Paypal - with no cap on what a 3 customer can earn from See Me TV.

I think this is pretty amazing. God knows how much they’re charging the viewer for the clips - probably a lot more than the meager 1p they’re sharing back to the creator… But it’s just the fact that Three is basically doing a rev-share for user-generated content that blows my mind. Not a lot, but if you happen to have a hit video seen by a decent percentage of Three’s 3 million UK subscribers, you could make some money!

It could be the beginning of a whole new revenue stream for the mobile industry based on multimedia microcontent. Think about it. This isn’t a mobile operator playing broker between merchant and consumer (like DoCoMo has famously done), but instead playing broker between the consumers themselves. It’s got an eBay or AdSense like quality to it, no? Who’d have thunk the Wall Gardeners would be the company to do this?

Speaking of eBay, I have to wonder why they’re bothering with PayPal, though. Why not just deposit your earnings back into your account? Maybe because of all the pre-paid accounts out there? Maybe because Three doesn’t want to become essentially a bank (by holding your earnings in case you earn more than you owe)? Very strange to me.

Regardless, I think it’s brilliant. What do you think?

-Russ

VideoEgg & TypePad:

"The VideoEgg Publisher is a small browser plug-in that makes it truly simple to capture, edit, encode, and post video online. VideoEgg and Six Apart have partnered to make it easy to post video to your TypePad blog. You can post a short video clip to any one of your TypePad weblogs. "

After logging in from a Mac you get this message, "A Macintosh Version of VideoEgg Publisher is currently under development - please check back soon!"

Also, your videos are limited to 2 minutes, and at some point in the future VideoEgg might add advertising.

This partnership looks like it will open the door even wider for people to easily post their videos on the web. By integrating a video publishing platform directly into TypePad, nontechnical users will be able to try it out, without having to learn an extra set of video publishing tools.

I use vblogcentral.com which allows me to drag and drop my video to a desktop app, which also allows me to key in a blog post title and text.

vblogcentral then uploads my video and converts it to windows media and quicktime for both dial up and broadband.

The cool thing about this is that it allows people to subscribe to my rss 2.0 feed and have my videos automatically delivered with an aggregator such as FireAnt.

If VideoEgg converts everything to Flash, do they also support enclosing the Flash video in an RSS 2.0 feed?

If they do support Flash in an RSS feed, it won't help my subscriptions since FireAnt does not support that yet. They are working on it for the next release.

So I won't be subscribing VideoEgg video in TypePad blogs until aggregators can read Flash in a feed.

Having QT or WMV enclosures is better, and in the case of audioblog.com, they convert your uploads to Flash AND soon you will be able to make a video podcast.

That is better all around...

Look for some of this in PCmag.com or publish.com tomomrrow.

Californian cool cat Julian Bleecker wrote a very interesting piece about what he calls dislocation: the “ways in which various forms of (mostly electronic) communications/networking social infrastructures make tectonic, geographical alterations on the landscape“. This is meant to appear in a book about locative media edited by Jeremy Hight.

… some of the ways that certain spatial practices related to some technologies are changing how we operate in space. Specifically, the way VoIp shifts the practice of telephony from place-specific to place-agnostic (area-code assignment, Skype from plane or Vonage from plane). There’s no one way to read this shift, other than to say it is emblematic of practice-in-transition. This was anticipated by cell phones and is tied to the relationship between location and motility. The relationship being that location is “ours” in the case of this practice. We decide from where we telephone and how to represent where we are when we telephone. In the primary case, it was such with the portable handset evolving in degree to the VOIP systems, with cellular telephony in between (as well as more sophisticated DIY call-forwarding schemes, one of which got a colleague at Data General reprimanded for configuring his phone to call-forward to his parents house so he could avoid the toll charges.)
This topic also relates to the challenge of anonymity at a time during which resources are committed to surveillance and intelligence gathering. The gangster calling from an “outside phone” is working against the agents who’s task it is to trace and record and locate the originators and recipients of telephone calls.

Why do I blog this? I like this concept very much and I think it’s a new ‘technosocial situation’, i.e. a new technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This concept comes from Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe’s paper Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use. Julian’s article also connects this dislocation concept with locative media projects.

Some of you may have heard of the Photogapher's Right, a guide to your right as a photographer in public places by attorney Bert P. Krages II.

Well, videoblogger Pete Prodoehl, in a post on the videobloggers mailing list titled Are We The Media?, relates this episode today:

Yesterday I was shooting some video and walked into a university. I was told by an employee "I don't mean to ruin your fun, but you can't film in here." (She may have said 'videotape' instead of film, I'm not 100% sure, I just remember I was told I had to stop shooting.)

I noticed later that the fine folks from the local TV station were allowed to shoot inside, where I was not allowed to.

So, that brings up some questions in my mind.

Were the media given 'special priviledges' ordinary people are not?

Could the fact that it was a university have been in my favor? Don't my taxes help pay for it?

Is there "Videographer's Rights" document, like the Photographer's rights? Would it apply?

I was following what became a news event -- this is backed up by the fact that the local TV folks were there. I can't help but feel like I'm the little guy who got squashed by Big Media.

imate question. In my view, citizen journalists should have the same rights of access afforded news crews from the mainstream media.

With TV shows now sporting a price tag with the lure of no advertisements, will lawsuits be more apparent in the future?

: Yahoo has the Hollywood connections but Google Video gets a boost of publicity and content today from a deal with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation to showcase the Emmy foundation's Archive of American Television. The archive includes 284 in-depth interviews with a "who's who" from every aspect of television. The first 75 interviews -- about 240 hours -- are available now.
Foundation chairman Steve Mosko calls it "a perfect marriage of irreplaceable content and one of the most powerful delivery systems in the world." Press release
Meanwhile, AOL is expanding the universe of RSS feeds in its video search engine, announcing new deals today with Blastro.com, EVTV1.com, Forbes.com, GameTrailers.com, PC World and Time4 Media. The feeds optimized for video will show up through the AOL.com video portal, AOL Search and the AOL service. The deal includes AOL's Singingfish video and audio search engine, along with its search network. By using RSS feeds to deliver information, AOL becomes the conduit while video traffic goes back to the sites. Press release.

A growing number of "social content" applications such as Flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming are making open web services part of their core offering to end users. These interfaces allow users to query, share, and manipulate the data managed on their behalf by these social content applications.

Based on a brief review of the common features of a selection of these sites, this paper suggests some best practice guidelines that developers can follow when creating new service interfaces for similar applications.

Xbox 360 chief architect Peter Moore has already stated that there are no plans to stream full-length 360 titles via Live. However, there is great potential to introduce episodic gaming. Services like Xbox Live Arcade are definitely going to take a chunk out of retailers’ profits, but episodic gaming could completely change how we buy and play games.

By staggering the release of a game’s content into weekly intervals, publishers can create the same kind of frenzy and anticipation that avid television watchers experience. But is the Xbox 360 HDD prepared to handle this transition? Would new episodes replace old ones? How would this affect replay value? Once you own an episode, can you download it again? Questions, questions, questions…

[Thanks, Davis]

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The Creative Weblogging network of bloggers has launched a new project, Creative Reporter, that pays readers to write "collaborative journalism." Creative has no formal contract with the reporters, but will give them a byline and pay $10 for every 1,000 page views of a story, according to PC Magazine. So far 100 "reporters" have signed up for free registration.

"There is no line for us between blogger, amateur, and real journalist," CEO Torsten Jacobi said. "We are blurring the lines." That is certainly true, but don't believe everything you read.

Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven't been able to get out of my head since:

Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?

Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?

Jay comes down on the side of My Space. He wants to see everyone self-publish with their own straight-up blog and their own server space. If personal media is partially about self-expression, then it is, in a way, also about self-determination. Content creation within MySpace comes with a whole slew of content restrictions and user agreements that many content creators may come up against one day. Plus there's that little issue of content ownership. As Eli pointed out to me the other day, News Corp owns any content produced on MySpace. In this sense, content creation within MySpace might be likened to slaves on a ship talking about who got the flyest chain.

But there are a ton of reasons to not dismiss MySpace as a platform for participatory media, primary among them are the social rewards that are crucial to introducing newbies to the world of blog authoring. (Even the videobloggers have their own "MySpace". It's called the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.)

Years of participatory media classes by Liz and Tricia have taught me that without strong, constructive and immediate feedback from one's peers, most students will stop blogging as soon as the class ends. There is no consistent reward down on the low end of the long tail, so unless you're able to connect a student's content creation with their existing social networks, that student's Blogger account will most likely go inactive soon after (and sometimes well before) the class ends. Meanwhile, these same students will continue to participate (and create content!) online within social networking services like MySpace.

So if a social networking service's user base includes a significant portion of a student's immediate social network, shouldn't that be our target space for introducing them to participatory media? If we teach them how to blog/videoblog/podcast within their existing social network, aren't we empowering them within their existing context?

In a content creation economy without financial rewards, peer feedback will drive users to create more sophisticated content. Within social networking spaces, comments -- along with more valuable "friends" links -- are the currency of that economy.

If we teach someone how to post a videoblog entry on their MySpace home page, they have a greater chance of receiving feedback from their friends (and a few strangers) than they would posting to a Blogger account. As they receive more comments ("That's so COOL!"), it may spur them to post more content. As they post more content, they hone their content creation skills, and the sophistication of their posts increases.

This is the thinking behind the latest changes to the videoblogging curricula I'm involved in implementing. It's only been a few weeks, so check back in a few months and I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, one thing I know for certain is that I shouldn't be teaching participatory content creation without a strong, relevant social framework to place people in. My hope is that other folks will do the same.

Mark Gibbs has a nice piece in Network World discussing the proposal for ID3 tags for music files. The gist is that ID3 tags could be added to any digital encoding format (ogg, MP3, etc) and that these tags could contain information such as table-of-contents. Thus, you could rip a whole album to one file and yet retain the ability to skip around to various tracks within the larger file, using a player that read the ID3 information. In theory, Version 2 of the ID3 tag proposal permits any sort of tag, including very long ones. Given that freedom, it's easy to see that DRMistas and others will have many uses for them, including encrypted watermarks, hidden alternative encodings, and I'm sure you can all think of other amusing nastiness.

Business Week has an interview with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

As he waits for the White House to fill vacancies that will give him a Republican majority, the FCC chief is now set to approve the historic mergers of SBC and AT&T, and of Verizon and MCI, by as early as the end of October (see BW Online, 8/31/05, "So Long, AT&T? Not So Fast").

Then, he tackles an ever-thornier set of issues, ranging from indecent broadcasts to the rewrite of the telecom laws. Martin discussed upcoming issues with BusinessWeek's Washington correspondent, Catherine Yang, on Oct. 12. Below are edited excerpts of that conversation.

What do you want to accomplish most during your tenure?
The Commission's top priority is broadband deployment and to make sure other new technologies are deployed as quickly as possible.

Are you troubled that the U.S. ranks No. 16 in the world in broadband penetration?
It should be a concern of the Commission to make sure that broadband technologies -- both wire-line and wireless -- be deployed as quickly as possible.

When you compare where we stand internationally, you have to take into account that we have very large sections of the country that are rural and where it costs more to deploy (see BW Online, 6/28/05, "Good for Cable, Bad for America").

For example, Massachusetts and Japan have about the same population density. Massachusetts is ahead of Japan in broadband penetration. But that doesn't mean there's not more we can do.

Should broadband providers have to pay into the universal service fund, which taps long-distance fees to subsidize phone service for rural and low-income households?
What I advocate is moving to a technology-neutral way of collecting universal service funds. Telephone numbers are technology-neutral. Whether you're a wire-line provider, wireless provider, or new VOIP provider, [your customers] need a telephone number. [By assessing charges per phone number,] we're could [put a system in place to] collect money from consumers regardless of which technology they use.

One hot regulatory issue involves the efforts of phone companies to win approval from local cable-franchising authorities to provide TV services over fiber networks. Do you favor a broad granting of authority allowing phone companies to go ahead?
Local franchising authorities have the responsibility of granting access to their communities. But the 1992 Cable Act says local franchising authorities are not allowed to [unreasonably prevent] second entrants [in a market] from coming (see BW Online, 9/28/05, "Verizon's Muddy TV Picture"). The Commission may hold a proceeding to see if we have a role in [the franchise approval process].

Why have you taken such a strong stand to require Internet phone providers to link up to 911 operators -- at a time when many warn of saddling new technologies with too much regulation?
There's nothing we can do that's more important than making sure new communications services don't leave people unconnected with emergency personnel.

Many of the FCC policies completely baffle me.

The Bush administration says they want to offer ubiquitous broadband and plans to open of 90 Mhz of spectrum (see DW: President Wants 90MHz), which will be auctioned next June. The spectrum, at 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz, will be broken up in smaller geographic portions in order for smaller carriers to bid on them. Sounds good. But duplex 5Mhz channels sound like a sweet deal for UMTS-based Cingular. How does that help inexpensive broadband wireless? It sounds like a bad play.

The buyout and elimination of 2.3 GHz broadband wireless by XM radio is another issue. Then there's the domination of licensed 2.5 GHz by Sprint/Nextel, the power limitation of 5.4GHz (made available by the efforts of Senator Barbara Boxer), the elimination of telco DSL competition, the limitations of 3.5GHz, silence on attempts to ban virtually all municipal networks, the elimination of unlicensed 700 Mhz, a screwed up DTV system, and the general lack of affordable broadband and competition in the United States.

What kind of broadband policy is that?
Sucking up to SBC is good for America?

Canon today announced a new compact WiFi camera, the SD430, the first Canon model to feature built-in WiFi (802.11b). The Canon PowerShot SD430 retails for $499 and will be available at the end of January 2006 in the United States.

Canon PowerShot SD430 can also function as a webcam or be remotely operated by a computer. It will offer users the ability to automatically transfer pictures to a personal computer via the wireless link as the pictures are taken. Images can also be sent through a wireless access point.

The wireless features include:

• Wireless direct printing: The supplied Wireless Print Adapter plugs into the PictBridge port and is pre-registered for instant, wireless direct printing to any Canon PictBridge compatible printer2 – including the SELPHY CP range of portable Compact Photo printers. Users can also connect wirelessly via PC1 and configure to print automatically to a USB connected photo printer.
• Auto Transfer mode: The camera automatically transfers each image as soon as it is taken and the supplied software displays the images on the PC as they are received, allowing for real-time full screen viewing with friends.
• Wireless Remote Capture: Enables users to wirelessly control camera shooting functions from the PC1 – ideal for candid party shots or home wildlife photography.
• WEP security and WPA-PSK with TKIP/AES encryption for enhanced data security.

It features a 5-megapixel CCD and 3X optical zoom lens. A movie mode captures 640 x 480 resolution at @ 30 / 15 fps, 320 x 240 @ 60 / 30 / 15 fps and 160 x 120 @ 15 fps.

Purchasers of the camera are eligible for membership of CANON iMAGE GATEWAY, which offers 100 MB of online space for uploading and sharing images. Membership also allows users to download start-up images and sounds to customise their My Camera settings.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

It's got an incredibly ugly interface, and it ain't Native Instruments FM7 by any stretch, but CuteVST has two things going for it: first, it's an FM synth that's open source, and second, it imports Yamaha DX7 sysex data. So think of the ugly interface as geek cred. It's the real deal: classic 6-operator synthesis, modeling the original Yamaha keyboard. Downloads for Windows available at SourceForge. Thanks, AA!

But, wait, there's more: CuteVST is a port of Hexter for Linux/LADSPA. Meaning you can download for LADSPA hosts -- and probably meaning you can run this on the Mac, if you're really savvy. I'm just going back to Ableton Operator, thanks.

.

The Trusted Computing Group, a nonprofit industry association that creates open industry specifications that vendors use to create more secure computing products, today announced its plans to enable trust and security in mobile phones and their applications. The organization has created a set of use cases for mobile phone security and intends to have a publicly available specification ready for first half of 2006.

More in Nokia Security.

Portable Augmented Reality

Computer monitors are by no means an endangered species, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that they will soon be replaced for many uses by floors, walls and table tops. The latest evidence: a Microsoft Research scientist has developed a projector and computer vision system dubbed PlayAnywhere that projects interactive computer-generated images without the need for specially mounted cameras.

Researchers have been reducing the cost and complexity of the augmented reality systems in recent years. (See PCs augment reality, TRN June 26/July 3, 2002). The PlayAnywhere system goes further by packaging the components into a single portable unit that doesn't require calibration. The system consists of an NEC tabletop projector, an infrared light source, an infrared camera and a computer. The device projects a 40-inch diagonal image onto the surface it stands on.

Computer vision techniques allow users to use their hands to move, rotate and scale projected virtual objects. The system tracks shadows to determine where fingertips touch the surface; frame-to-frame pixel-level changes determine hand motion. The system also keeps track of sheets of paper in its view and can project images onto them.

The projector system could be used for games, educational software and other interactive graphical computer applications.

(PlayAnywhere: A Compact Interactive Tabletop Projection-Vision System, Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2005), Seattle, October 23-26, 2005) [posted on Technology Research News Roundup]

Adrants reports that Budget Rental Car has launched an online contest/marketing campaign that includes The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt blog. The site drops clues in a nationwide scavenger hunt. The contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with advertising promotion on 74 weblogs in what is a big test for the medium. Congrats to B.L. Ochman who played a pivotal role in the campaign. This is one to watch.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Promotions

In the technology and Internet industries, a lot of companies publish what's called an application protocol interface, or an API for short (definition). These special “hooks” enable software developers to build new fangled tools on top of existing platforms. For example, this mashup of Google Maps and Craig's List was created using APIs. Same thing applies for this Flickr Sudoku game.

The same model could be applied to better journalism and marketing in the rip, mix, burn economy we live in. In fact, some are already experimenting. The BBC recently set up the Creative Archive License Group. The BBC hopes to foster innovation by letting anyone re-use its material for personal and educational purposes under the Creative Archive Licence. Currently some 100 clips are available for mixing.

This is just the beginning. Consider the following scenarios...

Imagine if Fidelity Investments released video/audio snippets of their new ad campaign featuring Paul McCartney for mixing. Citizen marketers could come up with new creations using components of the ad campaign, such as the music or even just images, provided they adhere to certain guidelines set forth by Fidelity. This could generate even more word of mouse.

Or what if BusinessWeek published a story that had half the factual reporting covered. Let's just say they can't confirm a certain fact with a secondary source. They could publish the article online and ask the community to corroborate the story or even take it in a different direction if that's what the facts show.

Marketers and journalists need to take a page from the tech industry and start releasing “the bones” of what they produce into the wild and then wait and see what comes back. They might be surprised to find that what consumers create is far better than what the pros produce, fostering more innovation and better content. Whether they will try this is another story entirely. This is something Joseph Jaffe and I will take up on our next podcast.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Media

Dam!

I guess I don't make it onto Jason Shellen's list. And I guess Adam Bosworth doesn't consider me important enough to get back to me and followup from our meetings on microcontent from six months ago.

Oh well - cause it sure is nice to see Google swallow the red pill so hard. And gulp it down.

Regardless of what their schemas loOk like, we'll support them and bake them into our 'Structured Blogging' compatiblity box. That way people won't be locked into the Google schema and can post their Reviews, Events, Lists, Recipes, JogBlogs, People and Group showcases, Listings, Personal ads, etc. - anywhere they want.

They can choose to put it into Google cloud - or anywhere else. Or both. That's what the 'OutputThis' service will allow - sending stuff to multiple locations - your favorite destinations.

Anyway - this is great news for us 'structured content nuts' - as long as Google publicly exposes all this content and lets others spider it and index it - as well.

Here we go.

I bet Tantek is happy - too. And Bob and Salim.

Now where was that San Francisco Restaurant Reviews server? I'd better go ask Gavin.

In a speech to the U.S. Telecom Association, Hearst-Argyle CEO David Barrett reached out to the telcos. "The sooner we embark on this partnership the better," Barrett said. "We are in the throes of a political battle in Washington with your cable and satellite competitors who want to restrict consumer access to multicast programming. If telephone companies can help us secure multicast carriage for all television viewers, you will find broadcasters across America welcoming your arrival to the program distribution market."

Libraries, schools and other institutions that use the Internet are protesting new rules that allow law-enforcement wiretaps and require changes to allow the eavesdropping. These groups argue they should not be covered by the new wiretapping rules.

Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher says a lot of the citizen journalism material is simply dull. Then he gives suggestions to editors on how to improve the quality of citizen journalism.

Here are some highlights of an article worth reading:

"If you don't have a well-developed strategy to populate the site with content of interest to people, you will end up with a site full of junk," says Rich Gordon, an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the faculty advisor behind the school's GoSkokie.com, citJ Web site. "Hard as it is to get people to visit a citizen journalism site for the first time, you don't want them to come and decide it's not worth coming back."

Nearly everyone I interviewed for this article emphasized that getting people to submit content to citJ sites requires lots of outreach and marketing. There's no such thing as "build it and they will come."

Amy Gahran, who co-writes a blog about citizen journalism called IReporter.org ...thinks that being willing to highlight the best citJ contributions prominently -- and not treating it as a less valuable or valid form of news -- can go a long way in increasing the quality of citizen content.

"To get the best content," says (Chris) Willis, We Media co-author, "I do believe people will have to be compensated. News companies had a chance to get a lot of participation for free, but as blog networks begin to get bought up by the likes of AOL, the New York Times or News Corp., a value for influential online voices is being set. That's a genie that won't be going back into the bottle anytime soon."

Microsoft says "me too!" to the idea of digitizing books. MSN Book Search will be a part of the Open Content Alliance and a beta version will launch in early 2006.

A while back now we asked you to submit ideas to rethink how to present TV and Radio listings using the TV anytime data and other relevant feeds.

The response was magnificent and thanks again to everyone who took the time and effort to submit entries. But on to the bit you really want:

The winners of the first Backstage competition are...

Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth for
http://www.mightyv.com/

We all loved this.

It’s a fantastically impressive prototype with a wealth of features and innovative ideas already implemented that we were almost overwhelmed. That said the simplicity of the user experience meant that it was easy to use out of the box. There is a lot of different findability here; tagging, ratings, recommendations as well as the basic grid format with innovative and different ways of navigating your way through thousands of hours of TV and radio.

There was a real effort to integrate non BBC feeds (imdb, bleb) and the TV Anytime metadata was neatly exploited via the accessibility search tool as well as genre lists such as films and comedy. I haven't mentioned the personalisation (but you can sign up for your preferred channels) and some real heavy lifting behind the scenes plumbing like an open source PERL TV-anytime parser which the team have made available to CPAN. We were itching to use this and show it around as soon as it was submitted which is a sure sign that Leo and Leon had come up with something special...

This is fantastic prototype which thoroughly deserves to win the first Backstage competition.
Leon and Leo win some "Geek Bling", ie: a rackmount server to the cost of £1K and a trip to the BBC to talk further.

Runners Up:

Thomas Scott for the TV Map
http://tvmap.thomasscott.net/

It was the lateral approach to the brief that we liked here. The idea that TV metadata descriptions could be versioned as a google map mash up sounds odd but, in fact, works very well.

This is a very simple prototype with only a weeks sample data but we can see the opportunities for introducing viewers to programmes they would have never considered viewing.

It’s rough and ready but does the job of suggesting that there are different ways to visualise those hundreds of tv and radio programmes per week. Thanks Thomas.

Fraser Nevett for the Programme Similarity Visualiser
http://www.nevett.org/lab/tv/similarity

The complete departure from the grid was what made this stand out. There's a simple algorithm there combined with a compact visualisation tool and Fraser has done a fine job of representing a weeks broadcasts in a vastly different way to the time/channel axis. There were plenty of ways in which we could think how this could be built on with plenty of different features but it was again another easy to use prototype with an extremely intuitive interface. More importantly it set us thinking about what might be possible.

We'll be dropping a note to the winners/runners up to arrange prizes/delivery and meet ups as soon as this mail has arrived

Please don't think that because your prototype wasn't shortlisted that we weren't impressed. There was some great use of phones/sms, avatars, automated speech, some traditional but keeping it simple listings layouts, some fine personalised epgs and a Radio 4 clock!. Thanks for putting the effort in.

Watch out for further competitions...

DataTiles is inspired by the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", where the memory of the computer HAL was stored in transparent rectangular slabs. The system enables users to manipulate digital data as physical DataTiles.

Tagged transparent acrylic tiles are embedded with RFID tags. These tiles serve both as physical windows for digital information and to trigger specific actions (to launch an application, or submit a query) when placed on a sensor-enhanced display surface. When a tile is placed on the tray, its associated function is automatically triggered. For example, placing a weather tile onto the tray retrieves the current weather forecast information from the Internet and displays the processed results on the region of the screen under the tile.

Users can use a pen or a mouse to interact with the information displayed by DataTiles. Several combinations of physical and graphical interfaces are possible. For example, a printed high-res image (on a tile) can be visually fused with dynamic displayed graphics. Grooves engraved upon the tile surfaces also act as passive haptic guides of pen operations.

The tiles can be used independently or can be combined into more complex configurations.

Mind-blowing Video. Images.
More information in the PDF.

By Jun Rekimoto.

Via rhizome < DV blog.

A group of engineers from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Strathclyde plan to develop tiny "Specks" for low power sensor applications.

The Specks are sensors with computational and communications capabilities that can be embedded in objects. They could be used as lighting and temperature sensors in buildings, placed in aircraft wings to detect failures or used to sensitise medicine bottles to ensure that people take their medication at the correct times.

Thousands of Specks, scattered or sprayed on a person or surfaces, will collaborate in programmable computational networks called Specknets. Scientists are even considering the idea of a putting the devices in a spray-can, allowing the Specks to be sprayed onto any surface.

"In the future, computers will be able to be diffused into the environment," explained Professor DK Arvind in 2003. "One way to achieve that will be computers the size of a grain of sand. Just by spraying them on to objects, you can computerise them. They would create a network which can transmit wirelessly to each other. In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology."

Via The Engineer Online. See also a previous article in Scotsman . Image.

Reblog's 1.0 announcement promised "push-button republishing for the masses", and we've been doing pretty well following that track for the past year or so. Last night, we pushed the button on Reblog 2.0. The concept behind the software has always been a form of attention cagefight: many feeds go in, one feed comes out. Reblog closes the loop between piqued interest and publishing by making the act of marking a link for publication a one-step affair. We've long thought this was a pretty interesting addition to the standard functionality of an RSS reader, and I'm surprised to see that in late 2005, there's not a lot of other software that performs the same task.

In the meantime, Reblog has started to see slow but steady growth. Eyebeam and Rhizome both use the software to publish net art blogs, and Eyebeam has an explicit "curator" role in the fortnightly reblogger. Global Voices Online has expressed strong interest in adapting the project to their multitiered reblogging operation, and Reblg from Broadband Mechanics borrowed the term for a similar idea based on microformat republishing from within the browser. A lot of these uses place Reblog in the role of plumbing: like the mixer in your shower, it's there behind the wall but you never see it. Reblog's output is typically meant to be fed into a MoveableType or WordPress plugin, where it surfaces as a series of blog posts on an HTML site annoted with "Originally by so-and-so from..." attribution notes.

We've been thinking a bunch about expanding this role a bit, so that the RSS output from Reblog carries more weight. What happens when you chain a bunch of Reblog installations together, so that the output of one person's attention stream becomes fodder for the next? You get an omnidirectional passive e-mail substitute, great for washes of "FYI" type information and general interest sharing. In a lot of use cases there's no reason for the output to ever make it to a regular blog. Small, distributed groups can use the software to share information among themselves, and only escalate to the relatively disruptive e-mail level when action or response is required. Alternatively, chaining feeds together could result in a progressive-filtering mechanism, reducing the complexity of a thousand feeds into a few pertinent pieces of information through a pyramid of editors.

So, with the interest of making Reblog a more flexible sharing tool, we worked on version 2.0 with a few broad goals in mind:

• Usability: Reblog's user interface needed to help the end-user manage large numbers of feeds more effectively. Tagging feeds & entries has proven to be the most flexible way to accomplish this. We were also interested in ways of making the interface look less... dorky. There was a lot of techno-cruft that just had to go.
• Extensible Input via a public API: Greasemonkey is pretty damn cool, so we thought it'd be useful to provide for a way to perform common Reblog editing actions via a programmable API. XML is boring to parse, so Reblog now has a JSON-RPC API exposed.
• Extensible Output via support for plug-ins: We were strongly interested in seeing some sort of plug-in ecosystem evolve around Reblog. If the software's useful, it makes sense to provide for a way to adapt it to specific uses. My own guide for this has been Blosxom, a simple blog engine written in Perl.

One huge change that became apparent as we wrote 2.0 was the need to post your own entries, independent of any particular feed. Historically, Reblog 1.x assumes that the target blog would be used for this purpose. In 2.0 we've added a "post item" feature, which acts as stripped-down Blogger or Del.icio.us analogue, and handles one of the primary uses cases suggested by Reblg. This idea has been gaining some traction recently, most conspicuously in Mark Pilgrim's microformat atom store concept. Mark decribes the idea as "having your own private database", but my own takeaway from Del.icio.us has been the value of making such micro-information public. Reblog is built to share. Bud Gibson has been referring to this idea as the xFolk Veg-o-matic, a slice & dice greasemonkey-based browser augmentation that trawls websites for microformatted links and posts them into Reblog for you.

We believe this is pretty cool.

Hipster beltbuckles have got nothing on this waist contraption from Feelspace. Strap this electronic compass around your waist and one of those circular green sensors vibrates to tell you which direction is north. The creators describe this using more fancy terminology: "vibrotactile stimulation." Not exactly a fashion statement, but the goal of this research is to "investigate the effects of long-term stimulation with orientation information on humans." It also has some obvious short-term uses, say for the blind, people who run marathons across the Sahara desert and tele-sexual fetishists.

Feelspace [via Information Aesthetics]

Victor Lombardi of the Management Innovation Group: "We've been working for several companies facing how they and their markets change with the further spread of social media. It's creating enormous potential for more democratic media production and sophisticated tools, but a lot of it will rely on companies understanding it and being receptive to it. We're developing a framework to help companies do this, and one of the key considerations is not scaring the shit out of them."

(See also: Social Media and Value Creation. -kc.)

Stephen Hill: "2005 will be remembered as the year the lid finally came off media distribution. Personally, I look forward to discovering the unique talents that will emerge from podcasting."

Publish: We need to build systems into user-supplied content sites that provide the necessary checks and balances to create quality.

The Register: So right now, the project appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.

Specialised robots, devices for DIY content creation and new TV displays are among the trends to watch in 2006.

That is according to the American-based Consumer Electronic Association which has published its view of technologies set to influence in next 12 months.Devices and trends around video gaming and high-definition TV (HD) also make it into the top five.

"They truly illustrate the progress of technology in the digital age," said Gary Shapiro, president of the CEA.

via BBC

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

"Instead of making a two-hour movie, we're going to make 150 hours worth of [TV] movies for the same amount of money."

The AMV community reacts to Larry Lessigs publicizing of the AMV phenomenon.

"The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very lon g term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Participant believes that a good story well told can truly make a difference in how one sees the world. We seek to entertain our audiences first, then to invite them to participate in making a difference next.

Those looking for video content for the iPod should be aware that archive.org has tons of mp4 files that are iPod compatible in most of its collections including Feature Films, Prelinger, Universal Newsreel

a sophisticated social network data visualization system that end-users of social networking services can use to facilitate discovery & increased awareness of their online community. vizster presents social networks using a simple network node-link representation, where nodes represent members of the system & links represent the articulated 'friendship' links between them. network members are depicted using both their self-provided name & a representative image. the networks are presented as 'egocentric' networks, consisting of an individual & their immediate friends. users can expand the display by selecting nodes to make visible others’ immediate friends as well. in addition, inferred community groupings of two or more nodes are visibly represented as 'blobs' surrounding community members, taking advantage of low spatial frequencies to make community structures apparent.
this work will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization conference next week. see also the Enron email visualization. [jheer.org & jheer.org(pdf)]

It’s been a couple months since the CVS camcorder downloading alpha release. [Matt Gilbert] thought it would be a good idea if we checked up on the community. There has been a lot progress made: from low level stuff like unearthing USB commands to upping the resolution and record length. Modding for macro work and building helmet mounts has also been done. A great overview of how all of this came about is the “credit where credit is due” post. Recently they’ve been dealing with new firmware versions that make the cameras harder to play with (sound familiar?). No worries though, if the solutions maintain the simplicity of jumping one wire there’s a bright future ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved in this project; you’ve done some incredible work.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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In a response to NIcholas Carr´s The amorality of Web 2.0 David Gerard states that ”… if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it’s going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won’t be anything.”

Taking the "automatically torrent your RSS feed" idea I used for PEP which is an app I wrote to show off Prodigem's shiny new API, I have now distilled it as a direct feature of Prodigem. That means you can now just simply sign into your Prodigem account, go to your "Settings", tell Prodigem your RSS feed address and sit back and watch it auto-torrent. Here's what the Prodigem controls look like:

To put this plainly, this means you can just continue publishing your media through your blog or content management system as you always have, except now whenever your existing RSS feed gets updated, Prodigem reads it and spits out a torrent of your content. You tell your audience about your Prodigem RSS Torrent Feed and you are then automatically on the road to bandwidth redemption.

For the guts of how it works, Prodigem just scans your feed once an hour. It checks the latest 5 RSS items in your feed and if any contain an enclosure, it pulls that enclosure into your Prodigem account via the web and just torrents it. That's it. You can also specify if you want Prodigem to email you whenever it attempts to make a torrent, and you also specify the license you want to use for the content you distribute. Folks, it doesn't get any easier than this.

Several ISPs and telecom providers' first reaction to the likes of Vonage and Skype has been fairly predictable, network neutrality be damned. The Wall Street Journal today has a round up of many network providers' feelings on the matter, hidden under the guise that heavy users are hogging bandwidth and slowing down service for all their other customers. But one consumer advocate nails it when he says it's not a network-management issue, but rather a revenue-maximization issue, with an exec from Time Warner saying they're looking at different ways to control traffic, but that "Revenue opportunities...definitely exist." So, basically, it sounds like more providers will implement "price blocking": you'll be able to use whatever you want, you'll just have to pay extra for it . The problem is that these ISPs are looking to block services with which they compete -- Vonage packets might get hung up, for instance, while data for a provider's own VoIP system sails through just fine. FCC boss Kevin Martin has said that market forces will keep providers from blocking certain traffic on their networks, but that's not an assertion that's held up. But given how the commission has changed Internet freedoms into entitlements, and how the industry wants regulation to disappear, it's hard to see this situation getting any better before it gets a lot worse.

Forget borrowing somebody's notes or looking at the prof's PowerPoint slides on the Internet, now college students can just subscribe to the podcast if they don't want to go to class. Cue the inevitable backlash from people calling this the downfall of higher education, but it seems like a pretty good use of technology, really. If a student wants to go over a lecture again, they can, and somebody that tries to replace actually showing up for class with a podcast probably wasn't that interested (and probably wasn't going to do very well) anyway. But I guess Duke's finally found a use for all those iPods they gave out.

A Texas Instruments executive says open technical standards will make or break the potentially lucrative market in mobile digital television.

Doug Rasor, TI's marketing vice president, told the Society of Broadcast Engineers Thursday night that open standards such as Digital Video Broadcasting will create a level playing field for everyone involved, which will lower costs and make the technology more appealing to consumers.

Texas Instruments said its research has shown consumers are willing to pay around $10 for television service to be provided over their mobile telephones.

Rasor also told the engineers' conference in Dallas that the market would also depend upon a good mix of high-quality digital content to keep customers amused and informed.

p2p news / p2pnet: It’ll be D-Day at 7:00pm outside the Virgin Megastore on East 14th Street and Broadway in New York City on October 25, 2005.

Or, rather, it’ll be DRM-Day because Free Culture believes it’s time to make the offline public aware of DRM (Digital Restriction Management) issues. Accordingly, supporters of the protest will be turning up at the Megastore to hand out leaflets.

“If you’ve purchased CDs from Sony BMG or EMI, you may have purchased a digital rights management product and your fair use rights to your CD are at risk," says the handout. "Here’s what you can do:

• Return the CD and demand a DRM-free version
  
• To disable the DRM from working, try holding down the shift key in Windows when you insert your CD
  
• Circumvent the DRM protectiion using other instructions available on the Internet.
  
  

s out, the Dave Matthews and Switchback bands both have albums poisoned by DRM. But both groups are telling fans how to get around it.

Discs with DRM are indeed damaged goods and should be treated accordingly.

DRM is just another entertainment and software cartel scam to limit your ability to freely choose.

But it can't, and doesn't, work because anything which can be seen or heard can be copied by ones means another.

Dare Obasanajo has an interesting post on mashups and money:

One of the things that had me scratching my head about the panel [the Web 2.0 panel on mashups] is that it seemed to have skipped a step. Before you talk about making money from mash-ups, you have to talk about how people providing the data and services mash-ups are built on make money.

Yes – and if you’re the publisher of a newspaper, that’s exactly why you want to be out collecting data from your users. Mashups make it a lot easier (and fun) to access and consume data, but the key to groundbreaking work is still the underlying data, not the interface.

Latest censorship news: Wikipedia has confirmed reports from bloggers and others that the online peer-produced encyclopedia has been blocked in China. At the same time, as Tom Friedman reports in the NYTimes Select (I won't provide a useless pay-only link) podcasting is taking off like crazy in China. Censorship and information crackdowns on one hand, proliferation of user-generated online content in China at the same time. What gives?

I've been thinking and writing quite a lot over the past few months about such contradictions, and China's impact on the internet more generally. Today I gave a talk at Pop!Tech in Camden Maine about how China may change the internet as much as the internet will change China - and how these changes help explain seemingly contradictory trends.

My notes for the talk are here (not a transcript of what was actually said in the live talk), and the Powerpoint slides are here (large ppt file). The audio will eventually be available here.

Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman, Dina Metha among others for blogging the talk. In 25 minutes I tried to explain the paradox of the internet in China today: On one hand, the internet has been a tremendously empowering and liberating force for many Chinese - economically and culturally. On the other hand, a business and regulatroy model is emerging that enables censorship to work in a way that is actually tolerable for most Chinese internet users (except for political dissidents who are - to put it mildly - out of luck). As a result, China's extensive system of censorship and internet controls doesn't hold businesses back when it comes to innovating and making money from products and services that enable users to create media (blogs, posdcasts, etc.). We are also looking at a future in which soft censorship will be "baked" into a new generation of software and online services coming out of China. And these products and services will prove very attractive not just for the Chinese government but for many other governments - including some that call themselves democratic.

(I can't help but wonder if the internet in China process may become a model for the rest of us. -kc.)

It’s a phone, not a console! (PDF) is an interesting paper about mobile games by Marko Turpeinen, Risto Sarvas, Fernando Herrera from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Hmm, for a certain kind of gaming the PSP has still a lot of advantages - bigger screen, game-oriented buttons... And games are explicitely made for these consoles.

On the other hand I also think that there are a lot of possibilities with mobile phones not yet even touched nor discovered. But it's a different breed of games.

There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides and maybe we should just not look at it as either or but rather as two possible devices for games. Time will tell what kind of games have the greatest appeal on the different devices.

Via Nicolas

Excerpts from It is a phone not a console!:

Current trends in commercial mobile game development seem to follow the path of games made for portable game decks rather than taking advantage of the special characteristics of a mobile phone. Presumably, porting well-understood game concepts onto the mobile phone presents a smaller financial risk in the form of familiarity in marketing, development, and user adoption. As we have presented above, there are gamelike phenomena that leverage sociality, connectivity, media creation, and mobility. Furthermore, the phones are very personal devices; they know a lot about the user and lend themselves as vehicles for selfexpression.
Also, the phone can be a part of richer cross-media concepts, phones enable an alternative way of billing for gaming content, they are a communication medium for TV entertainment, and a source of extra information when playing in the real world. These characteristics can and should be used to differentiate mobile phone games from game deck games.

[...] However, the learning curve for consumers to understand what mobile gaming can really be about should not be underestimated. It is already hard enough to communicate to people about basic mobile games. Perhaps this is the reason why simple mobile games like bowling are very popular. One approach could be to gradually add features that leverage sociality, mobility, connectivity, self-expression, phone billing etc. into mobile game concepts that people are already familiar with. Then move towards more innovative concepts as the mainstream market becomes used to the special characteristics of mobile gaming. Another approach would be to introduce the mobile phone as a gaming device into game-like activities where these features already exist and the concepts are familiar. For example, Geocaching combines connectivity, mobility, and sociality, and online betting, which is a well-known and popular game format, combines mobility, sociality, money transfer, and cross-media.

The M.I.T communications forum held on Oct 20 "Spinners and bloggers: political communications in the digital age."From the site."For decades, perhaps for as long as independent newspapers have existed, political operatives have used "spin" to shape the way the news media respond to candidates and their policies. Spin can be understood as a kind of top-down power that depends on the social network linking political leaders and the news media. Some have argued that weblogs or blogs have emerged in recent years to disrupt this culture of spin. They see blogging as a grassroots movement that also tries to shape or control public perceptions of important events and issues. Others have claimed that the blogosphere has merely enhanced the influence of traditional interest groups, giving ideologues of the left and the right even more power to “spin” the world as they wish to see it. How can we understand the interplay between spin and blogs? How do each shape, some would say manipulate public opinion? How are each subject to abuse? Is the culture of spin and blogging contributing to the polarization of American political discourse?"An audio recording of Spinners and Bloggers is now available.

spinners and bloggers: political communications in the digital age

Felix the Cat writes "After budgets cuts led to the layoff of engineers and scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a US Senate committee has approved a $3 billion dollar subsidy to assist Americans in their difficult transition to digital television in 2009. The old analog television spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The transition date was chosen to not interfere with college football bowl games or basketball playoffs." From the article: "The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008. It does not mention a subsidy for set-top converter boxes. So, lawmakers will likely have to work out differences between the two bills, though Stevens said he did not anticipate a big fight with the House over the deadline or the subsidy."

Social verbs in online gaming are gestures that do not change the meaning of a object. When someone’s WoW Mage waves to your Paladin, you choose how object’s meaning will change because of the gesture. Language is power, just as an emoticon can get your out of trouble for telling a borderline joke.

I’m paying particular attention to verbs these days as they seem to have greater meaning than nouns, especially places (which are non-persistent; persistence is vested in objects that take actions). The reason I keep coming back to my WoW research (cough) isn’t because of the virtual world, but what I do with a group.

Beyond this gesture, the extended entry riffs on attention management, pull vs. push, marketing strategy and ownership of identity.

The pattern of gestures that don’t change the meaning of an object is actually an important design principle that is inherently social. Interruption is an increasingly anti-social action in an overloaded environment, it borders on manipulation. A social verb, by contrast, can pull participants into interaction. Conversation starts with a reply. A gesture that invites conversation, that pulls without a high cost on your attention, is incredibly valuable. In the real world, non-verbal gestures are a foundation for interpersonal communication. IM presence is a poor proxy for eye contact or posture and is expensive for a user to actively maintain. In online games and social software, social verbs as a richer form of presence and expression, especially as social norms develop, are an enhanced proxy.

What helps us scale our interactivity (keeping limits in mind) is a shift to modalities that enable a pull model of attention management. Email and IM messages are pushed at you with little personal choice for how to negotiate interaction and from whom. Your address is an object that can be manipulated. By contrast, more asynchronous forms of collaboration like wikis, or specifically RSS — give the user control over what is pulled to them, the right to unsubscribe. Instead of being broadcasted to, you are left to find your own sources, remix and roll your own. This gives rise to more active consumption, but is also inherently more efficient so long as search and coordination costs remain low.

Transparency and reuse of content as a discoverable by-product of conversation enable the pull model. The word social itself is a verb, and being social, or open, is a gesture. You may blog with your friends in mind, and doing so openly invites others to converse. Linking to someone is a more active form of social verb, you can do so without necessarily referencing them in the context of your post, it can serve as a ping.

The temptation for many tool designers is to create anti-social applications that incent users to push upon other users in hopes of viral adoption. We also tend to create tools that structure use into a single reference model and then push it as a product. But over time, tools that enable subtle social verbs in use and supple interaction in form, so long as they are simple, attracts.

Beyond the pull model for people, similar patterns are being observed for the Firm as a body. John Seely Brown and John Hagel suggest in McKinsey Quarterly that corporate pursuit of efficiency through centralized push of resources to predictable demand is headed in the wrong direction. They offer a pull model which lets go of control with decentralized group forming to foster innovation.

In the media business, pull approaches have transformed more than just distribution channels. On the production side, a vibrant “remix” culture has emerged thanks to the availability of widely affordable digital audio-editing tools, which make it possible for DJs in nightclubs and other music fans to pull in tracks from a variety of music sources and to recombine them. “Blogging” tools help users “publish” their own writings, music, or photographs, most often by pulling in content from a broad range of sources and creatively mixing and commenting on it.

Augmenting the capabilities of people to turn flows into stocks, and take action, goes against the Industrial era model of automating the deployment of assets. Most firms will not be able to make this transition because it requires sharing assets and intellectual property to reduce transaction costs and enable innovation. Sharing control or property is a gesture that enables the firm to tap into commons-based peer production and more adaptive organizational structures.

Traditional marketing attempts to directly influence it’s audience to purchase a product pushed out into a market. By contrast, marketing strategies that seek to include active consumers in the process of production, distribution and influence generate pull. And when active consumers have tools of choice for engagement, it’s really the only strategy left available.

Because of the incentives of Industrial era firms, the one tool of choice that active consumers will not likely be able to leverage is ownership of their own identity. If it were not for regulation, we would in many cases not even have shared control of identity between individual and firm, even though my identity is inherently my property. But this identity as property is traded freely between firms. And when a firm leverages such crudely mercantile identity within push marketing methods such as direct marketing — there is no gesture or social verb — just a direct assault on you sensibilities. No wonder we stopped consuming passively and want our identity back.

A recent survey from Parks Associates has found that more people are interested in camera phones (52% indicating an intent to buy one) compared with music phones (30% indicating an intent to buy one).
“Although the industry is currently focused on iPods and Motorola’s new music phone ROKR, consumers would rather have a camera phone,” said Vibha Pant, an analyst with Parks Associates. “Moreover, the impending introduction of advanced mega-pixel camera phones will strengthen demand, which will create great opportunities for service providers to increase their ARPU by offering photo sharing, photo printing, and other applications.”

Check out this article from Game Revolution. Using data from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics it shows that contrary to the current media hoopla over the epidemic of youth violence, recent data shows that "... the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.” The data is only available up to 2003, but at least herein lies some hard facts with which you can confront those who find your choice of entertainment "distasteful."

In his smart, provocative and much-linked essay, "The amorality of Web 2.0," Nicholas Carr writes:

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

or blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. Those despised "people in a back room" can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition - or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.

Movies made in World of Warcraft, discussed by Henry Lowood from Stanford University in his talk at Aesthetics of Play.

"Most traditional VC funds have a single web-focused partner, who may or may not be interested in web 2.0 consumer companies. For the most part, these VCs are not part of the most interesting deals. If they do get what you are pitching, they want to pump way more money into the company than makes sense.

Here’s my attempt to point out the venture capitalists who do get it. Some of these have new funds and only recently became venture capitalists. Some of them have been around forever. There are just two personality traits all share. First, they understand that a fundamental shift has occured in web evolution. Second, they are hungry as hell to find deals, and spend more time proactively looking for the next opportunity than they do sitting back and looking at the business plan stream that naturally flows into any venture fund."

"SOME networks have value which grows faster that the number of users both because the number of possible connections grows much faster than the number of users (Connection Value) and because interesting groups can be created within the network (Group Forming Network or GFN Value). I call these "extra-value networks".

Since I wanted to fill my new gadget as quickly as possible with video files found with Yahoo! Video Search, I realized that this would be a good time to mention that you can use the Media RSS feed from our Web Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a video podcast with iTunes 6, and from there you can move them to your iPod. (So you can still use this feature with iTunes 6 even if your Video iPod hasn't arrived yet).

Here's what you need to do:

This document describes a protocol and data format for exchange of "tags" in real-time.

Technical list brainstorming the infrastructure for the future of video syndication. Videoblogging, RSS, microformats.

The Kiss Communicator is a a concept prototype that allows you to blow a kiss to your beloved when s/he's at the other part of the world.

To let a partner know that you are thinking of her or him, you squeeze the Communicator gently. It responds with a slight glow to invite you to blow into it and create your "message" in the form of an animated light sequence as the device responds to your breath. The "message" shows while you blow and if you are happy with it, you simply relax your grip and it is sent to the corresponding Communicator. Sensors in the handheld device pick up your kiss, translate the impulse into a series of randomly lit LEDs, which are then transmitted as a slow glow to your partner’s device. On the other end, the Kiss Communicator indicates that there is a message but waits until its owner squeezes it to play back the light sequence.

In 2004 and 2005 i've blogged so many devices for long-distance relationships*, but IDEO ' kiss communicator dates back to 1999!

* the table connection, body-drawing communicator for distant partners, robotic pillow for grannies, communicating via pillows, the Phildo, telesquishy, Tok Tok and Tug Tug, the Hug Shirt, etc.

Anyone who's surprised that the Suicide Girls and company are among the first to produce indy video optimized for the new iPod and iTunes 6 is just now figuring out that Playboy offers mobile content. ...News.com also picks up on hacks to move video for TV and other sources onto the new devices. Just remember, where there's a hack, there's an iTunes "upgrade."
Meanwhile, some quality time with his new 30G iPod has gadgethead Russ Beattie raving about the potential for video podcasting and video downloads in general. He has at least two PSPs in his collection -- and has been a big booster -- but takes Sony to task for missing its chance: "I still can't believe that Sony has done so little to push downloadable video for their PSPs. I mean, how hard is it to learn the lesson from the original iTunes? It wasn't just the player itself that made the iPod such a success, it was the whole package. Making it so easy to rip or download new music and sync it to your device made the iPod what it is today. The same functionality for Videos is what is going to make the new iPod the standard bearer for portable video as well, even though it has a much smaller screen than the PSP."

It is a concept of a mobile phone designed by Roman Kriheli, based on the most modern technologies. The entire face surface of this phone is a colour sensor display 4.2 in. in diagonal (a TFT-matrix of 700 times; 266 pixels) protected with a 2-mm transparent plastic shield.

Buttons appearing on the display are 13 in diameter. They are convenient to press with a finger. Besides the virtual controls, the telephone is equipped with a joystick. The standard position of the phone is vertical, but it can be turned horizontally when watching video. The joystick and the on/off button are of metal. The loudspeaker is located immediately between the sensor surface and the display.

A fuel cell-based battery feeds the telephone with electricity. The battery is charged by a wireless means: the phone should just be laid on a special pad connected to the electricity supply network (the SplashPower technology).

reBlogged from Yanko Design.

Here is a presentation in Articulate from George Siemens that lays out his theory of connectivism and how it applies to the Read/Write Web. Much of what he says makes sense, I think. We need to start looking at learning much differently in a socially networked world. For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is "network creation" and that we can learn through "collaborative meaning making." And the idea the we no longer need to learn everything in "advance of need" resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel's idea of push vs. pull learning, that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

No doubt, these are some disruptive ideas for educators, which is why we need to consider them. The more I listen and read and learn from all of these new teachers, the more much of this seems to come into focus. But it also begs many new questions. What content to we still need to push? What are those core ideas that every child needs to consider? How do we teach ourselves to teach our students the skills they need to find and build their own networks for learning?

Here is a Google AdSense Case Study entitled: Weblogs, Inc. grew blog ad revenue from $200 to $3000 a day

It is really a how to make money at your blog. Weblogs, Inc. is the operation that was sold to AOL for somewhere up to $25 million.

Yes the case study by Google is a self-serving, but it has good information for those who want to make a buck and blog too. Of course, the more you make with AdSense the more Google makes, so you have to believe it is good advice.

One of many tips from Jason McCabe Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc. :

be methodical about testing, experiment, and try one or two new things at a time: "Set goals for yourselves around traffic, number of ads shown, ads per page, number of clicks and as you optimize AdSense, the revenue will follow."

Thanks to Steve Outing for the tip.

What is podcache? It is an open source FireFox plugin... It downloads videos in your queue and caches them locally, and then rewrites wepages if it finds links to cached videos in them.

As I was looking at how network providers regulate the sharing of the Internet access they provide to their subscribers, I came across the initiative from Fon.
Fon is planning on being first a Spanish Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will make it possible for subscribers to share ADSL service through wireless connection (WiFi).

Principle

Basically, suscribers could choose between 2 models:

• Resellers: in this case, subscribers could resell up to 50% of their connection capacity. Fon will manage the access to other suscribers and give the user a cut of the fees it gets from that particular wireless access point. (Identified in the business model as Bill for Bill Gates I guess!)
• Community members: subscribers will then give up up to 50% of their connection capacity for free to others members of the service. In exchange, they will be able to roam on any of the other access points made accessible by other Fon members. (Identified in the business model as Linus for Linus Torvalds I guess!)

Excuse the editorializing in the headline, but this is really outrageous. A high school in Maynard, Mass., has had a small FM station for more than 30 years. Don't picture a tiny after-school club playing music for an hour - 185 students are part of WAVM-FM 91.7, which broadcasts music, community programming, high school sports and fundraisers. When they applied to the FCC to increase their 10-watt signal so they could hit more of the community, government-think kicked in. FCC rules require that when you put in an application to boost your signal - others can bid on the frequency. Backfire. The FCC awarded the station to California religious broadcaster Living Proof, Inc.. The kids are going to lose their license, and the FCC is proving its utter inability to act in the public interest. The school is appealing - but good luck fighting that kind of mentality.

A good overview of what's been happening with Participatory Culture's DTV application.

"Pick your own scenario; Motorola/Sprint/Microsoft could team up for 700 Mhz service. Or maybe they'll go with Apple. AOL and Earthlink also need something like WiMax since telephone and cable companies may cut them off."

What you mark in Ma.gnolia not only stays found but keeps coming back to you as your interests change. That’s our pitch, plain and simple, and it’s why we say that found is the new search.

A web-based word processor and desktop publishing module.

Tech editor of the International Herald Tribune seems open to publishing a column of blog-generated ideas.

Intel showed some "future innovations" today, though most of them weren't anything you'd actually be able to put in your pocket anytime soon. Demonstrators were quick to explain to me that I would never see the exact products they were showing, but hopefully, sometime in the next 3-5 years, we'd see something similar. In terms of hardware, there was something called The Ruby, a complete PC running XP about a tad bigger than a PDA. This included wireless capabilites and of course, Centrino mobile technology. The biggest problem with something this small is heat, so Intel is focusing mainly on low-power efficiency rather than just minaturization. Very cool, though I'd definitely bring a bigger keyboard if I ever planned on actually working on this thing.

Another little diddy I saw was called the Bishop Rock (not quite sure why). Again, it was quickly pointed out that this was not a real product and never would be. In fact, this tiny media player (which was really just a small LCD with some buttons along the sides) was really just being shown to explain to less technically inclined people how small working LCDs could be. One day, something like this could possibly play full length movies and other longer content, but for now, it played maybe one hour of video and had a mini-SD slot. Lastly, the Universal Communicator was a great idea, but I dare anyone at Intel to get it past the cellphone carriers. With five different radio signals built in seamlessly, you could easily switch from a VoIP call, to a GSM call, then move to WiFi and to a GPS network—all without any interruption. Except explain to me why any carrier would want to switch you from a paid call to a free one? I certainly can't. Maybe Intel has some inside deals working.

Basically, an interesting array of technology, though it would have been nice to see something that was a little more pret-a-porter.

Russ on theft of his posts

"Look, I *hate* it when people copy my content wholesale on their weblog. But it’s only when it's not abundantly clear who’s content it is when I get pissed off. If the search engines can find my content on your site? That’s when I get *very* annoyed. I've emailed at least four people in the past couple of weeks to cut out the crap and delete my posts. But online aggregators? Search engines? These are legitimate services, even if they are commercial."

Inspired by, but not affiliated with Wikipedia, we are building a searchable, editable, and expandable collection of tunes, melodies, and musical themes.

Yesterday, the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved Verizon's state-issued franchise application to offer Verizon FiOS TV service to 21 communities in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. This will expedite Verizon's rollout of its new TV service to North Texas communities in its service area where fiber deployment is actively under way. The communities covered by the state-issued franchise are: Allen, Carrollton, Colleyville, Coppell, Denton, Double Oak, Flower Mound, Fort Worth, Garland, Grapevine, Hebron, Highland Village, Irving, Lewisville, Lucas, Murphy, Parker, Plano, Rowlett, Southlake and St. Paul.

This afternoon starting at 4pm and all day tomorrow (GMT-4), unmediated is holding the first Open Media Developers Summit.

This summit bring together some key individuals and organizations working on open implementations of the technology that supports the current trends and those that will lead toward the future.

Overall it is hoped that by bringing these individuals and groups together on issues such as distribution and metadata standards while working together to avoid duplicity these technologies can be propelled and fulfill our common goals. Furthermore, we hope that face to face meetings will encourage collaboration, help to determine our overall future direction and ultimately create a sense of togetherness within the group.

We wish we could invite all of our readers to participate in person, but a live stream and chat will be available during the Summit. Please see the OMDS site for details.

Jon Udell: Making a routine of citizen journalism. Eventually, the gathering of basic documentary evidence won’t be, in and of itself, a special act of citizen journalism. It will just be routine. With lots of eyes and ears on the ground, and a network to connect them, everyone -- first responders, journalists, and citizens alike -- will cope better with crises.

We kind of suspected this, but now it's official, this is the brand new Xacti C6! Available in Vintage Silver, Spark Ring Ruby and Onyx Black. As you might have deducted from the name, it's a 6MP camera and sanyo worked a lot to make the device look more like a video camera, by upping the frame rate from 30fps to 60fps with some software tweaks for example. This little trick uses the 30fps rate as a base amd there is also a movement detection system that renders more fluid video images than before. You also get a 60x zoom (optical and then digital). So all in all a nice machine that we can't wait to test!

Week two of CreativeCommons in Review, Lessig writes on interoperability, Digital Right Management and the Creative Commons license.

So how would Creative Commons licenses help with this problem? Our view is that they would help restore some balance between both extremes. We believed that if we provided a simple way for creators to say what freedoms they intend their content to carry, that would, for many creators, be enough. Not enough for Hollywood releasing a new film, perhaps. But enough for the widest range of creators who are making accessible their creative work through the Net.

"Swisscom Fixnet’s electronic TV guide for Bluewin TV 300 can now also be accessed via mobile phone",DMeurope reports."Bluewin TV 300 customers can call up the electronic programme guide on their mobile phones, search for programmes and programme shows via their handsets."

Swisscom offers remote digital TV programming via mobile phone

The first ever SMS vote is taking place in Switzerland with the residents of Bülach using mobile phone text messages to decide on speed restrictions in the town, reports Swiss Info.

The Bülach vote will be followed by similar ballots in two other communities also in canton Zurich, after which the federal authorities will decide whether to roll out text voting throughout the country.

Project leader, David Knöri of canton Zurich's Office for Statistics explained that SMS voting will bring Swiss voting technology into the 21st century, following a successful internet voting trial in Aniéres, canton Geneva, in January 2003. Knöri also believes the new technology will change voting habits in Switzerland. "We forecast that particularly younger people will take advantage of e-voting, but we have seen in Bülach that many middle-aged people regularly use SMS too," he said. "I don't necessarily think that more people will vote as a result of e-voting but I do believe that many people who used to send their votes in the post will switch to SMS."

By Robert Niles: Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. We've started a wiki for OJR readers to share tips on how they do it.

TechCrunch » Flock is launching publicly today, in about four hours or so. Apparently its out on the filesharing networks.

Though details are scarce, Reuters is reporting that Netflix has decided to put their film download service - currently only in trials - on hold "indefinitely." The company states that there were problems obtaining licensing agreements from Hollywood studios, and the service will launch when "the content climate begins to thaw."

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other industry leaders urged lawmakers Friday to speed the transition to digital television in order to free up radio spectrum for wireless broadband services, especially in rural and poor areas.

In a letter to House and Senate lawmakers, high-tech officials said the spectrum would reap enormous benefits for consumers and the economy. "New and innovative technologies that will help meet the goal of universal, affordable broadband access are already being developed and readied for early deployment in this spectrum," said the coalition's letter.

The letter also stressed the need to clear the spectrum to improve police, fire and other first-responder radio communications. Some of the frequencies that would be vacated in the transition from traditional analog to digital TV were promised to public safety officials in 1997.

The rest of the spectrum would be auctioned by the government. It's been valued by congressional officials at $10 billion, though industry puts the estimate as high as $30 billion.

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

Jean Poole's review of the best [Grid Pro] real time video mixing software

HandBrake is a GPL'd multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux.

What will one day be a wikibook on movie making.

Game Studies 5:1 is out. The new issue includes:

• A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design, by John P. Davis, Keith Steury, and Randy Pagulayan
• The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942, by Tony Manninen and Tomi Kujanpää
• Player-Centred Game Design: Experiences in Using Scenario Study to Inform Mobile Game Design, by Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä
• Formal Models and Game Design, by Stefan M. Grünvogel
• The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design, by Craig A. Lindley
• What Wario Ware can teach us about Game Design, Chaim Gingold reviews Wario Ware
• A Conversation with Raph Koster, Celia Pearce interviews Raph Koster
• Can A Table Stand On One Leg? Critical and Ludological Thoughts on Star Wars: Galaxies, Timothy Burke reviews Star Wars: Galaxies

You know, Gore's cable channel? Well at the very least, you can watch the daily Google Current segments, archived on Google Video. (Via Fimoculous)

PressThink media critic Jay Rosen and CBS News President Andrew Heyward participated in a Sept. 28 roundtable about Big Media and bloggers at the Museum of Television and Radio. There, Heyward talked about the "illusion of omniscience," how it's hurting the big news providers, and how it should just be abandoned. A few days later, Rosen and Heyward ran into each other again at the Oct. 5 We Media conference. Heyward said he had read Rosen's write-up of the occasion of their previous encounter. Rosen told Heyward that what he had said was "of some importance for those of us who study journalism and critique it," and invited him to rework his thoughts for PressThink.

Heyward submitted his PressThink piece a few days later. In an email to Media Center Co-Director Dale Peskin, Rosen wrote: "The We Media event figured in this happening at PressThink, so THANKS... Isn't that how it's supposed to work?" Yes, Jay, absolutely! And thanks for letting us know.

And Heyward's thoughts are worth a good look, as are the responses from the likes of Ken Sands, Terry Heaton and Tim Porter, thoughtful media commentators all. Heyward's main points are conveniently laid out in his section heads:

One: Truth is a Plural
Two: Yes to Point-of-View Journalism
Three: News Has an Authenticity Problem

The piece is clearly by a man and from an organization serious about the function of news and struggling with the dilemma of how to deliver it in today's media environment. But it also demonstrates, again (sigh), that mainstream media is still pathologically incapable of confronting the crux of its problem, namely its new place in the world--its role and how it can fit in the wild, wild west of the rapidly evolving digital, mobile society.

Heyward says,"Truth is Plural," but does not acknowledge that truth can come from outside the mainstream media - from the likes of academics, practitioners and obsessed hobbyists, each shouting out their version of the truth from their personal computers, who often are just as capable of judging the value of and delivering a news item in their particular fields of expertise.

Heyward declares that news media's "core responsibility [is] to strive for the highest standards of accuracy, fairness, and thoroughness," implying that those standards exist, again, only within mainstream media. I don't have a news background, so will somebody please explain once and for all the foundations of that assertion, which assumes that news media are the final arbiters of what constitutes accuracy, fairness and thoroughness? A minority of working journalists have gone to journalism school, where, presumably, they got the basics of journalism values. Where did the remainder get them, from just reporting to a newsroom every working day? As far as I know, there isn't a professional development program that every journalist is required to go through that guarantees completion of coursework in Plagiarism 101 and Accuracy 101. Frankly, I think most reasonably educated, curious, conscientious people with a strong sense of fair play would be be more accurate, fair and thorough than, say, Jason Blair or Jack Kelley. In fact, I suspect that most intelligent, decent people, not subject to the pressures of operating in a large, impersonal, bottom-line-oriented hierarchy, stand a better chance of maintaining and defending "journalism ethics."

Regarding Heywards second point, I, too, say "Yes to Point-of-View Journalism." But point-of-view blog posts (and is there any other kind?) can sometimes deliver some aspects of journalism just as well, and other aspects much better, such as training someone to think for himself. If a person conscientiously reads in the blogosphere a wide selection of viewpoints on a particular topic, he will have just as good a grasp of "the facts" related to that topic as another individual who carefully studies the relevant articles in a handful of print publications and faithfully watches the news. The blog reader has to work through many perspectives, along the way recieving clarification for things he doesn't understand and engaging in discussion and debate that help crystallize his own opinions. The other guy just reads and watches TV. If the whole point of journalism is to create a well-informed, thinking citizenry able to participate in democratic government, there's no doubt in my mind which information channel is more effective.

Finally, Heyward turns to news media's image, which he refers to as an "authenticity problem." He says, "We have to break down the tired formulas of television news and find a more authentic way of writing, speaking, and interacting with the people and subjects we report on." I don't disagree with this, but this final point perfectly illustrates the problem with the entire piece. "We" need to do this, "we" need to do that - so very...self-centered, like listening to someone who always manages to turn the conversation to how a topic relates to himself, which you put up with because it's a valued friend. You want to lean over and say in the nicest way possible, "Hey, relax, it's not always all about you."

It's about how we just don't have the time anymore to huddle around the TV at the same time every day for the evening news programs. It's about modern parenting, which is raising a generation of kids used to being listened to, and about games, other media and technology that condition these kids to expect to be able to react, to talk back. It's about hectic modern life, where we need to make time to inform ourselves and expect our providers of information to make that as easy as possible. It's about all these things and more, NOT about what news media can do so we'll like them again. CBS News and all the other members of mainstream news media need to pay serious attention to the Big Picture, and the little pictures - like journalism values and reputation - will work themselves out.

iMedia Connection delves into the five key tenets of Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's breakthrough book, Creating Customer Evangelists. The book, written pre-blog boom, explains how companies can grow by cultivating rabid fans who will in turn spread the gospel to others.

Like Cluetrain before it, Ben and Jackie's book (and their blog) is required reading for any company that is ready to launch a blog marketing program. The only thing lacking (because of when it was written) is how to apply this thinking to the blog world. Here's how...

1. Use your blog to solicit feedback from your customers and then act on it
2. Blog away your best ideas
3. Find, listen, engage and empower your blogging influencers
4. Blog with a higher holy calling
5. Blog away coupons, tchotchkes and other freebies
6. Show your customers that you're their greatest fans

The table below summarizes this approach...

Technorati Tags: Customer

Growable Media Design: Integrating Plants and Digital Media for Information Visualization is an ambient media project designed to visualize everyday communication.

Growable Media controls the growth of plants by making difference in photosynthesis: controlling the supply of water and light.

The system consists of three parts: a sensor that collects data about everyday communications via mobile phones and RFIDs; a MySQL database server manages the collected data; and an actuator reads data from the database server, and embodies information as growth of plants.

When the RFID readers detect users ID as they come home, a computer starts the browser application and accesses the JAVA applet in the XPORT device server. The applet checks the database, and acquires the results of communications. Hence, it controls the duration of running LEDs and the duration of running the water supply.

Examples: RFID readers built into desk will sense IDs of your (registered) visitors/friends sitting down there. They will transmit data of IDs and duration of meeting to the database.

If you have a friend whom you often meet, corresponding plants will grow up well. But if you have a friend whom you neglect, corresponding plants will wither to notify you that you're forgetting him/her.

Design Team: Satoshi Kuribayashi, Akira Wakita.

Thanks Matt!
Related: Infotropism, The Eco pods, Fish, plant, rack, Spore 1.1 and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignoneau's Interactive Plant Growing.

The results from the IGDA Game Developer Demographics Report are in. The first report of its kind, IGDA gathered responses from nearly 6500 game developers to attempt to get a clear picture on the makeup of the industry.

Key results of the demographic survey include:

Male = 88.5%, Female = 11.5%
White = 83.3%, Black = 2.0%, Hispanic/Latino = 2.5%, Asian = 7.5%, Other = 4.7%
Heterosexual = 92%, Lesbian/Gay = 2.7%, Bisexual = 2.7%
Average age = 31 years
Average years in the industry = 5.4 years
Percentage of people with disabilities = 13% (e.g., cognitive, mobility, sight, etc)
More than 80% have a university level education or greater
More than 60% of studios claim that obtaining diverse applicants is challenging

The Complete PDF Report

A recent presentation by Greg Costikyan on the "need to create new game styles" given at the Future Play conference at Michigan State Univ. is available on his Games * Design * Art * Culture site here.

(Thanks to Jim Rowson for the BoingBoing pointer)

This is shameless self-promotion, but Socialight, the location-based messaging platform I've been working on for quite some time now is in public beta. Woo-hoo!

Socialight is a platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages called StickyShadows. Mobile and web tools give you access to location-based media on your mobile phone and on the web.

It works by taking the media that you create - text and pictures (video and sound coming soon), adding location coordinates, mixing in privacy metadata (based on your social network and group memberships) and storing the final product as a StickyShadow on the server. These messages can then be viewed in the exact location they were created using the Socialight Mobile application, or on the web at socialight.com.

Socialight can be used in lots of different ways. What I'm most excited about is its Groups functionality. By creating your own Group, you can build your own city tour, body of restaurant reviews, or just about anything that links content to places.

Bruce Sterling's SIGGRAPH'04 keynote speech on "Spimes" is just out in expanded form from MIT Press on Peter Lunenfeld's MediaWorks Pamphlet series:

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.

Amazon.com: Books: Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets)

Bring back the glory days of ASCII art with ASCIIMoviePlayer! This sample demonstrates using a MovieDrawingCompleteProc to render a QuickTime movie in the Mac OS X Terminal.

In a telephone chat with the Editors Weblog, Dean Wright discusses the changes the media world is undergoing, news agencies’ new role in directly targeting the consumer and his vision for the future.

Viewers can sign up for their free membership.... Each afternoon, members watch Days of our Lives, log on to "Daily Rewards" through nbc.com/days or daysofourlives.com and enter the correct answer to a question from that day's episode in order to earn valuable My Sony points. Members can easily redeem these points for substantial savings on Sony merchandise such as the latest consumer electronics, DVDs, CDs, and more.

"We are blessed and thankful that Days of our Lives fans are some of the most fervent television viewers and online participants in the world, and this innovative program will not only help us reward that loyalty, but continue to reach new viewers in the 18-34 demographic..."

Digital and broadband have opened a huge window of opportunity for content rights holders.

"Combining our production and creative expertise with the lessons learned from the text, photography and music pioneers that came before us, we are taking positive,we are taking positive, progressive steps to build new and sustainable business models that only increase the value of the assets we manage. We are proud to launch this new broadband video production unit and are looking forward to delivering many captivating videos to MSN and other broadband platforms."

Our customers are using their video mobiles in endlessly creative ways to entertain their mates and See Me TV will take this trend to the next level. We wanted to create the ultimate reality channel, where you're the talent and you decide what you want to

Yahoo plans on using the acquisition to improve both its local and mobile search services and gain competitive footing on rival Google.

media buyers and planners reported spending 18 percent of their clients' online display ad budgets on local media, and 34% on targeted content sites

Open source rss aggregator [for OS X] with built in browser

Morgan Jindrich emailed to let us know about HearUsNow.org, and the Consumers Union's new animated music video, The Tower, a nice little ditty about why decentralization is good for consumers. Morgan says, "after (the video) is over a petition pops up on the screen - we are trying to get the FCC to hold public hearing before they rewire the media ownership rules (which they are planning to do in the near future - last time they tried this they skipped the part about talking to the people - so we are making sure that the people are heard this time around). "

"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). "

Regular readers here know all about how corporations reaching out to the "next billion" customers has a huge future, whether you're a humanitarian trying to help the developing world, or a company whose first-world technology markets are already saturated. Why do some investors get it, and others don't?

A Yahoo News article describes how easy it is for financiers to underestimate: "The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed." As it turns out, the low demand for land-lines was because quality/service was so awful, not because they weren't wanted. Cellular companies that did take the plunge have been richly rewarded: "Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in 2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western Europe." The article also describes how cell phones have improved the lives and businesses of Africans, with one of the examples I've seen: "Wilson Kuria Macharia, head of the traders' association at the Nairobi market, says he no longer has to spend two to four weeks at a time roaming across Kenya and Tanzania in search of fresh produce. 'A few mobile phone calls take care of what used to be the most grueling part of the business.' "

Some companies get it, like Philips...

Their Voices In Your Hand project was started three years ago, a humanitarian-and-capitalist effort to not just make existing technology cheaper or more accessible, but to start from the ground up and invent a cheap handheld internet/phone designed to fit the needs of some of the poorest people in the world. The project is now in a field-testing phase in the favela of Recife, Brazil, and they have been smart enough to let the testing results take them in a direction they did not initially anticipate. It appears that real-time connectivity is not the biggest issue, so devices which are essentially modified mp3 players you occasionally connect to the web in telecenters to send and receive voice and text messages are good enough (and much cheaper than cell phones).

This allows a leapfrogging many people haven't thought about before: it's not just the leap over landlines to handsets, it's the leap over paper mail, which doesn't work for you if you're illiterate or don't have an address because you live in a shantytown; many in Brazil's favelas are both. It also allows low-cost local broadcasting/narrowcasting of health & community information or local musicians. With this, and some of Africa's repurposing of cell phones, it will be interesting to see what products developed specifically for the "bottom of the pyramid" will be like.

(thanks, Lorenzo Rademakers, for the Yahoo spotting.)

(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World at 10:18 AM)

The Yellow chair stories presented at Ubicomp related the interaction between people passing by and a wireless network connectivity materialized by a yellow chair placed in front of a house in london, UK.

For more details, see the Yellow Chair Stories - a live service design intervention and watch the Yellow Chair Stories video

See also:
Ubicomp 2005 demo: u-texture
Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo

Don't forget to check out the Newly Minted Carnival of the Mobilists up over at Russell Buckley's Mobhappy. My predictions are up over there, but more importantly there are a number of articles by people you may not yet be familiar with whom you should probably have on your must read list...

So what are you waitng for? Get over there!

The Annenberg Research Network on International Communication over October 7-8, 2005,held it's annual research workshop which focused this year on "Wireless Communication and Development: A Global Perspective."Papers and presentations found below.

Wireless Communication and Development

akhomerun writes "Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its experimental new VirtualWiFi Software. The free software enables Windows users to use a single wireless card to connect to multiple wireless networks simultaneously. The current build is a very primitive release, with no support for WEP or WPA encryption."

fortune mag puts michelle wie on cover and now covers bittorrent.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the television industry is uncomfortable with the precedent being set by ABC's deal to dish TV programs out to iPod users. Irked by the loss of ad dollars, one local affiliate writes ABC: "It is both disappointing and unsettling that ABC would embark on a new -- and competitive -- network program distribution partnership without the fundamental courtesy of consultation." Something tells us they'd better get used to it, and quickly.

Raptor Networks Technology, Inc. announced the completion of six additional patent filings related to distributed Ethernet switch architectures, which are network topologies and applications in which geographically separated devices connect and operate as one switch.

The architectures represented by these patent filings are transformational to the manner in which evolving latency-sensitive applications and new services with enormous potential including Voice over IP, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and storage mirroring over distance can be accomplished.

---

[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Over the past year, James Boyle has been fighting to expose the truth about how intellectual property law and policy is crafted: in the dark, with the only light provided by the glimmer of faith. There are no statistical economists running comparative studies to show how various levels of protection impact our social and economic well being. Instead, as Boyle points out in the Guardian Unlimited, we have law and policy based on "anecdotes, just-so stories, and celebrity testimony." If Jack Valenti or Cliff Richard says it, who are we to disbelieve?

Now Boyle has struck another blow against faith-based initiatives. He's gathered a group of artists, scientists, lawyers, politicians, economists, academics, and business experts to form the Adelphi Charter. This posse, which includes Gilberto Gil and Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, has developed a set of principles for vetting proposals for new copyrights and patents, and urges governments around the world to apply a new public interest test. The group also advocates what it calls a "new, fair, user-friendly and efficient way of handing out intellectual property rights in the 21st century." It hearkens back to the days of Thomas Jefferson, when, Boyle observes, "even the proponents of intellectual property saw it as a necessary evil, something to be limited to the narrowest scope and time necessary."

Quite the contrast to today's mad scramble to force through, oh, say, 50 years of fresh exclusive rights on top of existing copyrights with zero public discussion, debate, or scrutiny. Forget about statistical economists providing evidence that these new rights are necessary. We don't even get Jack or Cliff.

The charter is itself excellent reading, but there is also coverage at The Economist. Here's an excerpt that serves both as an introduction to the issues in the charter and an overiew of developments in the copyfight over the past few months:

[As] technologies like computers and the internet make the exchange of information easier than ever—and inventions become more conceptual—huge stress is being placed on today's intellectual-property laws, which trace their foundations to the birth of the printing industry and mechanical industrialisation.

ely on copyright and patent protection are increasingly turning to the law to protect their businesses. For example, music firms are suing thousands of people for swapping songs online and trying to stem the tide of counterfeit CDs. Google has also recently been sued by a trade association of authors to prevent it from placing book excerpts online. And Microsoft has recently reiterated its intention to patent a basic format for storing files—a move that could let the firm collect money from the IT industry for things that have been done cost-free for years. Meanwhile, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations body, is pushing ahead with treaty negotiations that will create a new layer of rights for broadcasters, including on the web.

At the same time, new approaches aim to work around overly-restrictive rights, such as the open-source software movement and an effort called the Creative Commons, which makes it easy for creators to give away some of their copyrights under licence while retaining others to control how their works are reused.

The Adelphi Charter is clearly far from a complete answer to the dilemmas posed by intellectual-property rights in an era shaped by digital technology and the desire for as much innovation as possible. But it does aim at the right target by promoting the idea that—as Mr Boyle puts it—“good policy does not just consist of ‘more rights', it consists of maintaining a balance between the realm of property and the realm of the public domain”.

Update: The BBC also has coverage.

Oh how success corrupts. You probably have heard of JibJab, the two brothers who have been creating politically tinged animated shorts for the web (they just released a new one last week) that became an internet sensation last year leading up to the election. The short that made them famous was an amusing take on the election to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land." However, soon after this became a hit, an organization that claimed to own the rights to the song, went after the JibJab brothers saying the parody violated the rights to the song... despite Woody Guthrie's famous personal copyright statement: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Of course, after the EFF defended JibJab and got the rights holders to back off, the brothers were suddenly in big demand, signing a deal with Yahoo and their latest offering is courtesy of MSN. Apparently, with money comes lawyers, and with lawyers come cease-and-desist letters. BoingBoing and WFMU point to a story that says JibJab's lawyers have sent a cease and desist letter to the creator of a "mashup" video that's become quite popular recently. The video uses a 9-second clip of the This Land parody, and it's hard to look at in any way that isn't covered by fair use. Unfortunately, it looks like some people are thinking fair use only goes in one direction.

I've been testing out Verizon Wireless' EVDO service the last few weeks while traveling to a variety of places around the country. I'll write up a more thorough review later, but overall it's been very good. However, I'm disappointed to find out that it appears Verizon Wireless is taking after its parent Verizon by pretending people don't know what the word "unlimited" means. The service, which is very clearly marketed as being "unlimited" turns out to be extremely limited, with one user getting kicked off after Verizon Wireless decided that he used his "unlimited" connection too much. It's back to the days of fuzzy caps. Now, obviously, there is limited bandwidth on the network, and bandwidth hogs can be a problem. However, if that's the case then the company shouldn't promise an unlimited service it can't deliver. That's false advertising, plain and simple. Of course, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise to those who have read the fairly draconian terms of service Verizon Wireless offers with its EVDO card where the definition of "unlimited" appears to be very, very limited. Still, it seems that if you're advertising unlimited service in huge fonts on the front page of your service, you really shouldn't be able to get away with redefining a very common term in the fine print, and then arbitrarily cutting people off.

NEC has announced today that they managed to make a 4.1" (10.4cm diagonal or W-VGA) screen that uses the SOG LCD or System-On-Glass LCD technology. It offers a higher brightness (400cd/m2) than what was available before, and it seems to be prefectly suited for PDA's.

Criteria for inclusion

"There are many ways in which social networks can be derived on the web: users connected through transactions in online auctions, users who post within the same thread on a news group or message board, or even members of groups listed in an HTML document can be turned into a social network. Many online communities claim to be or support social networks, but lack some of the properties one may expect of a social network. For the purpose of this work, we use a very specific definition. A web-based social network must meet the following criteria"

"Rubyful Soup is a Ruby port of the hit Python HTML/XML parser Beautiful Soup. It's designed to be a useful quick-and-dirty parser for screen-scraping"

ACM SIGCHI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006 is going to happen in June, 14-16 in Hollywood, CA:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing. 

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, artists and designers and computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment. 

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website: 
http://www.ace2006.org by 15th February 2006

Why do I blog this? this conference is a very good event in the sphere of innovative gaming technology

: VidiLife, a new online video hosting site has launched..the site allows to upload, store and share unlimited video clips for use on the site and to link with other online sources.
Brad Greenspan, the founder of Intermix Media and CEO when Myspace was launched, has provided initial capital for the site....Brad was recently involved in trying to block the sale of Intermix to News Corp.
VidiLife is positioning itself as a social networking site for sharing video...the CEO is a former Intermix employee. We'll see how far that goes.

: This is causing some waves in the market, ranging from the food industry to well, our own media industry: German electronics giant Siemens has unveiled cheap, paper-thin TV screens that can be used in newspapers and magazines, and also the food packaging industry.

The firm says the low production costs could see the magazine shelves in newsagents come alive with moving images vying for the customers' attention as they move along the aisle... the new screens, which are literally paper thin, can do everything a regular TV screen or computer monitor can do, but cost a fraction of the price.

The Siemens spokesman said that one square metre of the material costs around $50, and scientists working on the screens said they should be available by 2007.

Some more technical details in this story....

A picture of the paper is here

In the NYT/IHT, there is a good article about As gadgets replace toys, what’s in it for kids? By Michael Barbaro. It’s about an important trend: adults’ and kids’ artifacts like high-tech gadgets are now tending to be the same.

the push to sell consumer electronics to preteens is touching off an animated debate about whether the products qualify as toys, as manufacturers contend, and whether it is wise to break down one of the last barriers between children’s play and adult technology.
 
For decades, toy makers have designed products that allow children to mimic adult behavior, but it was, in the end, always make-believe. No matter how many electronic bells and whistles the latest toy truck had, it was still a toy. But with the latest crop of electronics for children 6 to 12, there is little pretending. The adult’s product and the child’s are often one and the same.

Why do I blog this? this trend is interesting, artifacts like cell-phones, digital video camera, DVD players are now used by both; how this is reflected in their design? and what would be the impacts of this: will kids drop kid-centered design and prefer the adults version?

: This is true not just for Verizon, but also for SBC, and for people who're betting all on just IPTV, well, wake up and smell the IP...the news of AOL's suitors, including talks with Comcast and Google, could aggravate a headache for Verizon, as this story says.
Even before word of the possible deal leaked out, investors were concerned over competitive threats posed to Verizon by the Internet...its biggest gorwth are has been sale of DSL lines. But Comcast is one of Verizon's biggest competitors in this business, and owning a piece of AOL would give it new advantages, including the huge repository of broadband content.
Verizon's content plans online? Well, a puny co-branded portal with MSN.

Glenn Fleishman has a review of Kodak's EasyShare-One:

The is a four-megapixel camera with a 3.3x optical zoom and digital support for up to 10x. It takes both pictures and videos for a list price of $599.

Wi-Fi support comes via an 802.11b SDIO (Secure Digital I/O) card that uses a special slot in the top of the camera.

When Kodak initially announced the EasyShare-One in January, the card was to be sold separately, despite the camera’s lack of features that would warrant a $599 price tag without Wi-Fi. Kodak wisely modified later releases, although the manual still hints that Wi-Fi isn’t a given.

Because of a partnership with T-Mobile HotSpot, you can connect to Wi-Fi at a Starbucks or another location in their network, logging in with an existing account.

Despite the several-month delay in shipping this camera, originally scheduled for a June debut, the firmware supports only WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) for network access. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and 802.1X support are due in a firmware upgrade within three to six months.

Anyone uncomfortable reverting to WEP or disabling encryption on their network should purchase this camera until the firmware update is generally available.

I can’t recommend this camera wholeheartedly without WPA support, but I do recommend that anyone who wants a Wi-Fi camera watch Kodak’s site for its upgrades. This 1.0 product could mature into a superb 1.1 without a hardware swap out.

t they'd use a camera like this to provide "live coverage" of breaking news. But they're not. Newspapers will follow end users and bloggers. You can take that to the bank.

Follow Kevin Sites into the Hot Zone. Then you'll know what to do.

Access points with built-in wireless backhaul might be a handy accessory for "event blogging". Commercial ones are available from Linksys, D-Link and NETGEAR. Other WiFi access points with integrated EV-DO backbones include the Entree Box, the StompBox, Junxion Box, Omniway, Possio PX40 Wireless Router and Kyocera's KR1 EVDO/WiFi Router.

The Social Canvas Zoom Server is particularly interesting; it allows multiple users to simultaneously zoom in on tiny areas of an image using a web browser. Screen resolution provides fast display. Upload a 4 Megapixel image (or more) and click to zoom in.

Nikon has two consumer Wi-Fi enabled cameras. The $550 eight-megapixel P1 (specs) and the $399.95 five-megapixel P2 (specs) have built-in Wi-Fi capabilities to transmit images via 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks. A Time-Lapse function enables the user to capture events occurring over an extended period of time.

Unfortunately, both the P1 and P2 will only send to PictureProject, Nikon's photo software running on a PC and not directly to standard FTP servers or across the Internet. It doesn't connect to the Internet at hotspots which is a huge disadvantage. But once on a PC, pictures can be sent to servers.

DailyWireless has more on Camphones For Journalists, Webcam Situation Report, How To Spend Your Homeland Security Check, Software for Wireless Camera, Wireless Netcams, Mobile Hotspot How To, Wireless Still Photography, Wireless Photography, Podcasting on cellphones, Portable Photostories, On The New Media, Rebuilding Media, Quicktime 7 for Windows, Akimbo Does VideoBlogs, The Podcast Hotel, Video Search, Video Blogging, 360 Video Blogs, 360 Degree Surveillence, Wireless 360 Video, Maxtrix The City, Panoramic EventCams, Nextel Does Photos, Video Wardriving, How To Phone Blog, Video Blog TV Channel, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones, MultiMedia Travel, and Event Blogging.

Indie film and iTunes? Maybe hard to believe a day after the announcement when you can only watch a few ABC TV shows or Pixar shorts, but Dave Ahl of Modiba Productions writes us in with an optimistic take:

I just wanted to let you know how revolutionary Apple's announcement regarding paid downloadable video segements is for independent film-makers. Modiba Productions (an African music and film company raising money and awareness for African social and political causes thru the arts) has been waiting for precisely this business model.

For the first time ever, small companies without retail distribution or a broadcast/cable deal not only have a way to reach audiences worldwide but also have the means of funding projects: simply sell video segments for $1.99 through iTunes. At present, it's just ABC and Pixar but --like the iTunes music store-- this will soon open up to small independent film companies whose work will be featured alongside major media corporations.

I encourage everyone to check out some work Modiba has been doing, including a short film to promote our benefit album "ASAP: the Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project" (which hit #1 on the iTunes World Music Charts):

Modiba Productions Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project (ASAP)

ject before on CDM, and both the music and cause are highly worthy. iTunes as a much-needed outlet for indie film? Sign me up. I'll let you know when we hear more. I'm not likely to be watching this on a video iPod, but on my Mac or PC laptop? Absolutely..

There's going to be a lot of work there that no one's ever seen. There is this whole other side to what we do that isn't mass-produced art at all. It's one-of-a-kind pieces.

"Television, drug of the nation, pacifier par excellence, we love you. Except you never quite have the things we really want when we want them, especially if we live outside the US. Thankfully, the gods of filesharing and encoding have delivered us from dispair and we are all happily enjoying shows pretty close to transmission times, sometimes before.

But how do I know when these magical gifts might be available for all my favourite shows? HBO schedules are not published in my backwater country!

Fear not, because now Tape It Off The Internet is a simple online service to keep you up to date and on track with your latest releases. We've even shoehorned in some crazy Web 2.0 social software for you to extend your fun in hundreds of ways. Did we mention we haven't built released it yet? Never mind, sign up now and we'll invite you into our Beta. Did I mention Web 2.0? I'm sure I did."

(chuckle. -kc.)

Sony announces in Japan two new MD Walkman MZ-EH70 and MZ-EH50.

The Sony MZ-EH70 and MZ-HE50 feature a HD digital amplifier to reduce noise. Both new MD players support the Hi-MD format.

The two new Sony MD players differ in design and colors, but seem to be technically the same.

The new Sony Hi-MD players come in November. No pricing set yet.

More details in this Sony press-release (Japanese).

via Search Engine Watch,

Video streams and podcasts have exploded in popularity on the web, but how do you search to find this type of content? And if you're a content owner, how do you make sure your multimedia files can be found?

Video search engines include Google Video, Yahoo Video, Singingfish, and Blinkx. Google offers a Windows, Mac, or Linux application for free uploading as does OurMedia, which hosts homepages and video from the Internet Archive.

Thanks for the link, Biewald

advanced contributions to the Internet Archive

"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.

An essay on Videogame Aesthetics, by David Hayward.

Via Wonderland.

From the previous post you can tell that I did some "blogvangelism" today at a county in-service just north of where I live, and it was five hours of pretty intensive discussion and teaching about blogs the noun and blogging the verb. In fact, it was the first chance I've gotten to spend some time with teachers really teaching them how to blog. (The session name was "Writing With Passion Through Blogging"...) And I think that most of them got it, that this wasn't navel gazing, that it was reading and thinking and writing. (And I think I had a moment of self-enlightenment when I heard myself saying "when I'm not blogging regularly (like now) it's not because I don't have time to write as much as it's that I don't have time to read.") We created bunches of blogs at Blogger, deconstructed blog posts by Clarence Fisher and Barbara Ganley, and talked about the ways in which we could use them in our practice and with our students. And we got into the inevitable discussion about what all of this means in terms of research and trust and sources and the like. In fact, one teacher shared that she restricts students to databases when doing research...no Web...no Google. I could totally understand her angst.

But I'm wondering if most of them left today with genuine excitement or genuine dread. I really get the sense that teachers fall into one of two camps after my "sermons." They're either saying "look at the amazing things that my students and I can do these days...what an opportunity" or they're saying "Oh. My. Goodness. How in heck am I going to figure this out for myself AND how am I going to teach my kids how to figure this out. This is work." And it is more work. That whole teachers and students as editors idea alone means a lot more work for everyone trying to figure out what's true, what's accurate, what's trustworthy. I mean there was only one person in the room who knew how to find out who owned the site martinlutherking.org. That's the kind of work we're talking about here, going beyond the "here's the book, the book is true, we can all passively read now" method of teaching.

Dave Warlick and Jon Pederson are continuing threads of this discussion on their sites, and at the end of his post Jon asks

"What percentage of adults have the required skills to a) navigate this environment and b) be critical consumers of information? Can we expect our students to be proficient with these skills when adults aren't?"

Not solely based on today by any means, my answers are a) 10, b) 5 and c) NO! And this just screams out the fact that our kids have no effective role models for content creation, content management or content editing. And sadly, most educators are not going to want to put in the time to make these literacies a part of their practice. To some extent, I understand why. It is work. And they need time and training that unfortunately they are not going to get nearly enough of. But on the other hand, if they're not willing to do it on their own, they risk becoming irrelevant and, as David puts it, dropping of the edge.

RLG has just released a draft report for the certification of digital repositories. The draft, titled "An Audit Checklist for the Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories," is available at http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769. It is the product of a task force working on a joint project between RLG and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The goal of the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification project has been to identify the criteria repositories must meet for reliably storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections. The "Audit Checklist" identifies procedures for certifying digital repositories. Leveraging the RLG-NARA checklist, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Audit and Certification of Digital Archives project will test audit the Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands), which maintains the digital archive for Elsevier Science Direct Journals, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Portico, an archive for electronic journals incubated within Ithaka Harbors, Inc. Stanford's LOCKSS system will also participate in this effort.

For more about the RLG-NARA task force, see http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=5441

After years of dealing either with those horrid mini tape recorders or small capacity digital audio recorders, it's nice to know about the MicroTrack 24/96 Professional 2-channel Mobile Digital Recorder. Looks like a regular MP3 player, but this heavy duty dealie records WAV and MP3 files, is battery-operated and uses CompactFlash or MicroDrives for storage. Ok, I'll admit, not the prettiest gal around, but can't say she's not sturdy. Sort of a frankenstein monster of a DAT and a digital recorder. All for $500.

NAMM: M-Audio Microtrack: The pro recording iPod [MusicThing]

DJ_Vegas writes "One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, 'Samy' had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community. According to BetaNews, the worm's code utilized XMLHTTPRequest - a JavaScript object used in AJAX Web applications and was spreading at a rate of 1,000 users every few seconds before MySpace shut down its site. Thankfully, the script was written for fun and didn't try to take advantage of unpatched security holes in IE to create a massive MySpace botnet."

Converge Network Digest breaks down how much bandwidth is needed for content such as HDTV, VoIP, video-conferencing, and other services. They then discuss the various approaches being taken to provide that bandwidth, from ADSL2+ and VDSL2, to fiber to the home. "To err on the conservative side, operators around the globe are settling on a 20Mbps starting point, with 100Mbps as the ultimate long-term bandwidth target."

A couple interesting nuggets in this Comscore press release. Men watch more streaming video than women, and 18-34s watch more than any other demographic (no big surprise.) As far as dayparts, daytime is closely followed by late night (after 1 a.m.) for the most active period of time for watching online video. And the average user watches 73 minutes of video a month.

Tribune reported a 2 percent drop in broadcasting revenues and a 46 percent jump in interactive revenues for the third quarter. Media General's TV stations dropped 3.4 percent while interactive revenues skyrocketed 49.3 percent. And the trend in the industry will continue... (Via PaidContent)

a very beautiful collection of networked data visualizations, meant as a unified online resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. the collection contains many examples retrieved online as well as from literature (with many new ones, & most online projects similar to those in the infosthetics aesthetics or infovis category).
according to the author: 'the project main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines as diverse as biology, social networks or the world wide web. the website truly hopes it can inspire, motivate & enlighten any person doing research on this field'. sounds somehow familiar. [visualcomplexity.com|thnkx Andrew]

Now here’s a real trojan horse program for you. An enterprising young man has whipped up some simple flashcard programs for the PSP designed to teach SAT vocabulary and Spanish-language vocabulary. It’s not that he loves education. It’s simply a matter of selling PSPs.

He writes: “I am actually just putting them up in hopes that the folks who already make these types of study tools will grab it and run with it and in turn make it easier for kids to beg for a PSP.”

All you other PSP fanbois can’t compete. The bar has been raised.

[Via Greedo]

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SPONSORED BY: Fable: The Lost Chapters. Now On PC. Enter a world where every choice changes your fate. Enhanced graphics, new journeys, good or evil-how will you choose to play?

Since the beginning of the year, Comcast reports it has served up 1 billion cable streams through its ON DEMAND service. (That's the growth chart on the left.) The most popular content: music videos, movies, sports and children's programming. (A music video from Ciara tops the list.) "We have added thousands of hours of programs in less than three years and will continue to dramatically expand our ON DEMAND lineup in the months ahead to give our customers even more value," said Page Thompson, VP and GM of Comcast ON DEMAND. On average, homes with ON DEMAND are using the service more than 20 times per month.

On the heels of delaying The Godfather videogame until 2006 (a project Coppola is unhappy with and supposedly never approved), it was just announced that EA will be giving Steven Spielberg an office their Los Angeles studio, to work side-by-side with game developers to develop three yet-to-be-determined games.

Spielberg has been an avid follower of games for years. In a speech last year, he told film students they could change the face of filmmaking if only they played more video games.

Here is the full press release; read more about Spielberg’s take on the state of ludology vs. narratology from last year.

I’m a huge fan of Spielberg’s better films, and when he’s on his game, I think he’s great. But his game, as it were, is good ol’ fashioned linear storytelling. On these EA projects, I’m sure he can contribute to whatever narrative (presumably linear) is laid on top of the games, but it’s unclear what he can offer on the actual gameplay side of things. At worst, this seems more like a way to create a brand such as “Steven Spielberg presents…” to sell more games.

That said, I’m going to be optimistic about this collaboration. I’m curious what they come up with in a few years time. Let’s hope it doesn’t result in another landfill of E.T. catridges — The Dig indeed.

I’m catching up…. Here are a few posts about exploding TV….

What’s the Currency, Kenneth?

: While I was in San Francisco for Web 2.0, I went “running” early one morning by the headquarters of Current.TV, and it occurred to me how little I’ve heard about the channel. They’re not in the conversation.

Why? Well, if you don’t get Current on your cable — and I don’t; most don’t (they list just DirectTV and some Time Warner digital and Comcast markets) — then you can’t really watch it. You can see some of the segments in its online “studio,” but it’s hard to navigate and you don’t get the sense of the channel itself because you can’t watch that. Why not? I assume it’s because of deals with cable systems, which cofounder Joel Hyatt told me wouldn’t be the case. But apparently they lost.

How much better it would be if they ran the channel on the internet, as if old-time TV were only an afterthought. It would be seen around the world by a much larger audience. Isn’t that the point? And how much better if they put up all the videos they get in an easily browsable format. And why stop there? Why not link to good videos wherever they are; think distributed because that’s the 2.0 way to do things. And keep going: Provide material that we can remix. Let us program not one Current but a thousand Currents and may the best channels win. And let anybody distribute any of it via Bittorrent; it’d save them a fortune and build the brand everywhere. But sell ads and share the wealth to support this new medium. That’s what I thought Current.TV would be.

But it isn’t. They went so media 1.0 and created another TV channel. Only they did it on the cheap by having the people create the little shows. And that’s cute. But it’s hardly revolutionary.

Can’t change the world if nobody’s watching you, if only a few are speaking with you, if you’re not in the conversation.

As I ran by, I stopped and watched the lobster-shift guy at master control in the front window. I could see what was playing then but couldn’t hear (would it have hurt to put a speaker out on the street?). Then again, I didn’t have to hear. They were airing a story about Cindy Sheehan. How perfect. How obvious.

The Dow of ideas

: And so I just reread Al Gore’s speech to the WeMedia confab in New York, which was happening that day, just about the time I was running by his Current.TV. It’s so politics 1.0 of him. Some notes:

He begins with the party line of whoever’s not in power: “I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger.” It’s not in danger from without — from mad terrorists blowing us up — but from within: Gore doesn’t approve of our marketplace of ideas. He blames politics and us and TV: “The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.” You can see where this is leading: Current will save TV and thus America.

But first, he practically dismisses the internet — saying that “it still doesn’t hold a candle to television” — so he can complain again about TV’s impact on the marketplace of ideas.

He says the marketplace of ideas is dead. I say it has never been more alive in my lifetime, thanks directly to the internet. But remember, Gore is not starting his network on the internet. He’s starting it on TV. He’s going to save TV. He says:

But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines. And the most prominent casualty has been the “marketplace of ideas” that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

17;t say what happened to it, exactly, except that he doesn’t approve of what’s said in it. He waxes nostalgic for a golden age of the marketplace of ideas that I doubt ever existed (until today):

The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:

1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; …

But it wasn’t open to all. It was open only to those who owned and controlled the printing presses.

2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them;

in, the rich owned the presses and the powerful gained office and the rest were not heard.
3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a “Conversation of Democracy” is all about.
When in the history of democracy has there been consensus? There has always been opposition and debate; that is the very heartbeat of a democracy.

He now contrasts his idealized history with what he thinks the world is like today — though, actually, he describes a world that began to crumble 25 years ago, when the absolute power of three networks was challenged by cable, and died completely a decade ago with the growth of the internet.

Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.

to complain about broadcast and waxes nostalgic, also, about regulation of it… regulation of speech, remember.

One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, “no nation can be free.”

As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. — including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.

Limbaugh is the product of free speech? OK, I’ll bite. And what’s wrong with that? Is he saying that such speech should be regulated? That government should protect us from such speech or silence it? How is that the free marketplace of ideas?

Next he complains about the business of news:

The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.

217;d say, from a man who is starting a TV network called Current that does not employ a staff of journalists. Which, by the way, is a fine thing, as far as I’m concerned.

Gore next complains about the state of journalism:

Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been “dumbed down and tarted up.”

Well, uh, wasn’t Rather forced out because he engaged in fabricated sources, fictional events, and the tabloidization of mainstream news?

Finally, at the end, Gore returns to the internet.

Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared.

ck, but streaming is usually outbound, not inbound. And I find it odd that you still call these people “viewers” if they’re supposedly programming the network. Aren’t they your journalists and programmers? Aren’t you supposed to be the viewer now?

And he still complains about the internet because there’s not enough bandwidth for full-motion video. Try Bittorrent, Al. Try video iChat. Try video on those new iPods.

But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America’s democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America’s democracy is at grave risk.

rry, but I don’t buy it.

Listen, Mr. Gore: I voted for you. I thought you won (even if you did lose the lead that should have made victory clear). I agree with you on many, though not all, policies.

But I think you’re blowing it with Current. You said in your speech: “The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet.”

Then why aren’t you — you, of all people — using the internet to its fullest advantage: Open up Current, Mr. Gore. Show everything that is sent to you on the internet. Enable the people to recommend video anywhere. Let us all share and link and distribute and discover it all. Let us edit and remix it. Let us program it. If you mean what you say, then create a true marketplace of ideas, not just another TV channel.

Lighting the fuse

: While I was in San Francisco, I went to Web 2.1, which was held in a studio at KRON TV. There, Terry Heaton and Michael Rosenblum have been revolutionizing local TV news by breaking up reporter/photographer teams and giving everyone a camera and a laptop, putting more eyes and ears on the street.

The bosses at the channel acknowledged readily that much of local TV news sucks. They said they hoped that opening it up would save it. They talked about finding more ways to enable the people to join in — and inviting people into the studio and onto its web site are steps in that direction. We started calling out suggestions — about putting up full video to allow people to remix it, about putting up stories with permalinks to get them into the conversation — and they didn’t fight it; they absorbed the ideas and added them to their to-do lists. They’ve only just begun. They’re still in the midst of training.

Brian, the station’s online guy and blogger, pulled me out into the hall for a quick chat before a big, old camera and I asked the photographer what he really thought of all these changes. He hemmed and hawed and it came out that he doesn’t want people thinking that doing his job is easy, even if new tools make it easier. And he worried that it’s hard to do what was once two jobs at once. But he was open. He said it would be better for the station to have more eyes on the street and more chance for more people to watch more of their stories online.

It’s not easy exploding TV.

BBC 2.0

: I just read Rory O’Connor’s report on the WeMedia confab and loved this contrast of big, old networks:

Sambrook outlined three keys to the BBC’s emergent value proposition:
1) Connecting audiences
2) Verification of news
3) Analysis, explanation and context addition.

g to Sambrook, is now “in the middle of reorganizing and reprioritizing itself for a fully-digital, on-demand environment. On-demand is our future.” …

Fundamental change also requires a certain fearlessness, of course and a real willingness to trust the public – both qualities lacking from the current CBS approach. Instead of trusting its audience, CBS evidently fears it and still wants to “filter” and control its contributions to the marketplace of ideas.

Such hidebound thinking is particularly typical of Big Broadcast Media, where the dominant metaphor has long been “Master Control.” But the paradox of social media, its counter-intuitive heart, seems to be that the only way to influence the future is to let go of the illusion of control, and instead to trust the audience and embrace the change. Big Media outfits that already get it – like the BBC – are poised to prosper; those that still don’t – like CBS – better start swimming or they’ll sink like a stone.

After all, trust is the emerging value proposition. And if CBS doesn’t trust the public, why should we trust CBS?

It’s not just about exploding the medium and the wires and the deals. It’s about exploding the relationship.

The theme of this special issue is to explore and bring together a multi-faceted view on user-centered multimedia system and application design.

p2p news / p2pnet:- Japan is getting ready to introduce VoIP for mobile phones, says the Mainichi Daily News.

The proposal for the network is being discussed by a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications panel of experts and telecommunications officials which is, "is set to reach a decision in December," ministry official Junko Koizumi is quoted as saying, going on:

"Although details, including the kind of mobile VoIP technology, are not yet decided, several carriers are expected to apply for licenses to offer mobile VoIP services, which are likely to be cheaper than talking on cell phones today."

Voice over Internet Protocol mobile phones, "are expected to relay information at up to 15 megabits per second - more than a thousand times faster than the fastest third-generation cell phones now available in Japan at 384 kilobits per second," says the Mainichi Daily News.

The Institute for Interactive Journalism reports that the Web site chicagocrime.org, an innovative overlay of the city's reported crimes with Google Maps won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

Top honors also went to $2,000 First Place winner, The View, Interactive Magazines Online, while $1,000 Awards of Distinction went to the News & Record's "Town Square," Minnesota Public Radio's Public Insight Journalism and Newsday's "The Cost of War.

Check out the winners and the press release for more.

J-Learning.org is J-Lab's how-to site for community publishing and a companion to the New Voices citizen media initiative. J-Learning covers Web hosting, HTML coding, digital photography, new media reporting and more.

Poynter has some tips on making photo maps.

If, as I have, you've been noting with interest how people have been riffing on the Google Maps API to come up with some cool visual information applications, you might be interested in SmugMug's latest offering. In my mind, the new service offered by this 3-year-old company is sort of a mix of a photo-sharing service like Flickr and Google Maps. (Go to this page and you'll understand the concept.)

Here's an example of someone using SmugMug to document his biking trip around the world. Perhaps there's a tie-in for citizen journalism; imagine using a service like this to encourage people to, say, submit photos and descriptions of their gardens, all linked to locations on a satellite map of your city

href="http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=79244#series" target=new>Poynter has 50 Writing Tools for Journalists.

But newspaper readership is down. On an average weekday, about 55 million newspapers are sold nationally, down from 63 million in 1985, according to Editor and Publisher magazine. Fewer young people are picking them up, and the average age of a newspaper reader is now 55, according to a Carnegie Corporation study.

Simultaneously, new technologies are presenting new opportunities.

Nokia's Lifeblog works with a variety of Nokia multimedia phones. Palm OS devices, like the Treo 650, can use HBlogger or SplashData (below), a wireless photo-blogging solution. FeederReader and PocketBlogger work on a PocketPC.

Adam Curry uses a T-Mobile MDA III Pocket PC phone. He is planning to geo-podcast, recording audio reports combined with location information, so that listeners could follow along using a map or satellite photo. His iPodder is available for the PocketPC. The MDA IV has a tablet-like swivel screen, megapixel camera, WiFi and SD slot.

Melodeo and Pod2Mob work on cellphones. Podcasting News has the latest.

The $500 million dollars that advertisers spend annually on ABC, CBS, and NBC news programs will shift to more targeted forms of distribution. Local broadcasters bought tickets on the ATSC Titantic. They're not going anywhere. Newspapers have a staff. They have WiMax, MediaFLO and DVB-H.

They've got the world on a string. Sitting on a rainbow.

Look. It's simple economics.

Here's how newspapers will change. College journalism labs and entrepreneurs will re-create the form and content of "news". It might look like The View, it might look like CBC's Radio3, a Video Blog Syndicate or something completely different. It will be revolutionary. The $100 e-book reader will take over.

End of story.

Related DailyWireless stories include Access Points as Pencils, Mapping Cloud Users, Camphones for Journalists, Rebuilding Media, Newspaper Podcasts?, Portable Photostories, Global Blog, NY Times Blinkx, Video Search, Video Search, Multi-Media Interoperability, BBC's Mobile Video, CBS/Comcast Broadband, Handheld Tablets, MDA IV PocketPC Phone, Rollout e-Reader, Interactive TV News, The Feed Room, ABC News Now Looks to Future, Publishers Buy Online Content, The Free Triple Play, IP-TV Settops, Mobile TV Expands, Verizon Does Cellular TV, Video Search, Big Media Mobilizes, and U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H.

The 10th Annual Webby Awards is now accepting entries. The 10th Annual Webby Awards marks the debut of three new blog categories – Business Blog, Political Blog, and Personal/Cultural Blog – and the first-ever category honoring Podcast Sites. With the public increasingly turning to the web for video coverage of major events, from Hurricane Katrina to the Live 8 concerts, The Webby Awards also is adding a special category for Best Use of Video or Moving Images.
Enter by Oct. 28 and get a discount.

Ever wonder who reads your script when you submit it to a producer, and just what they’re looking for? “Scott The Reader” (a long time commenter on Wordplayer’s forums) now has his own blog. His advice on writing a good romantic comedy is great, and his thoughts on why the reader is not your enemy are well worth thinking about. [The Blank Page]

No one actually has their new 5G (video-capable) iPod yet, but you can start preparing your movies now, reports multimedia designer Paul Burd in one digital life. Use a new preset in QuickTime Pro version 7.0.3. Open the movie that you would like to put on your iPod (when you get it). Select Export from the File pull-down menu. From there, select Movie to iPod (320x240), and click Save. The result will be a 320-pixel by 240-pixel m4v file encoded with H.264, AAC audio. The fps (frames per second) will be the same as your source movie (up to 30fps). Strangely enough, there are no configurable options associated with the preset, unlike the other presets. Next, add the movie to your iTunes 6 library, like you would with any other song, and sync with your new iPod. [one digital life]

For a while, Instant Message clients were all about walls. Yahoo, MSN, and AIM users couldn't talk to one another, and Yahoo had even been blocking Trillian users. Yahoo eventually backed down, and now comes the news Yahoo and Microsoft will allow their IM customers to speak to one another. Also recall Microsoft has been talking with Time Warner to either take-over AOL (or just integrate some functionality). Interoperability is the new black.

node based editing UI

What is Traffic?

Traffic presents a new model in the non-linear editing school of thought. It utilizes whats called a dependency graph, and it’s the same interface that high-end visual effects software like Apple's Shake uses. Operators connect "nodes" together to form a chain of events they want to perform on a clip. Traffic employs this node-based interface and has infused it with an editor's mindset. Changes and tweaks which seemed too tedious or even impossible to do can now be done in a matter of seconds."

I saw this ad today - notice the link to the director’s videoblog.

All the cool directors are making videoblogs. Peter Jackson makes videos about the production of King Kong, the Blue Tights network is a videoblog by the one and only Superman. I couldn’t find the ad again after making the screenshot though, and no Google love for David Rodenberg’s videoblog. It’s probably behind a Flash wall or something.

Echostar's new PocketDish can download, record and play content from a PC or Mac, digital cameras, mass-storage devices, as well as from sources such as digital video players, camcorders and video cassette recorders. Plus, customers of EchoStar's Dish Network can dock PocketDish to select DVRs.

Our woman in the field, Nicole, offers this pithy review:

The screen is gorgeous. Its wider than previous models and overall it feels slim and lightweight. Quicktime 7.03 is necessary to view video, which is great, along with response time. It's good enough to watch an entire movie on it.

Battery life: 20 hours for music, 5 hours for photos, and 2-3 hours for video, more or less—depending on model.

So, we've got ourselves a new iPod. It's not quite the iPod Video, but it's pretty close. Let's look at the specs:

The new iPod is has 4x3 screen, 320x240 pixels and 260,000 colors and does realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264 at 30fps. It has video out.

VGA is 480x720, but this is widescreen, which makes it better for video. The resolution is just about half-VGA, which is just about what all the other players in this market are hitting, so we're not entering any new territory here. However, what we have here is a MASSIVE install base. Apple currently has over 84% market share in the MP3 player space. Everyone wants a piece of that pie, and as we well know, millions of OEMs have already attacked the idea of a portable video player with reckless abandon, creating a wasteland of formats, sizes, and devices. Hell, the PSP can play video.

What's going to happen now? You're going to go buy one. Your mom is going to buy one. Your grandma is getting one. And downloadable video will become as commonplace as downloadable music. And Apple will win in this space, as well.

So let's see what we're up against: $399 for a 60GB iPod to update the 40GB we already own. The uptake on this new device will be rather slow. There will be an attack, at first, with millions of units sold. Then Joe Sixpack will drop his iPod on the treadmill and get a new one and be amazed that he can now watch lost. Then Jane WineCooler will look at the Nano and then iPod and figure that maybe she can download some movies from ThePirateBay. Then Creative and Microsoft and all the other boys who ALREADY HAVE MEDIA PLAYERS will try to corner a few studios, much to their folly.

Expect a massive shake-up in the DVD world, as well. Downloadable content with easy video out, a hot little remote control, and a sense of moral superiority will hit NetFlix in the nuts, not even mentioning the deathblow this delivers to Blockbuster.

Fuse, that music network alternative to Viacom giants MTV and VH1, has recently announced three new shows that bring new meaning to "viewer-influenced programming". All three shows will utilize a proprietary technology that "overlays two-way interactivity powered by text messaging on cellphones and other hand held devices to traditional television formats." This SMS-TV technology, concocted by Netherlands-based Marketgraph, allows viewers to text messages that will eventually show up on TV.

Before you go "Now I can shamelessly troll and make fun of musicians right in their own music videos!", well, you can't. The three new shows are "relationship-based" and are aimed primarily at teenagers. They are "Perfect Pair," "Dumped," and "Heavy Texting." In "Perfect Pair," you can text your name and the name of your significant other (or boy/girl you're crushing on), and through some weird numerology mumbo jumbo, you'll get a compatibility rating texted back to your phone, which may also appear on the show (WHY would anyone want their compatibility rating shared on a music video show?). "Heavy Texting" is a more adult version of "Perfect Pair," presumably with more sexual references. "Dumped" is even weirder — you text in the names, and you get a numerology-based forecast on when your relationship will END. Again, WHY would anyone want this broadcasted on a music video show?

The SMS-TV technology will also be incorporated into a long-running show called "Daily Download" and there'll be live chat capability on that show. We're betting that these services won't be free, and will probably incur additional charges on top of your alloted monthly fees. I think this whole thing is kinda wacky, but obviously I'm not down with the youngsters. The three new shows will start to go live the weekend of October 17.

[Thanks, Christy]

Pardon the lack of technical terms in the title, but we are still trying to figure out everything this does. So, it is a recorder that can save audio onto 4GB of internal memory or Sony's memory stick. It can record 96k-24-bit and features two integrated condenser microphones that provide phenomenal sound quality, and to top it off this thing looks damn cool, period. It is constructed out of titanium and requires four AA batteries for operation. Expect to shell out around $2,000 for this little dandy.

Sony PCM-D1 [Music Thing]

the first VJ tool to allow mixing and triggering of Quartz Composer compositions.

Edo lets you combine and manipulate video files, 3D sequences and still images in a non-destructive way using a powerful node graph visual interface.

Check this out: Video Pop-Up Link Maker

What does it do?

This is a little wizard that writes the code for you to generate pop-up windows with embedded videos. Paste in your video URL, give it a title, and paste an image URL if you'd like. Then copy and paste the
generated code into your blog entry -- Shazzam!

The code generated will launch a small pop up window with your video embedded. Its still a little experimental, but basically works with most video types that play using Quicktime or Windows Media plugins.

Why do I need to do this?

You don't... but you might want to think about it.

Here's the problem... most of us direct link to our videos on our blog and expect them to play fine and dandy in the browser. This is not the case if your viewers are using Internet Explorer, and that's 80% or
more of all Internet users!

When an IE user clicks on a link to your video that is not properly embedded using HTML, they will have to wait until the WHOLE VIDEO DOWNLOADS before they can see anything -- even if you compressed with
Quicktime Fast Start. This is a total bummer. Windows Media is not much better because it will launch in Windows Media Player unless properly embedded using HTML. This is annoying.

So why not simply embed videos in your blog entries? Why launch a pop-up window?

Two reasons:

• many videos embedded on a webpage will cause the page to load very slowly. Even if you use Quicktime poster frames, most web browser will get a headache trying to render your webpage.


• FeedBurner and similar services require direct links to your video files in order to create the Enclosure elements in your RSS feed.

The Solution

This is in many ways the best of both worlds. It creates a direct link to your video file so FeedBurner will make Enclosures, while at the same time writes the javascript code to launch a pop-up window.

Pretty nifty!

Why did I make this?

I dunno... just a nifty little thing I thought I'd do. I had planned to use it for the Vlogging Hacks book, but that's not happening anymore.... I whipped this up kind of quickly today, so while it works, there's probably some additional features that would be nice to have.

Hey, its a first attempt. Give it a shot and let me know what you think?

The code generator is based on Tantek Celik's hCard Creator

Hope you enjoy!

-josh

Barry Wellman NetLab Director of the Centre for Urban & Community Studies of the University of Toronto was interviewed for a thoughtful long feature of Kenneth Kidd in Sunday's Toronto Star about how iPods and mobile phones are affecting public/private boundaries of community.

By appropriating public space in this way, people are also discounting its value, especially the cellphone users — who actively disturb the peace with their own words, as if those physically around them either don't exist or are beneath noticing.

hand-in-handheld device with another development: As we turn public space into a quilt of private spaces, we're losing our inhibitions.

The iPod people will sing along to their music or engage in what Bull calls "non-reciprocal looking." That's when the lady with the iPod is looking right at you, but you just assume she's not rudely staring since she's probably just engrossed in her music. The iPod, in fact, may now be to people-watching what sunglasses used to be.

And how many times have you been on the street, or queuing up at the checkout counter, and had to listen to people talk into their cellphones about the most intimate and astonishingly mundane details of their life?

"It's not that they don't recognize that it's ill-mannered," says Bull. "Essentially they don't really care."

Does this mean the end of public civility, even the end of community? That depends on how you define it. Several decades ago, one sociologist came up with nearly 70 definitions of community, notes Barry Wellman, sociology professor at the University of Toronto.

But if we take the traditional sense of community — a village or urban village where everyone knew each other and kept track of one another — well, that was already starting to vanish long before cellphones and iPods happened along.

In 1968, Wellman surveyed 845 people in East York, which then prided itself on community ties. He returned a decade later to interview 29 members of the original sample.

"We found that only a small fraction of people's strong relationships were with neighbours," says Wellman. "They only knew the names of four or five neighbours and they only visited maybe one or two."

So the whole notion of a strong, controlling neighbourhood community "has factually not been true" since at least the 1960s. What has replaced it — with the accelerating help of cellphones — is what Wellman calls "networked individualism."

"The big change has been this shift from groups to networks," he says. "They're less formally structured, they're more amorphous."

Those in anyone's network don't have to be physically close, just a cell call away, and it's easier to opt in or opt out of a network than it is a group.

"People can switch around and manoeuvre around. What that does is leave them with some uncertainty in their lives but it also leaves them with some autonomy. It's a switch from public sociability to private sociability."

Your cellphone network becomes, in a sense, an extension of yourself, what some sociologists have begun calling "a third skin."

"The notion is that you should be connected at all times," says Wellman.

There is a small irony in this: "In some ways, it goes back to pre-industrial villages (where) people were always visible. You knew they were at home, or saw them walking from one home to another."

But now it's communication with your personal network that provides the sense of comfort and security that local vision once did. Do you feel safer in your car knowing that, should anything go wrong, help is just a cell call away? Or that you can always phone your peripatetic teenager to see if she's okay?

You could look at this as a trade-off. In return for suffering (and sometimes inflicting) all that cellphone rudeness in the company of strangers, you get safety and apparent freedom from helpless worrying.

But there may be a third way — and salvation from unwanted noise — in a related technology: text-messaging. At least, that is, if we learn anything from Japan, where you're allowed (and technically able) to use cellphones on the subway, but scarcely anyone talks into them.

"You have a lot of people sitting there quietly," says Wellman. "But instead of reading a book or newspaper, their fingers are flying over their cellphones, sending and receiving text messages.

"What you have is a lot of quiet people, very socially connected, but not to each other."

Yes, quiet, and politely respectful of those around you. Heck, you could even do it while listening to your iPod.

n.b. reading the full article requires registration !

Multimedia Research Group, Inc. announces its new semi-annual IPTV (or IP TV) forecast, "IPTV Global Forecast 2005 - 2009: September 2005," as part of its IPTV Tracking Service. Projecting growth from 3.7 million subscribers in 2005 to 36.9 million in 2009, the report also forecasts subscriber revenue growth from $880 million to $9.9 billion in 2005-2009. "IPTV is continuing to push forward in Asia and Europe, as deployments and trials in Japan, China, and India are really starting to show positive impact," states Bob Larribeau, MRG Senior Analyst. "The U.S. RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) are still lagging, due to issues that SBC and BellSouth are facing, waiting for low-cost MPEG-4 set-top boxes and Microsoft's software, and dealing with the complexity of the system integration required. Progress in Europe is making up most of the difference."

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[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology is available in 652 communities connecting 322,700 homes, according to research released last week at the FTTH Conference in Las Vegas. Those figures should only increase as Verizon continues its FiOS buildouts. The report was released by...

Continue.

Bloggers would “probably not” be considered journalists under the proposed federal shield law, the bill’s co-sponsor, U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar has told the Inter American Press Association.

According to Editor and Publisher, Lugar did say that debate is not yet closed on how to define a journalist under the proposed law.

“As to who is a reporter, this will be a subject of debate as this bill goes farther along,” he said in response to a question from Washington Post Deputy Managing Editor Milton Coleman. “Are bloggers journalists or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists? Probably not, but how do you determine who will be included in this bill?”

(thanks to Lisa for the tip)

LG has unveiled plans for a phone that has a live video pausing and rewinding feature. Apparently they are labeling this technology as the ever-so-creative "time machine" function. The phone actually looks pretty cool but the newly hyped feature, not so much. I think I would like to see the whole "live television on mobile phone" feature develop some more before manufacturers worry about stopping and rewinding said live television.

LG Launches TiVo-Style… [RealTechNews]

University of Missouri-Columbia scientists say they've developed a power cell capable of providing continuous power for years.

The scientists from the university's research reactor and the Qynergy Corp. say their discovery will create new capabilities for applications that require longer power life in compact, low volume containers. The cells have the potential of continuously generating small amounts of electricity for nearly 20 years.

"Ufone and Mobilink mobile users can donate 3 rupees to earthquake victims by sending an SMS with DONATE to number 346. You can repeat the process for whatever amount you want to donate. The money will be deducted from your mobile balance and goes directly to people suffering from disaster," says a posting from the Pakistan relief site.

There are links to Earthquake Reports, Missing People and Relief Work. As with the devastating tsunami which wreaked havoc in Asia less than a year ago, the Internet and mobile communications are being quickly harnessed in the aftermath of the October 8th (...)

Entry continued...

: More to come... Microsoft and RealNetworks have announced three agreements valued at $761 million to settle their antitrust case and create a "new partnership to innovate and promote consumer choices in digital music and games".
The three agreements include:
-- an agreement to resolve all the companies' antitrust disputes worldwide;
-- an agreement for digital music collaboration between the parties, including promotional and marketing support of Real's Rhapsody, on MSN properties;
-- and an agreement to offer RealNetworks' digital games through MSN Games and Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360.

Site dedicated to encoding and presenting video through flash files.

MTV has launched a 24/7 channel distributed entirely over broadband to 730 US schools.

Called mtvU Uber, it’s available through both streaming and what MTV says is a unique on-demand capability.

The company also announced a partnership with CiscoSystems to award ten grants of $25,000 to create ten "broadband incubators," funding students or student groups to create games, movie shorts, music videos and more for the broadband environment.

But MTV hasn’t gone so far as to embrace the concept of openness. Rather, each project will be released only on mtvU Uber.

Both mtvU and mtvU Uber are owned by Viacom International.

Looks like it's time for the Koreans to show their tailfeathers at the Korea Electronics Show, from today through Oct. 15. Obviously, we can expect lots of new, cool stuff from LG and Samsung, who are both headquartered there. And believe it or not, this will be the KEA's 37th year. (Ah, those were the days—when all you'd see were tube TVs and kimchee makers.)

Something cool to look out for this year is the Samsung DMB-T450 portable satellite TV receiver. I had to translate the press release from Korean, but it looks like it not only provides portable satellite TV broadcast reception, but also MP3 playback, a digital camera and video recording. We'll see if the translation was way off when the show gets underway, but for now, that sounds pretty good to me.

Samsung Introduces New DMB-T450 Multi-function Device [SamsungHQ]

Tim Lee offers counterintuitive advice for the record labels when they re-up their licensing agreements with Apple for iTunes: they should demand that Apple strip the DRM from the tunes.

How come? Because DRM isn't helping the labels sell music. It's helping a company (Apple) become the music industry's single gateway to the people who want to pay for music.

Thanks to DRM, a song downloaded at the iTunes Music Store will only play on iTunes or an iPod. That means that if a customer wants to start using different jukebox software or another MP3 player, he'll need to rebuild his music collection from scratch.

As Apple's share of the overall music market grows, it will be more and more difficult for you to walk away from the table during contract negotiations. Jobs will hold all the cards, because his customers--who form an ever-growing share of the music market--will be locked into his products. Like Bill Gates in the PC world, Steve Jobs will become the gatekeeper to tens of millions of music fans, and you will have to pay his price for admission.

How does ditching DRM help? If Apple's songs were distributed without copy protection, your customers would be able to switch to another program at any time. You could threaten to cut a deal with any of the other companies now clamoring for your business--Real, Napster, Sony, Microsoft, etc--and Jobs would know that his customers had the option of leaving his platform.

I know what you're thinking: what about piracy? The reality is that DRM does next to nothing to reduce piracy. Virtually every song ever recorded is already available on peer-to-peer networks. It's easy to "rip" a song from a CD (which has no protection at all), and Apple's DRM scheme has been repeatedly cracked. So people who don't respect the law aren't going to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store in the first place. DRM won't do a thing to stop them!

On the other hand, DRM systems treat your most honest customers like criminals. People who purchase music from the iTunes Music Store know perfectly well that they could get the same song for free via a peer-to-peer network. They choose to purchase from iTunes for one of two reasons: they value convenience or they respect the law. Either way, you don't need DRM to keep them honest. If they were inclined to engage in piracy, they wouldn't have bought the song in the first place.

Previewseek - Artifical intelligence based search engine using javascript, data clustering and multiple database integration technologies.

IM: Interactive Media is a refereed interdisciplinary electronic journal administered by the National Academy of Screen and Sound ( Australia) and conceived as an interactive forum for researchers in screen and screen production

Engadget points to this I4U Q&A with a Verizon Fios TV subscriber in Keller, who answers some questions about the service. The user answers questions about image quality, HD lineup, the Verizon DVR, and on-demand, as well as offers some pictures of his setup. Fios listings are starting to show up online via Yahoo and other outlets.

Citizen's media pioneer Dan Gillmor has started up a monthly column for PR Week. In his first piece he says that in this age of interactive media, conversing - not controlling - is the key to effective PR. Amen, brother.

Chris Pirillo, founder of the annual Gnomedex high-tech conference, has a new venture definitely worth a look: Gada.be, a metadata search engine that's especially handy for anyone using a handheld device such as a Net-enabled cell phone.

He explains it a bit here.

But what you really need to know, you can glean by looking at this page of Gada.be search results for the movie Corpse Bride.

Robert Scoble gives some other examples of how handy this service is. Nice work, Chris!

So, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California AB 1179 which prohibits retailers from selling violent games to minors. If you haven't read about all the uproar over this, here's a a good place to start.

One thing I've always wondered is why games don't use the same ratings system as movies. What's wrong with G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17? People have had decades to be trained into recognizing that system and I've never fully understood why the ESRB system has to be so esoteric. Part of the reason why these bills keep getting passed (even though they often get struck down in federal court) is because of the "confusing" nature of video game content and ratings that "confuse" parents. It's an easy step for advocates of these measures to make a leap from parents being "confused" to their children being "manipulated" by game marketing. Disregarding that specious rhetorical device, I have no doubt that marketers ARE doing their best to "manipulate" as many people as a possible into wanting their game--minor or adult. That's sort of how advertising works--you pull on people's strings in order to get them to toss you money they'd be much off better saving. Capitalism and all that rot.

Could the argument that "ratings systems don't work" be short-circuited by shifting to a ratings system people are already familiar with (I'm intentionally overlooking the huge technical hurdles of such a switch)? Or is there some real benefits to the ESRB system or serious problems with applying movie ratings to video games that I'm overlooking?

Gamasutra featured a very relevant piece about the future of mobile gaming. It’s actually a compilation of viewpoints made by Quang Hong. Here area few selection impressions I found relevant about the very questions “What interests you most about the prospects for cell phone gaming, and what innovations and trends do you think all game professionals should keep a close eye on in the mobile gaming market?”

I think the last thing to keep an eye on would be the prevalence of 3D applications. I personally don’t think 3D really has a place on mobile (except for the “wow!” factor), but will wait to see where the consumers fall on this issue. It just seems to me that many big companies look at mobile as a natural extension of console. That concepts that work in their current medium will transfer directly to this new one. I don’t believe this is the case. (Nick Smolney)

The interesting thing about the prospects for cell phone gaming is that we as an industry do not yet exist in the hearts and minds of the consumer. (John Szeder, Mofactor, Inc)

am most interested in the uniqueness of mobile devices and how they can be used to enhance gaming and make it different from fixed gaming. When people think about cell phones, they think about community and moving around. This leads to different types of multiplayer (given shorter play time and less bandwidth) and the possibilities of location-based games. Most people think of location-based games as these hardcore mobile games, but they do not have to be (Anonymous)

Why do I blog this? among all the statements presented in this article, I picked up those 3 points because I find them close to the reality. Mobile gaming will work if 1) it’s not taken as a follow-up of game console (then 3D mobile games are a wrong path) 2) it should be taken as a new and unique phenomenon still to be understood in order to create new gaming experience 3) cell phones unique features (voice, geolocation, ptt, bluetooth…) could be seen as a basis to meet this end.

A method for calculating a TV or radio program’s added value – its contribution in attracting users.

To get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.'

"Safa Rashtchy, managing director at Piper Jaffray, moderated a panel with five Bay-Area teenagers."

(Something tells me that this conversation might unfortunately become part of the Developer and VC Bible on Youth Marketing. ;) -kc.)

This BBC article says "the web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study.
In the year to October the web grew by more than 17 million sites, says monitoring firm Netcraft. This figure exceeds the growth of 16 million sites seen in 2000 when net fever reached its most intense pitch".

Web enjoys year of biggest growth

The Korea Times says "South Korea plans to show off its technological edge in the mobile phone industry next month on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Pusan (Busan).
Included in the demonstration will be high-speed data packet access (HSDPA), digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB), network-based robot, telematics and wireless broadband (WiBro). Telamatics refers to the fusion of computer technology and wireless telecom.All of these technologies, enabled by wireless network, will offer APEC participants a killer opportunity to experience the futuristic technologies hands-on".

Futuristic Wireless Services to Adorn APEC

NY Times reporter Saul Hansell (whom I met at Web 2.0 this week): Smaller Video Producers Seek Audiences on Net. Excerpt:

Small to medium-size producers like Oxygen Media and Scripps Networks are trying to go beyond simply posting a handful of videos on their sites. They are experimenting with expanded lineups of video content, improving navigation between videos and creating a business model from video services.

"It is now possible to distribute a high-quality program that has been produced by much smaller entities," said Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Brightcove, which is based in Cambridge, Mass. He predicted a rise of new sources of video just as the Internet spawned blogs and Web sites of all stripes.

Brightcove's system, which will be formally introduced at an Internet conference today in San Francisco, combines software tools for producing and distributing video with methods for making money. Consciously modeled after Google, it is starting a network that will sell video ads associated with independent video producers, much as Google sells ads on many blogs. It also includes technology that allows producers to charge fees to watch or download video, including a way for Web site owners to place links to video content on their pages and split the revenue with the video producer. ...

On Thursday, I jumped in to a bloggic discussion of the tradeoffs between centrally-controlled and peer-to-peer design strategies in distributed systems. (See posts by Randy Picker (with comments from Tim Wu and others), Lior Strahilevitz, me, and Randy Picker again.)

We’ve agreed, I think, that large-scale online services will be designed as distributed systems, and the basic design choice is between a centrally-controlled design, where most of the work is done by machines owned by a single entity, and a peer-to-peer design, where most of the work is done by end users’ machines. Google is a typical centrally-controlled design. BitTorrent is a typical P2P design.

The question in play at this point is when the P2P design strategy has a legitimate justification. Which justifications are “legitimate”? This is a deep question in general, but for our purposes it’s enough to say that improving technical or economic efficiency is a legitimate justification, but frustrating enforcement of copyright is not. Actions that have legitimate justifications may also have harmful side-effects. For now I’ll leave aside the question of how to account for such side-effects, focusing instead on the more basic question of when there is a legitimate justification at all.

Which design is more efficient? Compared to central control, P2P has both disadvantages and advantages. The main disadvantage is that in a P2P design, the computers participating in the system are owned by people who have differing incentives, so they cannot necessarily be trusted to work toward the common good of the system. For example, users may disconnect their machines when they’re not using the system, or they may “leech” off the system by using the services of others but refusing to provide services. It’s generally harder to design a protocol when you don’t trust the participants to play by the protocol’s rules.

On the other hand, P2P designs have three main efficiency advantages. First, they use cheaper resources. Users pay about the same price per unit of computing and storage as a central provider would pay. But the users’ machines a sunk cost — they’re already bought and paid for, and they’re mostly sitting idle. The incremental cost of assigning work to one of these machines is nearly zero. But in a centrally controlled system, new machines must be bought, and reserved for use in providing the service.

Second, P2P deals more efficiently with fluctuations in workload. The traffic in an online system varies a lot, and sometimes unpredictably. If you’re building a centrally-controlled system, you have to make sure that extra resources are available to handle surges in traffic; and that costs money. P2P, on the other hand, has the useful property that whenever you have more users, you have more users’ computers (and network connections) to put to work. The system’s capacity grows automatically whenever more capacity is needed, so you don’t have to pay extra for surge-handling capacity.

Third, P2P allows users to subsidize the cost of running the system, by having their computers do some of the work. In theory, users could subsidize a centrally-controlled system by paying money to the system operator. But in practice, monetary transfers can bring significant transaction costs. It can be cheaper for users to provide the subsidy in the form of computing cycles than in the form of cash. (A full discussion of this transaction cost issue would require more space — maybe I’ll blog about it someday — but it should be clear that P2P can reduce transaction costs at least sometimes.)

Of course, this doesn’t prove that P2P is always better, or that any particular P2P design in use today is motivated only by efficiency considerations. What it does show, I think, is that the relative efficiency of centrally-controlled and P2P designs is a complex and case-specific question, so that P2P designs should not be reflexively labeled as illegitimate.

AP: Key Ruling Backs Blog and Web Rights. The Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision that had required an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official on a newspaper site. It was hailed nationally as the first state ruling in such a case.

This ruling is a big deal because it affirms an important principle: that people suing to get the identity of anonymous online posters should have at least a plausible case that they have a defamation (or copyright infringement, etc.) case in the first place.

That said, I'm not a fan on anonymous sniping from the cyber-bushes, as the person in this case seems to have been. People should stand behind their words in all but the most limited circumstances, such as when their lives might be endangered if their identities were disclosed.

We allow pseudonyms in the comments here, but we also require a valid e-mail address before anyone can post a comment. (We ask for real names in blog postings.) For the most part people behave in a civil manner.

On sites where totally anonymous posts are allowed, I give such postings a minus credibility rating. That is, I start off disbelieving everything these folks say, and unless they provide direct evidence for their claims I assume they're false.

If a totally anonymous poster starts off with, say, -10 credibility points, people who post under a pseudonym start off at zero on this scale. They may earn some points over time, but they have to persuade me.

People who use their real names start off with positive credibility ratings. They have to make serious mistakes of fact to lose my trust.

We're all learning how to gauge trust in this arena. Let's keep anonymity but try not to misuse it.

Last night I was co-moderator of a panel on "virtual world journalism" at New York Law School's annual State of Play conference (co-organized by my Berkman Center colleagues). The panelists were all people (all men) who report about what goes on in virtual worlds like Second Life, Sims Online, etc.

One of the panelists has quite the cool job: Wagner James Au is an "embedded journalist" in Second Life - and his job (salary paid by Second Life) is to report on events, people, and phenomena in that one particular virtual world.

As a somebody who has spent no time in these worlds (although some would argue that the blogosphere is another virtual world), I asked why the panelists think news editors ought to care about coverage of virtual worlds. The answer: increasingly, things that happen in virtual worlds are having a real-life impact. One example: people are actually making real incomes by selling virtual goods created for other members of their virtual worlds to buy with virtual cash, which actually translates into real cash. There are also fund-raisers to help fund real-life causes - albeit sometimes done in more, er, outlandish and creative ways than you would see in the real world. As people's activities in virtual worlds increasingly have real-life impact on people's economic and social situations in the real world, coverage of virtual events will become more important.

A couple of the panelists made another rather interesting point: that virtual world journalism as a genre is much more experimental, interesting and creative than real-world journalism, because people are free to do whatever they want and must be inventive to capture the attention of their fellow gamers.   Might virtual world journalism start influencing the techniques of real world journalism?   Perhaps we shouldn't dismiss that possibility.

James Au made another interesting point: virtual world games like Second Life are worlds created and built by the users. There is no set plot or set endgame: the people who join create their own avatars (personas), homes, neighborhoods and countries - through which online societies evolve. He believes this is the ultimate form of "user created content", and is thus ties in with the world of blogs and other forms of participatory media.

As somebody who hasn't played a video game since Tetris in the early 90's, the session certainly gave me a fresh angle on the future of citizens' media, broadly defined.

Here's a quick first look at the new BBC Internet Media Player – it's currently in a limited, invitation-only (and UK-only) trial. So far, it seems pretty neat.

Thinking about the future of newspapers, David Carr writes in the The New York Times an article titled "Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod". Regarding the state of newspapers, "the last of the great analog technologies", Carr writes, "The newspaper business is in a horrible state. It's not that papers don't make money. They make plenty. But not many people, or at least not many on Wall Street, see a future in them. In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts ... But what the newspaper industry really needs is an iPod moment."

Just as the iPod was "a new way of listening to music" and helped the music industry, that was fighting with downloadable music, the newspaper industry needs "a device for data consumption ... (that is) uplinked and updated constantly: a digital player for the eyes, with an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price." Newspapers could live long on such a device.

However, Carr mentions technical and economic problems with such a device. Technically, it is not as simple as one might think to construct such a tool. Esther Dyson, consultant on digital issues, says, "It looks simple to come up with a tablet that works, but it is not. In order to have the power and portability you need, you need power. The screen is the part of the device that uses the most power." But even if those problems would be solved there is still the problem of how to make money from it. Carr states, "Because there is no scarcity of ad space on the Web, you cannot charge nearly so much for a banner ad on a page with millions of hits as you can for a double-page spread in a national paper."

However, a possible solution could be an iTunes-like business model. Carr claims, "As iTunes has demonstrated, there is a vast swath of consumers who are willing to pay for what they want and avoid the moral taint of unauthorized use ... That is the future that newspapers have to prepare for. Readers no longer care so much who you are, they just want to know what you know."

Even if the future may look grim for good reporting, Carr concludes, "But in a frantic age where the quality of the information can be critical, being a reliable news source humming away in everyone's backpack sounds just useful enough to be a business."

Source: The New York Times

:: Last Call for 2006 Independent Games Festival Submissions
Deadlines are drawing to a close for submissions to the 2006 Independent Games Festival (IGF), held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Honoring innovation in videogames created by independent game developers and students, the event continues to grow and prosper--and the prizes just keep getting bigger. The event, which is slated for March 20-24, 2006 in San Jose, CA, is offering a $20,000 Grand Prize for the best game. As proof that there's no slowing down in the game development industry, the event has added a new modding competition, and mods can now be submitted for Valve's Half Life 2, BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, Epic Games's Unreal Tournament 2004, and id Software's Doom 3. The extra incentive is that there's a total of $10,000 in prize money for the best original modifications.

This year, more than $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to IGF competition winners for innovation in five areas: Visual Arts, Audio, Game Design, Technical Excellence, and Best Web Browser Game. Main competition finalists are eligible for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and Audience Award. The IGF also plans to recognize 10 games for Student Showcase, including a new category for games created using middleware.

Deadlines for submissions to the modding competition are October 10, 2005; student submissions are due November 15, 2005. Visit www.igf.com for rules, deadlines and entry forms.

The best of both worlds - Contactless convergence with mobile wireless

Going forth, the vision for the consumer takes the current voice and data communication channels and adds a contactless communication channel, which transforms today’s mobile phones into a multipurpose terminal, lifestyle tool and personal security device. This transformation can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The first is the introduction of a dual-interface UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card), combining (U)SIM applications for 2G or 3G networks with contactless capability. The second is the integration of contactless technology, Near Field Communications (NFC), into the handset itself. The third is the introduction of a removable multi-media card (MMC) with integrated security and contactless technology.

In May we noted the first ccMixter user to be discovered and signed to a record label via their participation in ccMixter. Now we have the first record label started by people who first met on the site. Victor Stone explains:

Cezary Ostrowski from Poland and Marco Raaphorst from Holland met online at ccMixter and decided to go into business together. They started an online label called DiSfish where 5% of all sale proceeds to goes to CC, 5% goes to charity and the rest is split between the label and the artist. All music on the label is licensed under CC.

Victor Stone (that's me) from Berkeley and Robert Doiel from southern California met online at ccMixter and collaborated (without ever meeting) on an album of Doeil's compositions called 'Fourstones plays Weird Polymer' and decided to release it exclusively on DiSfish

The entire album is available for listening, purchasing or licensing.

Thanks Victor, Robert, Cezary, and Marco!

An online job posting hints at new details in a dot-com billionaire's plan to up-end Hollywood movie distribution system. By Holly Wagner.

BBC research on key target audience groups

Participate.net is a new community social action website, developed in part by our own Micki Krimmel. Participate.net is now up and running, and it's well-worth checking out. A project of Participant Productions, the social-action film company, Participate.net showcases activist projects directly related to current Participant releases, including the new George Clooney-directed Good Night, and Good Luck. Beyond its specific projects, Participate.net brings together an active community to address major social issues.

The Participate community includes actors, filmmakers, issue experts, moviegoers, and activists from all over the world. They write blogs, share ideas, sign petitions, recruit new members, organize discussion groups, and take direct action. They are Participants in improving their lives, homes, schools, communities, and the world.

Good Night, and Good Luck, which is getting terrific reviews, dramatizes the story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's on-running confrontation with Senator Joe McCarthy. The Participate.net tie-in with the film is the Report It Now project, a citizen-journalism effort. Unlike most other citizen journalism projects (like OhMyNews), Report It Now focuses on video and audio stories, and the highest-rated stories may be rebroadcast on PBS or XMRadio.

Another Participate.net effort, Stand Up, ties in with the upcoming Charlize Theron movie, "North Country," and is aimed to putting a stop to sexual harassment and domestic violence.

When Micki has a chance to catch her breath, we'll have her give an inside perspective on getting Participate.net going -- and just how you can get involved.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 03:51 PM)

The world’s first literary prize for books based on blogs, or "blooks," is being launched today by its sponsor, Lulu.

The Lulu Blooker Prize is the first contest to honor blooks, a hybrid literary form that has evolved in recent years from web sites, particularly the web sites known as blogs. "Blooks are the hottest new publishing trend," says Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.

The prize will reward the best blooks in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comic-Blooks (based on web-comics), but with one overall winner. It is open to blooks published anywhere by anyone, provided they are in English.

We already talked about the 3D floating vision by Pioneer a few days ago.

Just to recap:

Pioneer has developed a revolutionary system for 3D drawing. You use your finger to draw in the air. The procedure is as follows: you place your finger in a frame, you draw without touching anything with a depth perspective and this will be translated by a Pc onto the PC's screen. At first sight, I don't really see any real-life applications for this technology, but I'm sure that you can come up with dozens of possible fields in which this technology can be applied.

And here is the video !!!

Last week there was a big discussion over a story claiming that Microsoft was getting into the self-destructing DVD business. Since the writer of the article called the idea "revolutionary" despite a history of failures in the space, we should have been more suspicious -- and, indeed, most of the evidence suggested such Microsoft powered DVDs don't exist. However, the author of the original article has struck back, and in true "nyah nyah nyah" fashion has claimed that they do, in fact, exist, but his latest story is even more problematic than the original one. First off, he starts off by claiming that Ed Bott, who was initially skeptical enough of the article to call it out, has "an unlikely name." It's not clear how that helps to establish the original writer's journalistic credibility. He then goes on to say that he has "bad news" for those who doubted the story because he now has a named source to confirm it. Unfortunately, the named source doesn't say anything about self-destructing DVDs. It seems pretty clear he's talking about Microsoft's copy protection technology that content holders could use in all sorts of manners, including to make certain content playable only one time. That's a far, far cry from Microsoft unleashing self-destructing DVDs on the world.

The American Marketing Association announced a series of seminars on how 'Consumer Controlled Media Is Re-Shaping Online Go-To-Market Strategies'.

October 28 - Chicago ; November 11 - Scottsdale ; December 2 - New York

Topics are ranging from Podcasting and RSS to Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Social Networking and Power Laws of the Internet. The seminars provide insigt in how to channel these new consumer-connecting media to benefit marketing organizations.

'Join Consumer Conversations' Howard Rheingold told attendees Wednesday at a conference in New York arranged by Havas media shop MPG USA. Refusal to join in such conversations carries its own risks: "There are companies today that are giants, but won't want to give up control, and will shrink because of it and go out of business," said Rheingold at the conference. (via MediaPost)

Now this is a PSP accessory I can get excited about. Datel, which also makes the X2 battery pack for the PSP, has come out with an integrated 4GB hard drive version, effectively making this an external hard drive for the PSP. The Datel MAX 4GB connects to the memory stick port of the PSP, and will utilize its built-in battery pack instead of sapping the PSP's power. As for pricing, Lik-Sang is selling it for $249.99, while Dark Planets is selling it for £137.49 (quoted RSP is £149.99). Considering the price of a 2GB Memory Stick Pro DUO is more than $330, this is looking to be a must-have add-on for those PSP fans that like to pack on the multimedia in their handhelds (TV shows, for example). It will be available later this month.

Max 4GB HDD w/ X2 Battery [Lik-Sang via I4U]
Datel 4GB PSP Hard Drive [Dark Planets via I4U]

Kevin Howarth took notes on what he heard at the ConvergeSouth conference this weekend in Greensboro. More information can be found here and here.

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.

Via fredhouse, another neologism: placecasting:

‘placecasting’: networked publishing of digital media (esp. audio) that is logically associated with a physical location, to be experienced by suitably equipped people in that location.

fredhouse gives the example of the work did at Mobile Bristol (for instance this paper). Previously we refered to this concept by location-based annotations (be it a written postit/message or an audio note).

Of course, this lead me to type ‘placecasting’ in google, then I stumbled across this placecasting.com website which is just an appetizer:

Placecasting: Broadcast anywhere. Experience anytime.

Let’s talk about
• Podcasts
• Vidcasts
• Webcasts
• Gamecasts?
Making them, getting them, living with them.

Stay tuned for more info.

Ok we’ll stay tuned

Japanese-German Media Camp 2005

[MobLab: Japanese-German media camp 2005]--A live art & communication project with young artists from Japan and Germany (MobNauts), who develop creative ideas with mobile technology while traveling Japan in a bus. Welcome to the mobile laboratory! 15 October, (Saturday) - 6 November (Sunday), 2005

MobLab ("Mobile" + "Laboratory", also "mob" = crowd, community, etc.) is the sum of projects proposed and developed by Japanese and German artists from various fields (=MobNauts) in a bus that, equipped with an array of digital mobile devices, functions as an information base. The time the MobNauts spend on the road will naturally lead to various creative collaborations. The bus travels to a number of host institutions throughout Japan, each of which hosts events that incorporate the bus and its passengers. At the same time, the MobNauts have the opportunity to exchange with local artists and other people. The flexibly set route allows for the spontaneous staging of events, which will be announced on the MobLab Website.

The bus is at once an intimate space in which the MobNauts spend time together, and a public space for transmitting global information. While traveling, the MobNauts will create occasions for individuals to meet, on both real and virtual levels, and connect to different local realities each time they stop and get out of the bus. MobLab aims to be a platform for practical experimentation in public born out of a revolutionarily "on-the-spot" form of meeting of individuals and media, and investigation into the possibilities implied by this public nature. The concept of dynamic information that interactively transforms by exchange between a variety of people has just begun to surface as a new layer of reality.

The MobNauts are artists from Japan and Germany who travel on a bus across Japan. These protagonists form the centerpiece of MobLab, as their respective projects developed with information networks and incorporating direct experiences with different realities and individuals unique to each station of the journey, will create a new sensibility to possible future directions for both society and urban spaces. A blog at Moblab website, written by the MobNauts, will give you insight to each MobNaut's experience. The MobNauts are also expected to engage in unique collaborations with each other.

*The latest action and contents will be updated at www.moblab.org, (also each artist has a blot), additionally the bus collect some data(temparature, humidity, GPS date, and other captured images) (bus as an interface) and these data will be provided on the web as an "open data", which will be used by any artists or creators for their furture creations, projects!

Feel free to contact us at:
info[at]moblab.org
for questions or information.
(This art project is part of Deutschland in Japan 2005/2006)

*Beside of the followings, the spontaneous staging of events will be announced on the MobLab Website.

Early October: Information system development and implementation, conversion of the bus in IAMAS, Ogaki

10/15 (Sat) MobNauts gathering at IAMAS
10/15 (Sat) - 10/18 (Tue) MobNauts camp
10/18 (Tue) eve party@IAMAS
10/19 (Wed) Seeing-off ceremony, travel from Ogaki to Tokyo
10/20 (Thu) Setting at NTT ICC
10/21 (Fri) NTT ICC(Bus parks at Tokyo Opera City)
10/22 (Sat) Fujino workshop for art (Kanagawa Pref.)
10/23 (Sun) Yokohama Triennale
10/24 (Mon) - 10/26 (Wed) Travel from Yokohama to Sendai
10/27 (Thu) Setting at Sendai Mediatheque, putting bus inside the building.
10/28 (Fri) - 10/30 (Sun) Sendai Mediatheque, The bus is displayed at ground floor
10/31 (Mon) - 11/2 (Wed) Travel from Sendai to Kansai
11/3 (Thu) Saito IMI Graduate School in Expo Park, Osaka
11/4 (Fri) Travel from Osaka to YCAM, Yamaguchi
11/5 (Sat) - 11/6 (Sun) YCAM, The bus is parked in front of the venue.

MobNauts (artists on the bus): exonemo(Yae Akaiwa + Kensuke Sembo), AGF, Sven Gareis, Daisuke Ishida + Ken Furudate, Stefan Riekeles Driver: Yosuke Kawamura (Artist and director of MOBIUM, www.mobium.org) Production assistant: Tomonaga Yamaguchi (MobLab)

The spontaneous staging of events: MobNauts will spontaneously stage events at many places apart from their individual project. We welcome anybody to attend this plan. Why not come along with your friends? Artists, painters and musicians are also welcome to help us for live performances and the painting of the bus itself!!

Host Institutions: The bus travels to a number of host institutions throughout Japan, each of which hosts events that incorporate the bus and its passengers. At the same time, the MobNauts have the opportunity to exchange with local artists and other people.

-Ogaki: IAMAS (Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences + International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences) www.iamas.ac.jp
-Tokyo: NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] www.ntticc.or.jp
-Sendai: Mediatheque /smt www.smt.jp
-Yamaguchi: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media /YCAM www.ycam.jp

Organizer: MobLab Committee, Goethe-Institut
Support: The Japan Foundation
Patronage: Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Japan
Special cooperation: IAMAS, ICC, Sendai Mediatheque, YCAM, Transmediale
(Berlin)
Technical support: IAMAS (Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences + International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences)
Support: Mobium, Yokohama Triennale, Fujino workshop for art, Saito IMI Graduate School
Sponsor: CAMPINGWORKS CO., LTD

MobLab Base:

Project director: Yukiko Shikata
Project manager: Miki Fukuda
Production assistant: Tomonaga Yamaguchi
Berlin Coordinator: Stefan Riekeles

Enquiries:
info[at]moblab.org

-------------------------

Chipzilla will pay approximately $70 million for Zarlink Semiconductor.

The deal includes demodulators and tuners for receiving digital audio and video broadcasts to TVs, set-top boxes, recorders, and other devices. They allow the devices to receive, extract, and decompress the broadcast and then display or store the content, said Intel.

Zarlink claims to be the number one provider of terrestrial DTV demodulators and is well positioned to meet the needs of portable DTV equipment designers. Selling the assets will allow Zarlink to focus on its network communications, optical and ultra-low power businesses, it said.

Intel will pay $68 million in cash and $2 million in "other consideration," Zarlink said. The deal is subject to closing conditions, including the retention of Zarlink employees, and is expected to close in November, it said.

Zarlink's radio-frequency front-end consumer business, based in Swindon, England, has annual revenue of $53 million US, developing demodulator and tuner technologies for digital TV products. The acquisition would complement Intel's purchase earlier this year of Oplus Technologies, which makes video processing technologies, Intel said.

Meanwhile, Broadcom signaled its intentions to expand into mobile TV by announcing the purchase of Athena Semiconductors, a fabless radio chipmaker specializing in video, audio and low-power Wi-Fi.

Broadcom is backing up the Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) standard, backed by most of the GSM community. While its multimedia processors support the H.264 compression used by DVB-H devices, it has not yet integrated a DVB-H tuner into its chipsets or created a standalone DVB-H radio chip. That’s where Athena’s technology comes in, said Robert Rango, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s wireless group. “We will create the core of an industry-leading mobile digital TV market,” says Rango.

ARM's latest core, the Cortex-A8, based on ARM 7 architecture can deliver up to 2000 DMIPS while consuming less than 300 mW and may be used in portable multimedia devices.

Chips and content are going to mix it up.

MobiTV and Denver-based Comcast Media Center will deliver MobiTV to mobile phones. Comcast's 305,000 square-foot satellite center currently originates more than 80 TV networks, including HDTV channels. Its satellite uplink facility transmits more than 400 digital services.

MobiTV is currently available on PCS Vision from Sprint and Cingular but may move to offload their cellular spectrum by multcasting DVB-H on the 1.6 Ghz band owned by Crown Castle and the the 700 Mhz band (channel 55), owned by Qualcomm's MediaFLO.

They'll utilize H.264 compression and VC-1.

The MainConcept H.264 Encoder v2 software ($500) is fully compliant with the H.264 standard and includes a decoder which enables H.264 files to be played in Windows Media Player.

ComVu allows you to webcast live using your smart-phone or PocketPC. The feed goes to ComVu's server where other users, on a computer, smart phone or PPC, can pick it up after a 10-second delay from the Web site. Free video hosting is available at OurMedia.org, Feedburner, Vimeo and Blip.tv.

Nerd TV is ready to roll. So are Brightcove, Major League Baseball, Oxygen, ManiaTV, ChannelBlast, Current TV, RocketBoom, Google Video, Yahoo 360 and a dozen other multi-media content networks.

Producers of the Ironman Triathlon qualifier in Madison, WI, last month relied on the RF Central Camera Mounted Transmitter, the 5.8GHz RF Extreme (RFX-CMT) to give their cameraman the opportunity to get close to the action and to move around freely without the restriction of wires.

Designed for electronic newsgathering, the RFX-CMT transforms a standard news gathering camcorder into a digital wireless camera. The transmitter simply clips on to the battery adaptor plate. The device uses COFDM modulation and supports MPEG-2 4:2:0 and MPEG-2 4:2:2 encoding.

For the qualifying event, the RFX-CMT lets the cameraman move around the race transition areas without cables — so there are no safety concerns about interfering with contestants — and still deliver broadcast-quality images.

The Camera Mounted Transmitter outputs 100 mW.

Have Prodigem create and seed torrents from directly within Drupal

Whoa, Griffin made a stream ripper!?

"iFill streams mp3 files from thousands of free radio stations directly to your iPod. You can choose several stations at once and select from many different genres. And since iFill goes directly to your iPod, it won't clutter up your hard drive with extra files."

Over the last month, while picking, choosing, and preparing for our incoming R&D Fellows, I've been hacking on a little something in my spare time. Today it gets to see the light of day so I can see if it has any legs.

Introducing, VGMap, a new free and open-source library that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. It is called VGMap because it adds vector-drawing capability to the already-awesome GMap API.

I have also put together an interactive NYC Subway map using this new library. Hopefully it demonstrates at least a few of the possibilities of what might be accomplished using VGMap.

In fact, I am not really much of a flash developer so I am eager to see if this is put together in a way that makes sense and is usable. I was just curious if it was possible to draw over Google Maps with Flash, and, well, it is!

VGMap: http://vgmap.eyebeamresearch.org/
VGMap-Powered NYC Subway Map: http://nycsubway.eyebeamresearch.org/

Please let us know what you think.

Yahoo! Podcasts is a new beta service, that lets consumers find and listen to new audio programs PodTech's John Furrier got an exclusive interview with Yahoo's Chief Product Officer, Geoff Ralston.

PodTech John Furrier:
Yahoo is launching podcast. It's a big site. It's huge for podcasting. iTunes started in the summer. Yahoo now follows suit. How do you see this evolving?

Yahoo's Geoff Ralston:
We've been watching podcasts for a long time. It's the way people want to consume this kind of content out there. Podcasts are where Internet radio meets Web 2.0. At Yahoo we've been really focused to bring in to the experience of consuming whatever kind of content - text, audio, or video - the concept of personalized experiences and community based experiences and that is what podcasting really is. We think this (podcasting) just an example of how people in web 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 are going to get this kind of content. To bring it to whatever device they want to consume it on and wherever they want to consume it and then take it home with them and use it.

PodTech John Furrier:
This is great news for podcasters. What is your message to podcasters? Are you going to be open? Are your reaching out to the community? Explain your approach to podcasters? What is the message that you're sending with this system?

Yahoo's Geoff Ralston:
We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device - however a user of Yahoo podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We're going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we're going to work with as many standards as possible using standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox.

You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast we're going to find you, and if we haven't found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we'll get it into our index within 24 hours.

PodTech John Furrier:
What you're saying is that it's a social filter. You guys are using the social fabric of what Yahoo already has built and letting that social community filtering be part of the system.

Yahoo's Geoff Ralston:
There is nothing so web 2.0 as it being a social experience. The web went from being very static and very impersonal to being much more humanistic and social. To me Web 2.0 is about nothing more than that.

PodTech John Furrier:
How do you see podcasting evolving over the next few years?

Yahoo's Geoff Ralston:
We think that podcasts, audio content, and sorts of different content will find themselves wherever there is content, wherever there are events that occur. There are going to be lots of different ways for people to consume that information as well as - and this is important - to create that information. So we will have a huge growing group of people who are going to create podcasts, videocasts, and any kind of casts you want. And that content will appear "automagically" - by the intelligence of companies like Yahoo - in the right place at the right time.

181" target=new>PodTech has more.

Additional details are available from C/Net, ZD Net, MSNBC, Business Week and Podcasting News.

Meanwhile, Google Reader, is new beta service that aggregates news and updates from selected sites. It lets users subscribe to material from the sites and create a reading list that they can sort and organize.

The IEEE has finally approved a Quality Of Service specification for WiFi, reports Techworld. The IEEE's 802.11e task group, has been working on QOS standards for WiFi for about five years.

The Wi-Fi Alliance adopted a subset of the standard, called WMM (Wi-Fi Multimedia), which has already been adopted by several wireless LAN vendors. The 802.11e specification allows packets to gain priority by defining four traffic classes. By default, they are for voice, video, best-effort and background.

SpectraLink provides wireless QoS by specifying a back-off value of zero for voice packets. That gives voice packets priority over normal data packets. The downside is that if multiple SVP VoIP phones attempt to transmit at the same time, you'll get collisions.

The problem with 802.11e is that it puts the power to request priority in the client, says Ben Guderian, VP at SpectraLink.

Airespace, Cisco Systems and Colubris Networks offer proprietary wireless QoS. They link traffic prioritization to users and groups by assigning priority to either the user's authenticated identity or the 802.11 ESSID (Extended Service Set Identifier). A different priority assignment results in higher performance for prioritized users.

Large scale WiFi networks are not only interested in centralized management, now their interested in Voice over IP. That implies some sort of Quality of Service profile. Meanwhile homes are becoming multi-media hubs, requiring multi-megabit video streams.

VoIP (voice over IP) is expected to be the most common application for QoS, at first. Some hospitals deploy multiband 802.11 a/b/g network infrastructures, dedicating the 5-GHz 802.11a system to data applications and the 2.4-GHz 802.11b/g system for voice.

Wireless VoIP phones include; Pulver's Wisp Phone, Senao's SI-7800H and SI-800H Wi-Fi sip phones, SpectraLink's WiFi phones, Symbol's WiFi phones and ZyXEL VoIP WiFi Phone.

SpectraLink's phones use proprietary technology to maintain quality of service (QoS) for voice traffic, according to Ben Guderian, director of market strategy and industry relations at SpectraLink. SpectraLink's phones work with PBX or IP call servers provided by companies such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, which are increasing looking toward VoIP solutions, Guderian said.

SpectraLink plans to replace SVP with 802.11e when the standard is ratified. QoS is more complex in the enterprise because applications are more varied and the physical scale of WLANs is greater.

Cisco's Wireless IP Phone 7920, interface with 802.11b access points. Factors hindering large volume of VoIP handsets include the lack of standardized QoS and fast roaming.

WMM (Wi-Fi Multimedia) is modeled after the IETF's DiffServ architecture, which provides four data-access categories that can be assigned different priorities.

The home market is likely to grow fast as $150 WiFi phones become available and wireless distribution of multimedia picks up.

Newsweek is running a piece that explores whether or not mail-rental outfit Netflix can survive the broadband era. Since DVD use isn't expected to peak until 2013, the movie studios can't perfect DRM, and DVDs are available before pay-per-view (even if via IPTV on a VDSL2 network) - Netflix probably doesn't have anything to worry about for a little while. Also note: Netflix has been eyeing broadband distribution models of their own.

Javacast is an Enhanced Podcast to Java MIDlet (J2ME) converter for Mobile Phones. It is to be used by Podcasters to convert their Enhanced Podcasts to Java MIDlets.

foafing the music makes use of information available on other LiveJournal, WebJay, and Last.fm to recommend you musical assets. It uses the vocabulary created in the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project to define user preferences.

Clips from movie sections at del.icio.us( mov, mpg, mpeg, wmv and avi) are ranked according to number of blog posts with direct links to them (checked via Technorati).

A resource guide by Steve Outing to help you figure out how to put this industry trend to work for you and your newsroom.

AdWeek: "Still in its early stages, Current plans to rely heavily on viewer-created ads; 25 percent of its editorial content is already submitted by viewers." (via I Want Media)

Transcripts from four talks at Interactive Journalism Summit: Mary Lou Fulton, Jan Schaffer, Clyde Bentley and David Wiseman.

Here is audio from the We Media conference in New York City, courtesy of Paid Content:

- Al Gore's keynote speech

- Opening session with AP CEO Tom Curley, CBS Digital Media CEO Larry Kramer, Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division, Farai Chideya, Founder & Editor, PopandPolitics.com (and at NPR), and Merrill Brown, consultant.

- Panel including Scott Rafer, former CEO of Feedster; Craig Forman, VP & GM, Yahoo; Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, Google; and Andrew Heyward, President, CBS News.

The cable channel has taken passive steps to curb distribution of its content, but a recent flood of attacks against BitTorrent users show a change in its anti-piracy tactics.

Combining two of the most promising wireless technologies available today, Freescale Semiconductor is hosting the industry's first demonstration of high data rate Ultra-Wideband (UWB) silicon operating under existing Bluetooth software stacks. The demonstration, held at WiCon Americas this week, leverages partners Open Interface and Frontline Test Equipment to stream UWB signals using Bluetooth protocols and track the protocols via an analyzer.

rapid response printing tool

The PixelRoller project is a collabortive investigation into a new creative tool between Stuart Wood MA (RCA) Interaction Design and Florian Ortkrass MA (RCA) Design Products. PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces. The content is applied in continuous strokes by the user. PixelRoller can be seen as a handheld “printer”, based around the ergonomics of a paintroller, that lets you create the images by your own hand.

Ever increasing technological boundaries have removed the user from the creativity of the printing process. This separation diminishes the possibility of creative and live input during output.Conventional Printing is usually bound to a certain location, output method and process. Each printing process is very specific for each single application and the technology has become less adaptable and inflexible for the end user. Alternatively manual painting requires certain skills, time and is limited in accuracy. However the ability to print manually has advantages in terms of influencing the output, engaging with the medium and the freedom of not being limited to one substrate. [via neural.it]

The Medium is the Material

Transmission art, much like new media, is deeply impacted by the evolution of technology. Taking airwaves as its source material, this ethereal medium has traveled a historical route that began with morse code at the turn of the past century and runs through text messaging at the start of this one, all the while encompassing a broad range of formal and conceptual strategies. For the exhibition Open Call, Rhizome has teamed up with free103point9, a nonprofit organization who've pioneered the study and practice of transmission art, to create a context for art works that explore transmission along the wireless spectrum. Open Call seeks projects that engage the idea of transmission art via the Internet or GPS systems or mobile phones, or any other wireless technology, and exist as art works online. The organizations have called out to artists in their respective communities to submit works for the exhibition which will take place from January through March 06, and be elaborated in a live, accompanying event. So, whip your nearest frequency into an ephemeral art frenzy, and contribute to the ongoing exploration of the waves that bind us. - Lauren Cornell, Net Art News, Rhizome.org

Roll your own search engine

Make A Baby, by Lucky Dragons, is an ongoing series of experiments into the possibilities of using skin contact between performers as a means of transmitting and controlling data and creating a positive social environment.

Using a knit and applique rug with woven circuits as the touch controller, audience members are invited to participate, building up and breaking down resistive networks by 'passing' signals from skin to skin. Measured changes in these networks are used to play a series of software instruments, allowing for spontaneous bands of touchers to crystallize and disperse all over the place, at once, over and over.

Lucky Dragons - Make a Baby
October 7, 2005 8pm
Machine Project, Los Angeles.

For "$20-35m" on $2m revenue run-rate

Poll shows a third of 14- to 21-year-olds now have their own online content

39 tv channels in a desktop widget.

Stinger: "owners will "soon be able to deploy the device's built-in WiFi, to watch video from home entertainment terminals, anytime, anywhere in the world."

Heh, snarkback against the EB

Classcaster is a course blogging system that provides faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member schools with a new way to interact with students and communities. A Classcaster blog provides authors with tools for posting not only traditional blog articles but also tools for podcasting and sharing any documents and/or files with students and communities.

Yesterday, we showed you a neat Nokia concept for a flexible cellphone. The Phonemag crew shows off a few more concepts from those Finnish brainchildren today.

First up, the Acibo, which looks like an orb with a non-committed face, yet is being touted as a "buddy device." It's a phone that delivers on all "your communication needs," the Acibo includes multimedia, some sort of shadow-based projected keyboard which looks like it belongs in the next Batman movie, a voice recorder and personal organizer. Move over Blackberry, unless you can start emoting, the Acibo looks like it will win hands tied beind its...orb.

Nokia Acibo - Revolutionary Design [Phonemag]

an ultra cool ajaxified online mysql database designing tool

Community classified sites. Includes tagging/folksonomy for user classification

TV service on the go is being touted as the next big thing... but if too many people tune in, carriers' brand-new third-generation networks could be overwhelmed.

Some newspapers in the United States include blog postings about news articles adjacent to the news articles themselves. Here are some tips to get your blog postings seen in this way.

Sloncek, the once embattled eXeem representative, has reinstituted an old BitTorrent staple - now under the name of NewNova.org.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has been presenting audiences with a prediction and a challenge about the free culture movement: Ten Things that Will be Free. Jimmy's list is inspried by David Hilbert's address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, 1900, where he proposed 23 critical unsolved problems in mathematics. This list was enormously influential in shaping mathematical research over the 20th century, and most of the problems have been resolved. Jimmy's list is, like Hilbert's, an outline of what we don't know how to do yet in the world of free culture, and a call to action. It's also, to a certain extent, a prediction of the future - Jimmy makes the point that it's 10 things that will be free in the next ten to twenty five years, not should be free.

In a recent (September 27th) talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where Jimmy is a non-resident fellow, he presented the most recent version of the list, updated since he presented it at the Frankfurt Wikimania conference. The list is a dynamic one - it's being reprioritized as he receives feedback from colleagues and audiences, and currently includes 12 Things that Will be Free:

(Continued at WorldChanging)

The purpose of the site is to support the community of people interested in early video with information about early video and early video art, and current activities connected with that topic.

New Internet companies have recently introduced Web sites that aim to sift through millions of online video clips and instantly splice them together according to the viewer's stated or implied tastes. ...

[Unrelated photo: a port-a-potty-based public address system at the MACBA, Barcelona, 2005.]

A public art project called FOUND SOUND will be featuring works from artists in sound booths ("reconfigured" Port-a-Potties) on sidewalks in public locations throughout Washington, D.C. from Oct 14-Nov 5. Participating artists include Richard Chartier, Joseph Grigely, Alberto Gaitán, Jennie C. Jones, Helmut Kopetzky, Brandon Morse, Robin Rose, and Alex Van Oss.

Actor and part-time New Orleans resident Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, Spinal Tap, HuffPo) is contributing a piece on Hurricane Katrina, and Calvin Trillin has contributed a poem as well.

The press release quotes this from an essay by Nora Halpern at Americans for the Arts:

FOUND SOUND entices the listener to crisscross a city to experience fully this collection of work. As one leaves a destination for another--whether by foot, car, bus, or Metro--the heightened audio awareness encouraged by each piece should continue, like a musical riff, through all the spaces in between.

That's great and all, but in most of the places where these will be, "heightened audio awareness" might not be a good thing. Downtown D.C.'s not known for its street life -- but we have plenty of nice, loud traffic and construction. Maybe they should make a podcast available for walking in between.

Local galleries including Fusebox, Conner Contemporary Art, the Goethe Institute, and DCAC are collaborating. No map seems to be available yet but we'll link when it turns up online.

No word on whether any of the port-a-potties will be performing their originally intended public service as well, but consider it highly unlikely.

Don’t think of stories as text or video or audio. Free yourself of any legacy constraints such as 'This is how [online] newspaper stories have been presented' or 'this is how [online] broadcast reporting has been done.'

Forget about conveying just who, what, when, why, and how and any concept that people can decide for themselves given just those facts. That model of journalism has failed. Think instead of your stories as something to be taught.

Yale University Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Computer Science and Statistics, and Graphic Design Edward Tufte (who The New York Times has called "The Leonardo da Vinci of data") has said the core ideas of good teaching are explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, and credible authority without patronizing authoritarianism. And a good teacher interacts with those who he teaches.

Those are the core ideals for which journalism in the 21st Century must aim.

Google today quietly offered up their RSS reader, which was introduced by Google at the Web 2.0 conference being held in San Francisco. The website gives a tour of the reader, which right now is acting a little sluggish from all the attention.

By Tom Grubisich: Community news sites get a lot of hype, but can they produce quality journalism? A survey, from pineapple salsa to virtual village greens.

By Mark Glaser: Yahoo has always worked closely with media companies. But as Yahoo News rolls out original content, has Big Media's ally become a challenger?

This is good news: TiVo is beginning to test hosted Home Media Engine (HME) applications on the server side. So this would mean that soon all TiVos running the latest software would have some new applications available, and you might not need to run the HME software on a local networked PC. 

A new theory of participatory media is bringing back memories of the dot-com boom -- and the hint of a bonanza for startups with the right pitch for VCs and established corporate giants eager to cash in on the trend. Ryan Singel reports from San Francisco.

The Copyright Office periodically asks the public for examples of copyright-protected material that should be exempt from the DMCA. It's your chance to tell the government to get crackin'. By Holly J. Wagner.

RFID Gazette has posted nice summaries of some RFID projects in Japan.

RFID initiatives in Japan

RFID and retail in Japan

You might remember how the RIAA and XM cracked down on users who were finding ways to record satellite radio programming to PC, XM going so far as to pull & redesign hardware (pulling USB ports) from their catalog. XM ultimately released a "MyFi" player that could record last year (albeit at a low bit-rate), and Sirius is planning to offer its own portable recording device this fall. As you'd expect, this too irritates the RIAA, (see Slyck News, Slashdot, BetaNews) who is expected to start firing its legal cannons shortly.

Cool interface to CNET stories, you have to go to their Beta News front page and click on a story to see it in action

ComVu says their new PocketPC/SmartPhone software allows you to broadcast using your smart-phone. The feed goes to ComVu's server where other users, whether on a computer or on another smart phone, can pick it up after a 10-second delay from the company's Web site.

ComVu's live video broadcasting solution has been optimized to run on Intel XScale with Wireless MMX and SpeedStep technology to enable live Webcasting from the palm of your hand.

"From Bloggers wanting to transmit video onsite from an event, to families wishing to share special moments with distant members, to first-on-the-scene Citizen Reporters transmitting as a story happens, to workers in the field needing to use video to get their message across -- anyone can now have their own portable TV station ready to broadcast at a moment's notice."

ComVu is developing two technologies to make it happen: live "one to many" transmission from a mobile device and a "do-it-yourself" video networking.

Key service features include:

• Instant notification to groups of contacts via SMS, IM or email.
• Inclusion of tags and other video information to help categorize and search for videos.
• Capture geo-position data in video stream to allow viewers to locate transmission point.
• Immediate posting of video to a blog.

tes "one-button" Webcasting with event notification software. It includes automatic video archiving on ComVu media servers with integrated support for major blogging services and provisioning of a personal Webcast page for easy access to videos by viewers.

ComVu is currently available in beta release for any Windows Mobile 5 device, as well as the AXIA A108 PDA phone, ASUS 730W PDA and Windows PocketPC XScale devices with VEO SD camera. Additional compatible models will be coming soon.

Free trial software is available for downloading. Enhanced broadcast packages begin at $10/month or $80/year that allow for approximately 8 hours of broadcasting or playback, and 100MB of storage.

Related DailyWireless articles include; D-Link Camera Plays on Cellphone, GPS Blogging Phones, The Nokia N-90: Journalist's Tool, Podcasting on cellphones, Meetro Location Net, Portable Photostories, Clear Channel Podcasting, Software for Wireless Camera, Wireless Netcams, Mobile Hotspot How To, Wireless Still Photography, Video Blogging, Nextel Does Photos, Video Wardriving, How To Phone Blog, Video Blog TV Channel, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones, MultiMedia Travel, and Event Blogging.

Come join the early pioneers of the Metaverse (3D World Wide Web) at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC): the first major offline gathering of Second Life (SL) users and residents. Through a mixture of demos, conversation and formal presentations, SLCC will explore the state and future of the Second Life platform. Whether you consider yourself an SL resident, casual user, or are interested generally in the fast growing possibilities of virtual worlds, you’ll find the SLCC to be an invaluable learning and networking event.

SLCC will be co-located with the State of Play conference on law and virtual worlds at the New York Law School. Consider attending both events for a full weekend of cutting-edge, high-level dialog around virtual worlds and online games.

Community classified sites. Include tagging/folksonomy for user classification

The report projects that the Xbox 360 will lead console sales with 19.6 million units sold through the end of 2008, with the PlayStation 3 selling 15.5 million units and the Revolution selling 5 million units.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia

This is a must read for anyone developing mobile games or working on next-gen fixed games

P2P multicast streaming media doohicky

"The TMesh Broadcast System is developed as part of the End-host Multicast project at the Unversity of Michigan. The TMesh protocol is designed for efficient peer-to-peer multicast. We have implemented a prototype of the protocol and built a library with the necessary APIs. The TMesh Broadcast System is an audio/video broadcasting tool built using this library. It uses Apple Quicktime and MediaPlayer applications to stream and playback audio/visual content."

Games on mobile phones have come a long way since Snake or endless knock-offs of arcade classics such as Asteroids and Space Invaders, reports the BBC.

"Now many of the big name titles first created for consoles and PCs are turning up in shrunken versions for handsets that an increasingly large section of the population own.

But, says Thor Gunnarson of British mobile game maker Ideaworks 3D, the whole industry is just getting started.

Handsets, he says, are getting powerful enough to cope with what he dubs "console class" gaming, which means they are able to cope with 3D graphics that scroll past at a rate of at least 20 frames a second.

... Data transfer rates on second generation networks are too slow to play real people in real time. And data transfer rates on second generation networks, too slow to play real people in real time, is no longer a limitation with gaming on 3G networks."

FlyakiteOSX is a transformation pack. It will transform the look of an ordinary Windows XP+ system to resemble the look of Mac OS X. The installer simply automates the process of replacing critical system files, setting registry tweaks, and installing extras such as cursors, sounds, visual styles, etc.

A Firefox extension to aid screen-scrapers. What can I do with this?

Solvent lets you:

• Interactively highlight parts of the page you wish to scrape, directly in your browser, and obtain the right XPaths for them
• Inspect the DOM of the captured elements
• Choose from different screen scraping templates based on the type of page you are scraping (individual page, multi page, etc..)
• Edit and execute the scraper code directly in the browser, making the development cycle fast and incremental
• See the scraped results right in Piggy Bank even without installing the scraper first
• and more...

Online podcast mixer. Allows you to record audio, add mp3s, and build a podcast.

Card game about making games.

The band makes $8/disc by self distributing. Label-signed artists get $1/disc.

"Clap - based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia - have already sold nearly 17,000 copies of their self-released debut, all thanks to word-of-mouth. And while major-label artists make only about a buck a record, the Clap guys are making a whopping eight dollars per disc - putting their take so far at more than $130,000. Not too shabby for an album recorded for less than ten grand and distributed by the band itself via countless trips to the post office."

Posted by yatta at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

The future wireless standard for home digital equipment is likely to involve either the WiFi-based IEEE 802.11n or the IEEE Ultra-WideBand standard (UWB), explains Electronics Asia.

The 802.11n standard, built on previous 802.11 (WiFi) standards, adds MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) antennas for increased data throughput and range. Two standards camps are at odds; TgnSync and Wwise with a third camp, MITMOT trying to merge the two proposals together by November for faster, longer range WiFi networks.

The IEEE 802.15.3a standard, meanwhile, was designed to replace Bluetooth for fast, close range (10-30 feet) connections. Inexpensive, low power UWB chips could replace USB and Firewire cables in a few years. Ultra WideBand also has its standards battles with Multiband OFDM (MB-OFDM), which "hops" an OFDM signal from one band to another, versus Direct Sequence UWB (DS-UWB), which skips the 5 Ghz band entirely.

Now, according to Electronics Asia, there is talk of merging MIMO WiFi and UWB into a single approach for both short range connectivity and longer range WiFi networks.

The boundary between 11n and UWB has begun to blur rapidly. As a result of technological refinements to 11n during the competition to become the industry standard, new concepts have been incorporated to provide significant improvements in speed and reduced power consumption. At last 11n technology is approaching the realm of portable equipment application, which until now has been thought to be the domain of UWB.

Whether this is wishful thinking on the part of one of the promoters is not entirely clear. But it's a great article, with lots of illustrated explainations on how these proposals differ.

Related DailyWireless stories include; UWB Overview, MultiBand UWB Chip Gets FCC Approval, Wireless USB 1.0, UWB Range Doubles, UWB Organizations Merging?, Alereon Gets UWB Recognition, UWB RF-ID, Wireless USB Comes Home, Microsoft Joins UWB Battle and UWB in the Chips. Other 802.11n articles include; MIMO Expanded, Finding MIMO, D-Link's MIMO, Netgear's MIMO, Belkin's MIMO and the Linksys MIMO, MIMO Reviews, TGn Leading for 802.11n, Nortel Demos MIMO Cellular, Ext Antennas for Belkin's MIMO, Intel Does MIMO and Airgo's MIMO chips.