unmediated

"Culture, Commerce, and Public Media: A New Forum for Creators" addresses how commercial and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media can make their materials—current productions, and legacy content—more openly available. June 5-6, 2006.

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

Multifunctional Picture viewer and Video control script for Second Life.

An estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

MediaSnackers is a site/weblog/project/call to action for people interested in how young people consume and create media across the globe.

Via del.icio.us/rybesh

Excerpted from Apple Daily via InMediaHK:

What is the most popular movie in Hong Kong?   It is not M:i:3 (which is likely not to be shown in mainland China) and it is not Da Vinci Code (which is severely criticized by the Catholic Church).  No, it is a stealth video clip entitled "巴士阿叔, Bus UncleTube.

The incident occurred on the top deck of a Number 68X Kowloon bus on April 29.  A young man observed that the middle-aged person in front of him was talking too loud on the mobile telephone.  So he tapped the man's shoulder and asked him to keep the volume down.  This led to a vigorous response, including a string of obscenities.  The entire proceedings were recorded by another passenger named John using a mobile camera phone.  The film was uploaded on YouTube and then seen by the whole wide world.  As of May 19, 1.2 million people have watched the video clip! (Update: 1.9 million as of May 26; ETTV cited a 5.9 million figure on May 27, which probably combines all the editions).

Yes, but so what?  

Well, I must say that even I am astonished by the spontaneous media exposures and brand extensions that have occurred so far.

Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO, Business

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Microsoft have unveiled a completely new image file format, called Windows Media Photo (.wmp files), at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which will apparently be of better quality at half the size of a comparable JPEG image.

Strangers and friends are connecting in online communities, as described in this Memorial Day article in the Washington Post:

As the country observes the memory of those who died in its wars, online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life. Material added to mark important days such as birthdays, Mother's Day and Memorial Day, or even notes left by well-wishing strangers help the page evolve, so the memorial itself can take on a kind of second life.

By Robert Niles: The Sunlight Foundation hopes to use reader-driven grassroots reporting to help uncover news from the U.S. federal government.

the game has a life of its own, with a retail GBA release [via]

Playing a game within a game, like an electronic version of a Matreshka.

Originally from Waxy.org Links, ReBlogged by eteam on May 29, 2006 at 07:51 PM

a graphical visualization map of the websites people are visiting, updated every second with where people are going & coming from. as sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm & grow larger. conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center & grow smaller. website traffic is symbolized with thin lines: each line symbolizes a move from one site to the other.
see also google browser.
[swarmthe.com]

It's called "Sway's Hip Hop Owner's Manual," an upcoming series that's produced exclusively for mobile devices. The show's host, Sway Calloway, is shot tight for the small screen. During an interview, Calloway and his guest are asked to "stand a little bit, um, unnaturally close to each other." One of the show's producers, Sean Lee, explains that it becomes personal in a way TV never does. "He's saying: 'Hey, it's me, on your phone. I'm talking to you.' "

TV Week: Video use on cell phones still 'surprisingly low'

TechCrunch profiles CNET's AllYouCanUpload.com, a new site that allows users to upload photos -- free, without registration, without limits -- for posting anywhere on the web. "We are seeing more and more new web applications that keep piling on new features to the point where it’s nearly impossible to understand what they are doing," writes Michael Arrington. "When I see something like this -- a service that strives to do one thing efficiently and without friction, it makes my heart warm. Simple does not equal boring. Simple can be disruptive. I want more services like AllYouCanUpload." There's a powerful lesson here for traditional media who try to do everything and force it all on the home page.

Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions

Keynote: The Naked Interface - Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions by Luke Williams: Friday, July 21, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm.; Webvisions 2006, Explore the Future of the WebJuly 20 to 21, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

Throughout the electronic age, people have become accustomed to interacting with digital media indirectly, mediated through screens and peripheral devices. But now, as digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, the "feeling" of everyday things is also increasingly becoming embedded in digital technology.

In many senses, physical objects are becoming more important. In an immediate way, they can help us define new systems of relationships with digital information. This presentation will examine how perceptions and gestures formed through our experiences with physical products can effectively bring liberty to the relationship between brain, body and digital media interface.

What the audience will learn: :: How patterns and archetypes from product design now frame new ways for people to orientate themselves around information. :: The principle of stimulating one sense through another to create multi-sensory interactions. :: New developments at the collision point between "real world" objects and "digital interfaces" – the touch screen.

According to the Miniwatts Marketing Group's Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (last updated March 31, 2006), worldwide Internet penetration is only 15.7%! So much for the World Wide Web... this is indeed sobering stuff for those of us obsessed with 'web 2.0' technology. Here's the main table of stats:

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
World Regions	Population % of World	% Population (Penetra- tion)	Usage % of World	Usage Growth 2000-2005
Africa	14.1 %	2.6 %	2.3 %	423.9 %
Asia	56.4 %	9.9 %	35.6 %	218.7 %
Europe	12.4 %	36.1 %	28.5 %	177.5 %
Middle East	2.9 %	9.6 %	1.8 %	454.2 %
North America	5.1 %	68.6 %	22.2 %	110.3 %
Latin America / Caribbean	8.5 %	14.4 %	7.8 %	342.5 %
Oceania / Australia	0.5 %	52.6 %	1.7 %	134.6 %
WORLD TOTAL	100.0 %	15.7 %	100.0 %	183.4 %

Source: World Internet Usage Statistics and Population Stats (nb: removed two columns to make it fit)

In North America, where most Web innovations still come from, the penetration figure is 68.6%. However in Africa it's just 2.6%, Asia 9.9% and the Middle East 9.6%. Together Africa, Asia and Middle East make up 73.4% of the world's population. So that basically means 3/4 of the world has extremely low Internet penetration. The one positive note is that usage growth rates are encouraging (see column on the right). 

Interesting to note that China, seen by most analysts as a big growth market for Web technologies, has an Internet penetration of only 8.5%. Considering that great parts of China are rural, this isn't overly surprising. Also mobile technologies have a much bigger impact in China, than the PC. 

Still, these figures put things into perspective. I feel very lucky to live in a country (New Zealand) that has 76.3% penetration - even if the broadband is slow and expensive!

p.s. amazing how in these circumstances Pete Cashmore has managed to get 5 billion RSS subscribers ;-)

Have Money Will Vlog About

I like the concept.. A bit like turning video blogging into a sustainable "public medium". Maybe.

Would like it even better if the creative output of this was Creative Commons licensed, perhaps Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License would be appropriate.

From the site:
Have Money Will Vlog? What’s the deal?
Many good projects need only action to be successful. With the distribution of the internet, a person with a good video project can be seen by thousands of people. But some ideas need money.
Money for equipment.
Money for travel.
Money for time.
Traditional artists can apply for grants to make their work. Have Money Will Vlog supports videobloggers trying to do the amazing. The power of the community can fund projects on a regular basis. You easily spend $10 or more everytime you go out to see a movie…so consider donating $10 a month to a videoblog project. If we have 100 people that give $10 a month, that’s $1000. Let’s energize creators.

Google Cleans Ajax for Java
Very interesting.. Will have to give it a shot..
From the article:
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) released this week is a framework that converts a standard Java application into Ajax that will work in all browsers.

FMJ - Freedom for Media in Java
From the site:
FMJ is an open-source project with the goal of providing a replacement/alternative to Java Media Framework (JMF).

JMF is still dead in the water, despite some folks from Sun making a little bit of noise a couple of months back. Let's hope this effort keeps it going.

qp: Command Line QuickTime Player

QTCoffee

qt_tools

The fact that tactical media artist Adam Hyde is a traveller manifests itself in his work in many ways. For example, he recently established a mobile low-res artist’s residency in a campervan in New Zealand; the mobicast system he developed in collaboration with Luka Prinic was first used on the Tran-Siberian Express; and his latest production comes in a suitcase. The Streaming Suitcase is a portable box of tricks for Hyde’s streaming workshops on free and open source software. The project’s website makes these tools available to the greater public, along with blueprints creating a ’secondary economy’ for information. Visitors will find manuals offering plain-language instructions for streaming audio and video over the internet, as well as a glossary of terms and a handy list of links. The suitcase can help one learn the basics of Linux and PureData, and even build their own mini FM transmitter. In the true spirit of open source, Hyde invites viewers to ‘have a browse and take what you want.’ - Helen Varley Jamieson

http://www.streamingsuitcase.com

Originally from Rhizome.org Net Art News at May 29, 2006, 03:00, published by Marisa S. Olson

Type commentary
Genre work, archive
Keywords open source

a New York-based information bureau dedicated to world wide distribution of information for contemporary visual arts institutions via the Internet.

A sharing platform for social groups

Here's our current theatrical release schedule for The War Tapes. When we know more, we'll tell you, but save the date -- make sure you're there on opening night:

6/2 – NYC (Sunshine)

6/30 - WASH DC (E Street)

6/30 – BOSTON (Kendall Sq)

6/30 – SAN FRANCISCO (Castro)

"Cactuses" is a feature-length movie made entirely by a group of Central Valley youth, with ages ranging from 14 to 21, and funded exclusively by a youth-targeted non-profit organization.

You easily spend $10 or more everytime you go out to see a movie…so consider donating $10 a month to a videoblog project.

Open source documentary of a trip across America, CC-licensed, plans to Annodex all the media.

Sites that link up users in affinity groups are wildly popular. Even better, they seem to have figured out how to make money

Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, telephones, billboards, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and e-mail all are vehicles for conveying information within a medium or media. These vehicles aren't the media or a medium in which they operate.

Here's an overdue product -- a USB WiFi client with an antenna connector. WIFI-Link's USB adapter (WL-USB-RSMAP) has a female reverse polarity (RP) SMA connector so you can choose from a huge variety of WiFi antennas (in addition to the one that comes with it).

The MSRP of $49.50 is reasonable. In quantities of 100, it's only $29/each. Coupled with a 16db Vagi ($35, left) it may be just the ticket for residential penetration of WiFi city clouds. It's compatible with Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP and offers up to 256-bit WEP and WPA2 protection.

USB clients are a snap to install. USB cords are cheap and available at any store. USB clients also eliminate expensive, easily broken PC card connectors, RF cable losses and power cords.

The key to "city cloud" residential penetration is a strong signal with a low ($30-$60) CPE price. This may be the proverbial "it".

As was expected, four major studios and three television networks have sued Cablevision for their plan to eliminate the residential DVR, instead allowing users to store and control content from the Cablevision network side (see previous report). An MPAA spokesperson tells Reuters Cablevision "can't establish a for-profit, on-demand service without authorization from copyright owners whose content is used on that service."

"This lawsuit is without merit, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Cablevision's remote-storage DVR and ignores the enormous benefit and well-established right of viewers to time-shift television programming," said Cablevision in a statement. "We hope and expect the court will allow our customer-friendly technological approach to move forward."

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and an ongoing presence in developing its open source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), recently told the Pd mailing list he had compiled Pd for Intel Macs. You can download the Intel-native version on his Website:

Software by Miller Puckette

(Curiously, he calls them “iMacs”, but unless he’s modified the UI to look nice on white computers, I think that means Intel Macs!) This is the first step on what should soon bring the full-fledged Pd platform to Intel Macs. In the meantime, I would honestly suggest booting into one of the excellent Intel Linux distributions on this machine, since Pd runs very well on Linux. But it’s good news, nonetheless.

I keep hearing wonderful things about Pd, even from Max/MSP users who use it as to complement Max on various projects. We’ve got a good thread going on the CDM forums about how to learn Pd, alongside a previous thread on open source sound tools, and I just looked through various Pd tutorials on a site called Streaming Suitcase. If you’ve ever got Pd patches you’d like to share, let us know.

learning, Mac, Mactel, open source, Pd, software

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

Speaking this week at the CableLabs Financial Analyst Conference in New York, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said the company's primary thrust in 2006 has been to employ switched digital video (SDV). The technology frees up bandwidth on cable systems by delivering fewer channels to the cable-box, and keeping the rest waiting at the edge router.

A trial of the technology in Austin resulted in bandwidth savings greater than fifty percent, according to Time Warner execs. Out of the 1,000 homes in that trial, 45 out of 170 channels were being simultaneously viewed. The remaining un-used channels still gobbled up network bandwidth while sitting un-viewed.

Time Warner, the most aggressive MSO on this front, says they've deployed this technology in three markets, with four to six planned next year. When asked about the cost of such an initiative, Britt states the MSO rolled out switched digital, digital simulcast and "Start Over" technology in one recent market for about $16 per home.

Here's a rather special Media Recorder, not really the kind that you will see in everybody's home. The Samsung SVR-1650 is a media recorder and more specifically a standalone DVR for security purposes, it's capable of receiving data from 16 video sources, then encode all that into Mpeg4 at 480fps in 720x480 and store it onto its 250GB HDD (2TB optional) and burn it onto DVD... Cooool!

Want a truly powerful device for interfacing with motors, sensors, lights, and more? CDM’s assistant editor and Web ninja Jaymis Loveday and I are both excited about the upcoming MAKE Controller Kit, built by MakingThings (of Teleo fame). MAKE has started taking preorders, and shipping should start in a few weeks. You might want to preorder early; this run could sell out given the rapid growth of MAKE Magazine. (If you’re not reading and you’re into DIY, run and get a subscription.)

MAKE Controller Kit

Why is it cool?

It’s 32-bit and much faster than even more-expensive competitors, it’s surprisingly cheap for its capabilities ($150), it’s open source, you can count on lots of documentation and examples from MAKE (well, certainly from me, if you bug me enough), and software for interfacing with Processing, Flash, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd, and C/C++ is all included. That makes it both an incredible bargain and unusually versatile. And it’s great to see MakingThings, which had previously made proprietary hardware, go open source and publish their firmware, even if you never touch it.

The only real problem I can see with the Controller Kit is that it’s overkill for some jobs, larger because of its expanded I/O, and not likely the kind of thing you’d build yourself. There will still be a place for simple USB and MIDI sensor boards (hence we’re covering those today).

The current issue of Make Magazine has a great story on how the board came to be, the process of designing it, and the design goals.

DIY, Electronics, hardware, homebrew, physical computing, Sensors

Broadband video consumption surged 18 percent in the six months between October 2005 and March 2006, according to comScore's new Video Metrix service. In March, U.S. Internet users streamed 3.7 billion pieces of video content watching an average of...

Continue.

Clayton Christensen, five years ago:

One of the litmus tests is that, in almost every case, a disruptive technology enables a larger population of less skilled people to do things that historically only an expert could do. And to do it in a more convenient setting.

Terry Heaton, today:

This is precisely the issue with the triumph of personal technology over mass technology, and it offers amazing opportunities for local media companies. If you're a local station, for example, pick a local information niche and go after it as if you weren't a TV station (or radio station or newspaper). What would you do and what would you build that would meet that need effectively and efficiently? I promise you it won't be an on-demand piece of content.

Because here's the deal. The tools available to everyday people that are turning the media world on its head are also available to professional organizations. You don't have to approach everything with a $100,000 solution when $10,000 will do just fine. If aggregation is where its at (and I believe that it is), then build aggregators. Let other people be the content creators and move yourself to the edge. Not only is it fun there, but that's where the profitability is going to be downstream.

Lots more at that last link. Dig it.

Appropriate technology is an approach to design for development which emphasizes, in a nutshell, better design for essential low-cost technologies which local communities can build and repair themselves. The Appropriate Technology Wiki Porject is a new effort to both update the classic Appropriate Technology Sourcebook and to facilitate open source design.

It's a really cool site, with already including ideas for Agricultural Tools; Aquaculture; Beekeeping; BioGas; Crop Drying, Preservation, and Storage; Improved Cookstoves and Charcoal Production; Nonformal Education and Training; Small Enterprises and Cooperatives; Solar Energy; and Water Supply and Sanitation as well as a bunch of other interesting information.

(via Emeka)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 07:53 AM)

Powered by three LEDS rather than the traditional lamp, Mitisubishi's PK10, they claim, is the world's smallest projector. The Japanese electronics giant showed just what the PK10 PocketProjector can do when it was installed in a concept car of theirs. Whilst mounted, the projector was used to display various data on a transparent screen on the dashboard.

The PK10 PocketProjector features your everyday RCA inputs on the back, allowing users to connect any number of electronic devices to the projector for some wholesome projector fun.

Mitubishi hails the projector's low cost as a major coup, yet doesn't bother to release price or availability information, if it's coming out for consumers at all.

Mitsubishi PK10 PocketProjector - Worlds Smallest Projector Tried Out In A Mitsubishi Concept CT Care [Mobile Whack via Ubergizmo]

 
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Yesterday marked the beginning of Institute for the Futures annual Tech Horizon conference. I have really been looking forward to this event since I got to meet so many visionary people at the last IFTF event.

Larry Smarr the Director of California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology was giving the first keynote tonight about telepresence and its social implications. And by telepresence he is talking about videoconferencing systems where the technology has intuitive interactions and the present difference between interactions face-to-face and a videoconferencing interaction will not be sensed – also called transparent telepresence.

He had some really interesting perspectives on processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth which will surpass human capabilities within the next 10-15 years and enable real time human level telepresence.

To give an example of his views of technology surpassing human capabilities is the eye-to-brain communication which is being done at about 1 gigabit/sec, a bandwidth speed introduced to the mass market some years ago but has yet to reach Internet Service Providers portfolio.

A possible social change with real time human perception level telepresence technology would be that humans have less real contact and would travel less. A scary forecast which I could see happen from a corporate point of view or the gaming room of teenagers chatting with friends, though studies has also concluded that the usage of current telepresence systems of remote interaction only encourages the drive to meet the people at the other end in real life.

If that study will reach the same conclusion when future telepresence systems gets similar abilities of real life human presence will be up for debate.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 24, 2006 at 03:11 PM

Bruce Sterling, Wired: "Bloggers are sometimes pigeon-holed as pundits or journalists. In the Web 2.0 economy, they can be kingmakers, channeling crowds of willing participants wherever- they like."

If you're eager to converse without Uncle Sam listening in, PGP creator Philip Zimmermann has released a new free beta of software that will encrypt VoIP calls. Dubbed Zfone, the software uses Diffie-Hellman to generate a per-session key for VoIP calls using the new ZRTP protocol Zimmermann proclaims is better than alternatives.

"better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client."

The software is free, and available for Mac OS-X, Linux, and Windows XP. Of course it won't work with Skype and other popular solutions, so you'll have to run a softphone like X-Lite, Gizmo, or SJphone as per the FAQ.

Symella, a Gnutella client for Symbian Smartphones
Listening to a presentation about this now. Pretty interesting but will have to wait to get back to NYC before I can try it (data isn't working in Europe for me).
From the site:
Symella is a Gnutella client for Symbian smartphones. Gnutella is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing network system with many clients (and servers) available on various desktop operating systems (for desktop Gnutella clients check out this site).
It is used for exchanging files, especially music, MP3 files. Because mobile phones have limited bandwidth and small memory cards, this client focuses only for downloading, not sharing. It is available on Series 60 and Series 80.

A new lifestyle trend is springing up in South Korea, one of the world's most advanced digital hotbeds more and more folks are retreating to their homes instead of socializing with others. The Korea Times reports.

Experts call the phenomenon "digital cocooning'' because such a fad is enabled and accelerated by the digital revolution, which is occurring here in a full-fledged manner.

et and wireless technology is generating two seemingly conflicting tendencies - some are enjoying a nomadic outdoor life thanks to wireless gadgets while others stay nested up at home with them,'' said Park Jung-hyun, a senior consultant at LG Economic Research Institute.

"The former can be called digital nomads, the latter digital cocoons, or ones who retreat into the seclusion of their homes for privacy or escape,'' Park added.

"If digital cocooning represents future trends, it is understandable that such digital alienation mushrooms in technologically-advanced Korea faster than other countries,'' he said.

... Samsung Head: Most Famous Digital Cocoon? Korea's richest businessman, Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web was knighted in the UK for his invention. The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, Tim Berners-Lee said. Sir Tim was speaking at the start of the WWW2006 conference on the future of the web at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh.

Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

read more on BBC News
www2006 Social Wiki

Via Stephen Downes here is Jem Stone's summary of the BBC blogging policy for employees. This clear, cogent and reasonable document was written collaboratively, using a wiki.

"In the discussion that ensued, it was interesting to note that the ideas danced around the concepts of design--service design, product design, the relationship between the two, notions of ubiquitous computing, etc--but never actually mentioned design, and design as a process of taking technology and applying it in a targeted way. This identifies, at least for me, that there's a conceptual gap in the terminology."

A couple of weeks ago, the Experimental Digital Arts (EDA) of UCLA hosted Girls ‘N’ Games conference. Panelists ranging from anthropologist Mimi Ito to Brenda Laurel from the gaming company Purple Moon gathered to discuss everything from the perils of playing up stereotypes in “girl game design” to the differences in girl gaming in Asia, North American and Europe. Gamasutra gives a good overview of the discussion, while over at Joystiq, Jennie Lees offers an interesting counterpoint. She notes that much of this discussion was covered at the Women’s Game conference in 2005, and wonders if the debate has become stagnant. A fascinating discussion follows Lees’ post with commentary from many gamers, both male and female.

Via: Gamasutra and Joystiq

http://www.popgadget.net/2006/05/not_just_for_bo.php">Originally from Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 23, 2006 at 12:25 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog at May 23, 2006, 13:25, published by Marisa S. Olson

Advertising Age reports:

Google Adds Video Capability to AdSense

So sites like PJNet.org, which could sign up for AdSense, would not only get instant text ads playing off the website content, but also video ads.

Gokul Rajaram, product management director for AdSense, says:

"We expect it to be popular with movie studios who want to show trailers, automakers who want to show demonstrations of the vehicle or consumer package-goods companies," he said, adding that he envisions the offering will be popular with both large and small advertisers. Imagine, he said, the owner of a small beachfront vacation home in Maui showcasing the home through video ads in a specific travel blog on the Google ad network.

The blip.tv guys are some of the most clued in video technology guys around. Sure, blip.tv is no youTube, but thank god for that. They have a much brighter future. They did it again today, and launched a “very unofficial” Windows Movie Maker plugin.

It worked perfectly for me, here’s the movie.

Super easy!

Windows Movie Maker comes pre-installed on every Windows XP computer (it’s in the accessories folder in your programs), and for simple movies it’s actually quite nice. The plugin is a download and it installs in about 12 seconds (yes, I timed it). I don’t know how they did it, but the site mentions “Blip.tv support in Windows Movie Maker is not endorsed in any way by Microsoft”.

This will make me from a lazyvlogger (who doesn’t post often) perhaps into an active vlogger. It’s really cool. Add blip’s cross-post to your blog functionality, and you got a 1-click winner.

Here’s a screenshot:

Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network

Introduction: Delanda, Deleuze and Indymedia: In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda tries to explain Gilles Deleuze's ontology in straightforward language “for an audience of scientists and analytical philosophers of science” (Delanda, 7). He tries to untangle the language of Deleuze, a writer who allowed for much play in his language, jumping between various concepts and frequently renaming those concepts. Still, in his writing, Gilles Deleuze developed a rich ontological framework with which one can view the universe. This ontology is based on a rigorous mathematical approach which Delanda explains in great depth.

In this paper I will explain a few components of Deleuze's worldview, as explained by Delanda, using the example of Indymedia, the global Independent Media Center movement. The global Indymedia site, describes Indymedia as “a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth.” (Independent Media Center, About Indymedia.)

Within the network itself, each collective organizes itself autonomously, without a top-down leadership, while still acting within a framework created by the Global Indymedia Points of Unity. Throughout the paper I will refer to various texts written by different local collectives. My intention is not to create a complete, thorough representation of the network, which is global and very diverse, but to use a few samples which relate strongly to ideas expressed in Deleuze's ontology.

While I realize that Deleuze's ontology serves perfectly well to explain far more simple entities, such as a chair, it is my hope that this analysis will reveal some interesting dynamics because of the affinity between Delanda's motivations and those of the Indymedia network. Delanda states that one of the conclusions of his book is that “the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea of a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes... the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth.” The Indymedia Network works to challenge the claim to objectivity, or truth, of corporate media outlets by providing a space where people can tell their own stories and comment on other's stories, in an ongoing process, in order to help create social change. The processes that create this space will be further illuminated throughout this paper.

Multiplicities not Things

Delanda explains Deleuze's how realist ontology replaces the concept of essences with “dynamical processes” and the “multiplicity”. (Delanda, 5) Where many realist traditions are based on the transcendental concept of essence, describing for example the ideological category of “a chair”, Deleuze replaces that simplistic idea with the multiplicity, “a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels.” Delanda goes on to describe the relation of this concept to group theory and its difference from categories, which define individuals in a population a aberrations from the abstract instead of processes, which are defined by the set of individuals they describe.

The global Indymedia network can be seen as a result of a number of social, technological and economic processes itself: ubiquitous cheap internet access, a tradition of media activism including newspaper propagandists and pirate radio dj's, corporate globalization. At the same time, the Indymedia network is embodied by a number of processes.

Indymedia defines itself as a non-hierarchical network, not as a federation, coalition or collective. Networks are defined by communication among a disparate set of nodes. As a network, Indymedia can itself be seen as a population of collectives, or as a multiplicity described by the characteristics of the collectives in the network. The Global Indymedia Points of Unity, agreed to by all collectives in the network, state: “The Independent Media Center Network (IMCN) is based upon principles of equality, decentralization and local autonomy. The IMCN is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process, but from the self-organization of autonomous collectives that recognize the importance in developing a union of networks.” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity) As such, there is a wide degree of play across a number of variables such as number of participants, focus on various mediums, degree of cooperation with local communities, degree of transparency of process, openness to differing political viewpoints, amount of finances and more. Systems with many degrees of freedom can be seen as complex systems or dynamical processes. In addition, although there is an official collective that approves entry into the Indymedia network, over time some collectives fade away while others are closely integrated with projects outside of the network, making the strict definition of the network even harder.

Within the network, different collectives can also be seen as multiplicities, some more so than others. In particular, Portland Indymedia defines itself as “not a membership organization; it is a tactic, a concept, and a movement that can be effectively utilized in many different ways.” While some other Indymedia centers do have official membership, many do not and are based on loose affinities and degrees of individual participation. Unlike traditional unions or other forms of political organization with rosters of dues paying members, Indymedia is defined by a process of communication, affinity and participation. Delanda sums up Deleuze's view of things as processes saying “the alternative offered by Deleuze is to avoid taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals”. Further blurring the definition of membership in Indymedia is its Open Publishing policy where anyone can post to Indymedia websites, many people do and consider themselves part of Indymedia. As many Indymedia sites say “you ARE Indymedia.” (San Diego Indymedia)

Asking The Right Questions

Open Publishing was a founding concept of Indymedia in 1999, before blogs and myspace were commonplace. Open Publishing has been defined by people within the Indymedia network as “mean[ing] that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available.” (Arnison) The actual implementations of this vary widely and opinions on how open Open Publishing should be very widely even within local collectives. Delanda presents Deleuze's “problematic approach”, saying that “a solution always has the truth it deserves according to how well specified the corresponding problem” and goes on to say that “problems can replace fundamental law statements.” (Delanda 163) While Delanda's approach contains a high degree of rigor and describes specific mathematical models resulting in specific physical entities and populations, one can still see a high degree of correlation in Indymedia's approach of asking questions instead of promoting a party line. Unlike organizations that choose a linguistic statement of truth and promote that statement, Indymedia seeks to create a space for open publishing, diffusion of a variety of varying ideas and debate. The network does engage in editorial work on their sites, based on the Points of Unity which reject hate speech, but within that framework, they seek to ask questions, not provide answers.

The problematic approach is further exemplified by Indymedia's non-hierarchical structure. Since the Indymedia network “is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity), there is no single set of statements that define the truth of what Indymedia is. There are principles that collectives in the network have agreed to, but those principles are subject to local interpretation and to change at any time by a network wide consensus. Indymedia is defined by a set of problems it is trying to address simply stated as corporate controlled media, not by the theories of any individual or the policies of any bureaucracy. As Richard Day states in Gramsci is Dead, there is “a shift away from hegemonically-oriented 'movements', and towards non-branded strategies and tactics such as Independent Media Center”. (Day 9) The Indymedia network is an example of a tactic for creating change which does not strive to promote a simple set of truths but a set of questions, an invitation.

Time and Communication in Delanda

Moving onto Deleuze's conception of time, Delanda delves into communication theory. While multiplicities can define populations, they still must have invariant properties within those populations that bind them, and “whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator, or group of operators, capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings and a variety of other transformations on that entity.. The quasi-cause is, indeed, this operator and it is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them.”

The quasi-cause affects multiplicities and links them together. To explain the quasi-causal operator, Deleuze and Delanda use the example of an information channel. (Delanda 84) If one imagines the individual Indymedia collectives as multiplicities, then the information channel between them, the broader network, can be seen as this kind of operator linking them together. When Deleuze says “once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something passes the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning,” (Delanda 150) one can see a clear parallel to the global information sharing within the network where the stories of burning tires from the streets of Argentina or of mass border crossings in Morocco are passed from country to country, city to city, through Indymedia.

Attractors and the Virtual

Delanda's book, in Describing Deleuze's ontology, is largely about the virtual and its effect on the actual world. Deleuze says “it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop in two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem”. One critical example of a virtual entity is an attractor. “Attractors... may be defined as special subsets of state space, that is, as limit states” (Delanda 80) Later, in his definition of multiplicities, Delanda states that the attractors are “never actualized”. (Delanda 30) For example, the policy of having Open Publishing and the Global Indymedia Principles of Unity can be seen as being two attractors, or as being the virtual corresponding to the actual Indymedia network. While they are stated goals, varying collectives follow them to varying degrees, representing different states in the system at varying distances from the stated goal or the attractor. Deleuze states that “The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual... Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object”. The attractors that influence the trajectories of multiplicities are no less real because they are not actualized. They are observable.

Conclusion

Any attempt at a mathematically rigorous description of a thing so large, complex and nebulous as a social movement is bound to fail, or at best be inexact. This difficulty is compounded by a the fluidity of a network such as Indymedia. This paper is an attempt to describe the global Indymedia network as an entity within a Deleuzian ontology, while showing affinity between Deleuze's approach and that of Indymedia. Manuel Delanda's book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is an attempt to construct a clear picture of Deleuze's ontology and to provide a detailed alternative to Deleuze's explanation of the mathematical foundations of dynamical processes. (Delanda 5) In bringing Delanda's text, which attempts to described specific physical processes, together with the study of social movements and media culture, there is a bit of inexactness. Nevertheless, as Delanda states, “we philosophers must invent devices to allow us to become 'the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator'”, and in that tradition this paper is an attempt to explain some of the connections I saw while reading Delanda. As the Zapatistas said in the Second Declaration of La Realidad “We are the network, all of us who resist.” (Graeber)

Works Cited

Arnison, Matthew. "Open publishing is the same as free software" March 2001. May 1, 2006. http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html.

Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead. London: Pluto Press, 2005.

Delanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.

Graeber, David. "The New Anarchists". The New Left Review. Jan-Feb 2002. May 1, 2006. http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml.

Independent Media Center. "About Indymeda". Independent Media Center. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

Independent Media Center. "Global Indymedia Principles of Unity". Indymedia Documentation Project. May 2006. May 1, 2006. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity

Independent Media Center. "Indymedia FAQ". Indymedia Documentation Project. Jan 2005. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

San Diego Indymedia. "About Us". San Diego Indymedia. Feb 2005. May 1, 2006. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/static/aboutus.shtml

[via nettime]

Summer of MySpace

Call for Participation: The Summer of MySpace - an online exhibition; Curated by Patrick Lichty - The Curator of MySpace; myspace[at]voyd.com; Friend Request Dates - 5/21/06 - 8/31/06.

MySpace is a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people have poured their lives into this online community, making it the most successful to date, surpassing Friendster, Xuqa, and Facebook. Millions of hours of creative time by its users, aspiring bands, models, and magazines have been placed into this online agora. But is MySpace a creative space? "Summer of MySpace" asks a number of questions about this burgeoning hang-out haven:

Has MySpace become a new art medium or New Media/Net artform, or can it be used as one? Can the selection of 'friends' and their spaces be called a form of curation? In making profiles, do we make ourselves into art objects? What does it mean to ask to be a 'friend'? Is a form of curation?

Is MySpace merely a space for the colonization of youth culture by corporations and consumer culture? Is MySpace's success representative of a truly new form of community? What other questions about relationships, society, art, and culture does MySpace present? Is MySpace limited by the way it's made, or can we subvert the profile for our own desires?

"Summer of MySpace" fires a probe into this unknown territory, asking all these questions, and setting up a stage for the Internet Summer of Love of the 00's.

Come, be my friend. Let me show you as a shiny new piece of art. Let us curate and be curated, befriend and be befriended in this brave new land of joy and irony.

Let's see what happens. Get on the magic bus.

Submission Procedure:

All you need to do is to set up a profile, make it into an 'artwork', make yourself into an 'artwork', make a place for your 'artwork', and ask me to be your friend. That's what curation is all about, isn't it? The rest is up to us!

Peace, all!
-Patrick Lichty
(The Curator of MySpace)

Keeping Distributed Groups Connected

Monkey Business is a system that attempts to keep distributed group members more connected and aware of each other's activities; the system aims to facilitate informal and spontaneous communication, while minimizing interruption at inopportune times. The system consists of a network of animatronic agents, one of which will reside in the office of each member of a distributed group. We have chosen the embodiment of a monkey for the form of these agents; hence Monkey Business as the title of this project.

The agent uses a combination of microphones and sensors to recognize the activity in the office that it occupies. If there is a change in the state of the office activity, the agent broadcasts the information out to the network of other agents. The other agents, through subtle gestures, movements, and sounds, indicate the changes of state of the broadcasting office. Thus all members of the group, through their respective agents, are made aware of each other's activities in an ambient manner. more...

Also see Monkey Business: Creating social awareness among distributed group members, using a network of animatronic agents by Rachel Kern and Toward Lighthearted Mobile Non-verbal Expression by Rachel Kern, Chris Schmandt, and Paulina Modlitba. [via Jim Downing on Smart Mobs]

Just finished serving on a panel about podcasting and video blogging. At heart is the question: is there a business in this space? Yes, no, and maybe. Sorry, but that's the answer. Truth is it can be part of a business right now, but only as part of an overall delivery strategy. Podcasting, especially in news, only works in a very narrow segment of your audience and content. It's the reason why you need to think about original non-news content. In case anyone doubted how easy it is to podcast, I made one in front of the audience - complete with pompous, overblown, old-school broadcast news music. Fun.

went back to my 01/04 post -- http://www.saturation.org/saturationblog/archives/001460.html -- in end, it's always abt execution, not ideas. What's notable is not what U-M has dreamed up, but the way she is making it happen.

The main goal of the workshop is to develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area. Furthermore we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment. We will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned with design, development, and implementation of new applications and services using personal mobile devices as user interfaces.

Anti-DRM group from the Free Software Foundation

A movie project in which different people around the globe makes a movie together. The story is developed along the way, and while the actors and setting will change every 30-45 seconds, the story of the movie continues like nothing had changed.

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. I consider this to be among the most important I've written, because it raises issues relative to the current on-demand frenzy that many broadcasters see as a way out of the untenable position of shrinking audiences. Since I essentially coined the phrase "unbundled media," I'm clearly not "against" on-demand as a strategy. However, I think it's extremely dangerous to bet the ranch on it alone. Moreover, I think the greater downstream opportunities are in aggregating other people's content, and this essay offers arguments as to why.

The On-Demand Trap

“So everyone in our tech bubble thinks open data is a good idea but hardly anyone is doing it.” This and other very spot-on observations about the issues surrounding open APIs and the data they provide from Paul Hammond’s excellent presentation last week at XTech as very nicely summarized here by Suw Charman. Paul’s slides are here and his blog here.

In one slide he took ProgrammableWeb data and did a useful summary by API provider showing that a quarter of the 200+ APIs come from 7 providers:

Also noted: “There are millions of RSS feeds, but these highlight the problems even more. You can now get RSS feeds for almost anything you want, but try getting in depth sports statistics, or updated stock market data, or flight times. You can’t get it. RSS is intended to be read in an aggregator, and most of it can’t be reused or republished. So you can get any data you want from the net, so long as it’s the last 10 items on an RSS feed, and you don’t what to do anything with it.”

He then outlines a series of non-technical issues that are the real obstacles to API growth:

• Most companies don’t know what an API is
• They make money from data, so ask “Why give it away?”
• If you give it away, perceived value decreases
• It’s risky, including losing money already coming-in

On top of that, many companies couldn’t open up if they wanted to

• No rights for the data they use
• Exclusivity issues with partners and providers

In the end, it’s a perceived “nice to have”. Paul’s recommendations include:

• Don’t send an email demanding an API. That just makes you sound like a moron
• Be aware of the problems, including the fact that most are non-technical
• Have patience. Change takes time

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair and Jeff working at the absolute bleeding edge of current strategic thinking (pun intended).

Here’s a point from Umair:

Fox’s acquisition thesis is a bit more complicated - but predicated on a much deeper understanding of the new media value chain. Fox invests in domains which are hypersocial (discontinuous shifts in social connectivity) or hypercultural (discontinuous shifts in cultural specificity): sports, karaoke, music.

Further, Fox invests at the edge of the new value chain: at the interface with consumers.

Here’s a counterpoint from Jeff:

Now I’m not denying the incredible power of MySpace. But I am wondering whether it is really fully at the edge — yet. In fact, I questioned here whether there is a disadvantage in trying to own a community — because then you become responsible for the community’s actions and its worst (i.e., the molester’s home page). And so I wonder, in turn, whether the real relationship play in the future is not to try to own community but to enable it. And enabling is sometimes known as infrastructure. That’s the point I want to probe. If they’re still “consumers,” is this really the edge? I say the edge is all about control by creators: That is, I control my own space, this space at the edge, Buzzmachine; I am subject to no one’s rules; I hold responsibility; I reap the benefits, if any; I have relationships as a result of having this presence online; this is mine, all mine; thus I can also relinquish control and, for example, put out full text on RSS and I can realize that the real conversation is not just the one in the comments but the one distributed across others’ sites. That is qualitatively different from a community destination: You go there, you benefit from their infrastructure but you are subject to their rules, you live in someone else’s space.

And now Umair again:

The bigger point I wanted to make was that it’s not technology, but the social and cultural that counts. And being social/cultural is vastly different in, say, cosmetics, than it is in sports. So I think generic infrastructure plays are the wrong approach.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoy this kind of intellectual debate, for the same reason, I suspect, that I enjoyed critical theory in school. But what I find absent from this an all other 2.0 discourses (including my own) is a clear explanation of WHO is going to pay WHOM how many DOLLARS for WHAT. How does the money change hands here?

There are two sources of revenue — companies and consumers. You can sell them content, services, advertising — the list is not that long.

Maybe people like Umair and Jeff operate on a different plane where they can see the dollars even though they don’t reference them explicitly. But if you read News Corp’s quarterly report, MySpace’s ostensible success at the edge is still not reportable in dollars and cents.

Maybe I’m just slow. But I still worry that the sea change that is upon us will lead to fewer dollars in the market and Google-like monopolization of the dollars that do remain. I worry that there’s no way to monetize either “owning” or “enabling” the community — both assume a 1.0-like role for a middleman. It still assumes control of something. AdWords is fully distributed, but it is an intermediary — Google OWNS the system, they control it, and they can make it do whatever they want — unless, of course, it’s being exploited by botnets. Maybe cybercrime is the real edge.

Oh man.

Maybe I just worry too much.

UPDATE:

If this post depressed you, read Jeff’s follow-up post on networks. You’ll be suicidal by the time you’re done:

My point, in the end, is only that we are entering uncertain and uncharted waters in fluid networks. It’s not clear where the value will be captured and how it will be shared.

I responded in the comments to Jeff’s post:

What if media isn’t a business anymore? What if it becomes like poetry — lot’s of people do it, but nobody ever expects to make any money from it.

I know, just because there aren’t obvious answers yet, doesn’t mean somebody won’t figure it out, but for the moment we all sound like the horse and carriage industry 100 years ago. Or the US manufacturing industry 20 years ago. There isn’t always a solution to structural decline.

"We make BitTorrent files out of your big files (mp3s, movies, Zips, etc) and host them for you. It's cheap ($2/ea), reliable and hassle free!"

Laurus has an Instructable and video of a DIY Bicycle mounted steady cam project - "I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn't want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn't want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build a camera mount that would absorb some of the shock providing a better quality video." - Link.

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You know when Gartner and IBM pontificate on Web 2.0, that we've reached a point where the term has become generally acceptable - mainstream even. Well-known research firm Gartner has drunk the kool aid:

"While Web 2.0 offers many new opportunities for companies to grow their business, few enterprises realize how to implement the full range of capabilities to succeed. By 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0, but will be slow to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension, and the result will be a slow impact on business, according to Gartner, Inc."

...and David Boloker, CTO of IBM’s emerging internet technology software group, is also bullish on Web 2.0:

“Web 2.0 is a new class of affordable apps [that] are becoming do-able, delivering instantaneous value such as mash-ups and programmable web,” says Boloker. “Web 2.0 is comprised of everything from Ajax to social software, for example blogs and wikis; to a focus on simplicity, to microformats.”

I even have a personal example of how Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. I was at a New Zealand government strategy workgroup today and the term 'Web 2.0' was used profusely (and appropriately, I might add).

Now -- I've had an interesting and also bumpy ride with the term. I was the first blogger to focus on Web 2.0, starting back in 2004 soon after O'Reilly Media coined it. Indeed you could say that my blog has always been about Web 2.0 (read/write web, two-way web, etc). During 2005 my blog became very popular because of its focus on Web 2.0. My blog was the resource for Web 2.0, because I was one of the only blogs at that time writing about it. This was back in the days when Mike Arrington of Techcrunch fame kidded me about how many RSS subscribers I had - and that he'd some day overtake me. Which of course he did, I think starting from the moment I stepped into the Techcrunch ranch in Atherton in October 2005 :-) Now of course Techcrunch is number 1 amongst not only web 2.0 blogs, but arguably tech blogs in general - and deservedly so IMO. Techcrunch has simply become a must-read resource. Susan Mernit accurately described Techcrunch recently as the leading daily covering web 2.0 and startup land.

So what has happened to Read/WriteWeb? Well I've still been growing at a decent clip and I've gotten a lot of work via my blog. I've nothing to complain about reputation-wise. But in terms of Web 2.0, quite simply I got engulfed by the hype. You know that popular tech cliche: let a thousand flowers bloom? Well that describes Web 2.0 definitions by the end of 2005 - thousands of definitions "bloomed" in the second half of 2005, with the help of a lot of fertilizer from hypesters and naysayers alike.

Then on 18 December 2005 I made the infamous declaration that "Web 2.0 is dead. R.I.P.". Ever wish you hadn't pressed the 'publish' button? Well that was one of those times for me. Boy did that post cause some ructions. I tried to explain myself more coherently in a follow-up post - that defining Web 2.0 had become too distracting and I just wanted to focus on the the technologies and products. But no amount of explanation could get around that sensationalistic header I used.

So what's 2006 brought? Believe it or not, I think it's brought acceptance of the term 'Web 2.0'. That's actually caught me by surprise - I got it wrong. Web 2.0 hasn't died, it's actually morphed into a mainstream term that Gartner and IBM use. I still think it means everything -- and nothing -- at the same time. But in a weird way this has meant Web 2.0 has become the kind of umbrella term and catch-phrase that people identify with. From the 100 or so new and varied definitions of Web 2.0 you read every week (increasingly from mainstream media), to Dion Hinchcliffe's relentless pursuit of defining Web 2.0 for the enterprise, to VCs using the term to connote 'the period after dot com', to TechCrunch profiling the products of Web 2.0 and itself becoming a Web 2.0 success story, to Microsoft adopting Web 2.0 but re-naming it to The Live Web, to Yahoo continuing to put theory into practice and not naming it anything, to Google just doing it's own thing and being damn successful, to Valleywag rising up and creating a hilarious snark blog about the current boom (well, it'll be hilarious up to the point I get linked to), to 'old school' techs like Marc Canter and Dave Winer thriving in this new era, to Gen Y kids creating multi-million dollar businesses like YouTube and Facebook, yada yada.   

And now Gartner and IBM 'get it'. Get what? Web 2.0 of course. But what does it mean? Everything and anything you want. You mean the architecture of participation? Sure I do. What about Ajax? Yeh, why not. What about Flash then? I guess... Does Web 2.0 mean social networking? You betcha. APIs? Dude... Collective intelligence? Of course. Perpetual betas? Now you're talking...

Look: Web 2.0 is made of people (heh).

So I've come to terms with Web 2.0. Well I had to, because I sure as heck am not going to let Gartner and IBM get all the credit! :-)

By Steve Bryant: Broadband-enabled readers love online video. But what kind of video stories and services will get them to click?

little reminder for any infosthetic developer out there: for the first time, an 'infovis art exhibition' will be organized at the IEEE Information Visualization 2006 Symposium this year (Oct 29 - Nov 3, Baltimore). the deadline for entries is June 30.
"this exhibit aims to examine the merging of artistic intention & visualization technique, & is looking for artwork that reveals data patterns in aesthetic, innovative ways."
any questions can be directed to the organizers via email.
[computer.org]

We all know who rules the roost when it comes to downloaded music sales. But who's number two? The answer may surprise you.

In the 18 months since the relaunch of eMusic, the company has clawed its way to the number two position among digital download services (this does not include streaming music). Pakman claims that eMusic has 12 percent of the market compared to Apple's 61 percent, and that his company has now sold more than 60 million songs.

Ars looks at eMusic to discover how it has made a thriving business out of selling DRM-free music in an open format.

Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Networking News reports that the Task Group N schedule has slipped considerably, and the final version of the 802.11n standard may not arrive anytime soon. 12,000 comments on the Draft 1.0 proposal were received from the group (usually the group receives closer to 2,000). Says Glenn: "- if you want range, buy MIMO. If you want speed, wait. And whatever you do, don’t buy Draft N. The premium you pay isn’t worth the uncertainty and the many, many upgrades you’ll have to apply."

All that combining print and online operations will do is increase the sheer monetary numbers, not appreciably delay the time, when it becomes no longer economically feasible to produce either the printed or the Web editions of that newspaper.

Proving the point that the future of media is not distribution, it’s aggregation, TiVo announced today that it had recruited critics, magazine editors, and such to recommend TV shows — to create ad hoc networks, in other words. This cuts across and devalues the old networks; it unbundles and then rebundles them. The magazines are doing it for free because it promotes them and, they hope, their ability to find the good stuff for you: to aggregate. The next step for TiVo should be to have the people become guru guides for each other. Then I could subscribe not just to your blog and blogroll but also to your TV network.

We offer the freedom to create, play, and learn from technology without always being "tethered" to a PC or videogame console.

Filed under: Culture, Online

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By Robert Young

Back in the 1970’s, the television industry began a long period of market realignment that was caused by the introduction of a disruptive innovation called cable TV. After decades of market incursion, cable’s impact on the TV landscape is now complete and its disruptive effect has reached its peak. The result is the emergence of hundreds of cable channels that now account for more than half of our total viewing time.

This realignment of viewer attention has been at the expense of the major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), whose own collective share has declined from total domination of the TV screen to about 45% of viewership. Now, as the foundation of the television industry begins to tremble and crack again, this time from the disruptive forces of the Internet, the TV landscape is about to experience another tectonic shift. But in an ironic twist, a significant share of the TV industry is likely to unwind itself almost back to the days before cable, for reasons that will seem counterintuitive.

Five years from now, the TV market will no longer be segmented solely by major broadcast network vs. cable network viewership. Instead, the market will be further subdivided among viewers of linear broadcast programming vs. that of non-linear on-demand formats. Moreover, the on-demand segment will account for a steadily increasing share of total viewership. On the flip side, it’s equally important to note that the segment with traditional linear/broadcast programming (while declining) will continue to remain alive with its own significant share for quite some time. That said, within this linear/broadcast segment there will be a mini-disruption in the near term. To be specific, it is likely that most of the hundreds of channels we get today via our cable & satellite subscriptions will disappear and there will be only 10 to 20 “broadcast channels” left standing. Here’s why…

As just mentioned, overall viewership of linear/ broadcast programming will steadily decline. Such shifts in viewing patterns will cause collateral damage… that’s obvious, but here’s what may not be so obvious. The players that will get hit first and hardest will be the weakest of the cable channels. In other words, as on-demand programming takes share away from linear broadcast, it will be at the expense of all those niche-oriented channels that came into existence over the past few decades with the advent of cable… not the major broadcast & cable networks. These niche cable networks, many of which are barely treading water now, cannot afford to lose viewers for their linear/broadcast channels. If and when they do, it is highly likely that they will not be able to continue/renew their carriage on cable & satellite systems. The result: a steady procession of cable channels will start to disappear over time, at a rate that will be directly correlated to the increasing share of on-demand viewership. And the cycle will be self-fulfilling… as more and more channels go off-the-air, the lack of programming choice on broadcast will drive even more viewers to on-demand venues. And going back to my reference earlier of an “ironic twist”, the major broadcast networks will once again come to dominate the share of the linear programming schedule.

Now, this does not necessarily mean that all these cable networks will go completely out of business. Rather, many of them will be able to restructure and/or downsize, transitioning to a purely on-demand format, mostly via the Internet. The ones that already have relatively strong brands catering to specific niche audiences are the most likely to survive the transition. Even so, the shift will be painful and somewhat equivalent to a newspaper or a magazine having to give up its print distribution.

The disappearance of a large swath of cable channels will also have the secondary effect of disrupting the underlying business model of the cable & satellite providers. As cable channels are forced to shift away from linear programming, the only way cablecos will be able to preserve their content offerings will be through video-on-demand relationships. Without attractive VOD solutions, the cablecos will lose their content partnerships to the highly cost-effective and open Internet (which will be their major competitor regardless). This explains why companies like Comcast have been so aggressively pushing and deploying their VOD systems in the past year. Also noteworthy is that the changing landscape will also make the cablecos totally dependent on the major broadcast networks for their linear programming channels. Given all that, the business models of the cable/satellite providers will be subject to some very significant changes as their subscription model based on bundling channels comes under attack.

If the scenario outlined above proves to be a reasonable forecast of the future, the other set of players who are ideally positioned to win are the Internet TV ventures like Veoh and Brightcove. Unlike cable/satellite, they are not burdened with any market cannibalization or legacy programming issues. So with the freedom and ability to focus exclusively on the rapidly emerging on-demand segment of the market, particularly for branded programmers who cater to niche audiences, these startups can quickly become the lifeboats for sinking ships.

Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who played a major role in the invention & commercialization of the world’s first consumer ISP, Internet advertising (pay-per-click ads), free email, and digital media superdistribution.

Some design studio are envisionning the use of origami displays: as attested by this Origami Cell Phone and this Origami DVD player

This is a future cell phone concept developed at Inventables. The concept was inspired by the e-paper developed by Mag-Ink and the Popout Map. The map uses origami paper folding technique to expand and collapse automatically as it is opened and closed. This concept addresses the need for larger displays on cell phones without sacrificing a small form factor.

The Origami DVD Player is a portable DVD player concept that could be manufactured with a new e-paper (a full-color flexible display technology) being developed by Mag-Ink in Israel. As a product, it would target the business traveler who wants a convenient way to watch DVD movies. For this user, portability is a key requirement, but they are not interested in sacrificing their viewing experience and are willing to invest extra money for a higher quality product.

Why do I blog this? this is an intriguing way of taking advantage of a small device to expand the display through e-paper…

Another origami-related tech: it may help cellphone cameras to focus. (via emily)

To address the growing number of patent disputes, two House representatives introduced Friday a bill to improve patent litigation.

If approved, H.R. 5418, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa, R-CA, and Adam Schiff, D-CA, would create a pilot program to enhance the expertise of district court judges hearing patent cases.

Specifically, it creates a pilot project in at least five district courts, where judges can oft in to hear patent cases, of which each of the test courts will then be assigned to a clerk with expertise in patent law or with the technical issues arising in patent cases.

It also allocates funding to provide education opportunities for judges in the program.

Intelsat, which introduced a new MPEG-4 satellite-based content delivery and management service last month known as Ampiage, today announced that Content Services, Inc. will be the first Ampiage distributor. CSI will focus on delivering wholesale video, voice and data services to retail providers in the multi-dwelling unit, hospitality, municipality, university and master planned community markets.

Intelsat, through Ampiage and CSI, allows North American multiple systems operators to expand programming offerings. Under the agreement, CSI will deliver wholesale video, voice and data services to retail providers across the United States using Intelsat's satellite-based, open-architecture, video transport platform.

It will initially focus on distribution to multiple system operators (MSOs) seeking to cost-effectively upgrade video content to MPEG-4 as well as telecommunications operators (telcos) and Internet Service Providers looking to enter the IPTV or triple-play (voice, video and data) market.

"The agreement with Intelsat is key to our ability to deliver price advantaged wholesale digital content to our customers," added David Luman, CEO of Content Services. "MSOs and telcos traditionally have had to spend millions of dollars simply to be able to receive digital content. Through our relationship with Intelsat, CSI Digital customers can now upgrade existing MPEG-2 systems or enter the digital video market at a fraction of the cost required previously, while creating unique local packages customized for geographic and demographic concentrations."

Ampiage originates from Intelsat's Video Operations Center (right), where video and audio are received and processed for distribution to telco and MSO video hubs nationwide. Ampiage distributes the programming via their Intelsat fleet. Telcos and MSOs then distribute this programming content via xDSL, fiber, conventional cable networks and other broadband networks to their residential subscribers across North America.

Ampiage plans to reduce the upfront investment with a flexible pricing structure, customized to the customers' business model.

Last year Intelsat bought Panamsat for some $3.2 billion. That deal made Intelsat the world's largest satellite carrier, ahead of SES Global, previously the world's largest. A combined Intelsat/Panamsat would have 53 satellites with customers in over 220 countries.

Competitor SES AMERICOM launched IP·PRIME last year. BellSouth is using AMERICOM’s IP-PRIME for their IP-TV trial. AT&T told the Wall Street Journal on Friday that service will next be launched in Austin. That would be followed by additional launches in the third quarter in all of AT&T's regions, including the West, Southwest, Midwest and East Coast.

SkyStream also provides IP video delivery over satellite. SkyStream’s software and hardware is said to lower costs for service delivery and optimizes video delivery in any network. TANDBERG Television, a leader in MPEG-4 IPTV, bought SkyStream this year. SkyStream’s high density Mediaplex-20 and iPlex switched digital video headends for MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC encoding and transcoding are used extensively by IPTV operators in Asia, Europe and the US. TANDBERG/Skystream has a variety of IPTV gear under one roof for the global marketplace.

Skystream's zBand is a PUSH VOD platform to enable content delivery through both unicast and multicast networks. It lets subscribers access and manage their VOD services around the home through a broadband Internet connection. Another IP-TV delivery company is GlobeCast, a subsidiary of France Telecom. It uses MPEG-4 to deliver more than 100 World Television channels.

Cavalier Telephone & TV today announced the launch of its new Broadband TV service in Richmond, Virginia. The company is said to be the first telephone provider in the United States to offer MPEG-4 AVC over a broadband connection. AT&T's Uverse IP-TV service in San Antonio won't launch until later this year.

Cavalier will deliver over 150 digital channels including all local network affiliates. It utilizes an interactive electronic program guide with parental controls and on-screen caller ID to monitor incoming telephone calls. Cavalier's "Triple Play" will offer local and long distance telephone service, high speed DSL and over 150 tv channels for $95/month.

DIRECTV, the US direct-to-home satellite operator, uses DiviCom MV 100 encoders from Harmonic for MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264/AVC) compression of standard-definition services. DIRECTV is introducing local SD and HDTV over satellite using MPEG-4.

Another route to the home is multicasting mobile tv wirelessly for reception on cellphones, PDAs and laptops.

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

Related DailyWireless stories include; Intelsat Offers IPTV, The IPTV Gamble, AT&T's WiFi TV, NAB 2006, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IPTV Networking, Telco's Left Behind in IPTV Armageddon?, PBS + MovieBeam, WorldView, Cuban: Broadcasting Not Dead, Wireless IP-TV Box, IP-TV End Game, Cisco Buying Scientific Atlanta, SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, GoogleNet?, The Free Triple Play, VDSL-2 Ratified, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, and Duopoly Laws.

mjeppsen writes "PlagiarismToday offers a thought-provoking article that frankly discusses concerns with plagiarism and rote content theft among bloggers. In the section entitled "Block quotes by the Dozen" the author mentions the so-called "gray area". That is PlagiarismToday's classification of the common blogger practice of re-using large blocks of text/content from the original article or source, even when the source is attributed."

Originally posted by CmdrTaco from Slashdot, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 22, 2006 at 01:32 PM

Yep, finally. There are two files. First, the cards:
Download GameGame_cards_Release1.0_printouts.pdf (64.1K)

I hope they print out okay, I did some tweaking to the colors so that they would work better in B/W as well. I suggest they should be glued onto cardboard for better endurance.

Second, there is a rule manual, with some additional info about the concept and its premises:
Download GameGame-RuleManual.pdf (2751.8K)

Without doubt, there are rule omissions, typos, and such. Please comment on those here for version 1.1.

I would be very grateful to hear about any experiences with the game. Please use the comment function so that anyone visiting can see. You can also e-mail me directly.My thanks to everyone who goes into the trouble of setting the game up!

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

Darla Mack has word that the Carnival of the Mobilists has found a more permanent home at http://www.mobili.st/. This doesn't mean the Carnival itself won't be moving between sites, just that there is now a central place to find out where the latest Carnival is being held.

Asia Times Online has a great article on the state of Chinese standards initiatives. This is in light of the expected release of licensed home-grown third generation (3G) services that will be available in mid-July. 3G technology, also known as TD-SCDMA, will compete with Western W-CDMA and CDMA-2000.

This new technology follows China's push with their 11th Year Plan in developing their own innovations in standards from DVD's, codecs, to PC's (Godsen II Dragon Dreams).
The article explains why home-grown TD-SCDMA is a source of pride for China. Here are some points they made:

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

Here's a great graph from Asia Times that shows the status of Chinese Standards Initiative (I copied and pasted the info an Excel file.)

Technorati Tags: 11th year plan, beijing, CDMA-2000, china, chinese, chip, development, economic, experience curve, first mover advantage, global, home grown, innovation, intellectual property, internet, IP, license, product, standard, TD-SCDMA, technology, W-CDMA, western

From Virtual China: Baidu, China's leading search engine, has launched the Baidu Encyclopedia ((百度百科), according to China Web2.0 Review. As of 7:30 today it had 2768 articles written; at 7:51 it had 2909...you can see the articles piling up before your eyes. The intro says: Baidu is in line with the equal, cooperative, and sharing spirit of the Internet...it provides a stage for Internet users' creativity.
Since Wikipedia is blocked in China, we'll see just how creative Baidu writers can actually get.
And a reader asks: How can you edit it this way? What if there's a mistake? How reliable is this encyclopedia?
Random survey of articles written in last few minutes:

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

"Baidu Baike does not mention Taiwan, Tibet, democracy, human rights, or any of the controversial topics besetting modern China. Nor, it's been noted, is it neutral when compared with Wikipedia. For example, it paints a very biased picture of Chinese historical figures such as Mao Zedong, forgetting to tell its users of the seventy million Chinese citizens who died as a result of Mao's actions and policies "

Technorati Tags: baidu, encyclopedia, wiki, wikipedia

ISEA2006 Early Bird Registration is only $250.00

Seven days of art and interconnectivity
ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006
Downtown San Jose; August 7-13, 2006.

1. Keynote: Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi, India http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/CV.html
2. Almost 200 artists from around the world exhibiting and presenting
3. 70 papers and artist presentations during the symposium.
4. Talk-back live and really gain the benefit of the collective knowledge.
5. Workshops and Tours: Wetware Hackers, Free Soil, IBM/Almaden Research Labs, Landstream, From Crisis to Bliss, Computer Vision for Artists, San Jose Remixed-Open Source Interactive Narrative, Signal Process-Sound in Open Space, Transparent City, Social Memory-Documenting ISEA2006.
6. See Survival Research Labs LIVE! Legendary!
7. See Peter Greenaway LIVE! VJ Tour – Tulse Luper

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/05.17.06/isea-0620.html

ISEA2006 Early Bird Registration is only $250.00!!!

Click Here to Sign Up

http://01sj.org/content/blogcategory/121/130/

And A FREE COPY of Leonardo, journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, will be distributed to every Early Bird registrant of the ISEA conference (through June 15th). Leonardo 39:4 will be devoted to the work of the seven Pacific Rim working groups, featuring new media educational programs and artists from the Pacific-Asia region. The print issue of the journal, due to be released in conjunction with the symposium, will include statements by artists as well as articles by cultural theorists looking at issues germane to the seven working group topics, plus introductory texts by the working group chairs.

Visit http://01sj.org/ to register.

Checking the comments on my post to slashdot about streaming myth to your phone, theres one from a MythWeb developer (MythWeb being a standard MythTV plugin) which mentions they are actively working to add a flash app that gives you web video access to your tv recordings in the spirit of "google video/youtube". That's quite awesome. Are there phones which do flash?

Great article by Rob Tercek (former mForma exec) about the disappointing mobile content business that he and many of the other good talent I know have been fleeing en masse.

Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language that provides a natural coordinate-based framework for technical drawing

Looking for a loan at a great rate? Now you can borrow safely and securely from people just like you.

"The response of the younger generation might seem contradictory -- how can you reveal your intimacies to total strangers online and then worry about some spook in Langley, Va., tracking or listening to your phone calls? But it says a lot about young Americans' confidence in controlling new technology, as well as their lack of confidence in their government's use of it."

One of the problems that arises when companies try to import physical-world restrictions into the digital world is that the idea of ownership becomes hard to define, if not meaningless. When somebody buys a track on iTunes do they own something tangible (it would seem not), or do they simply own the right to listen to it on a specific device (which isn't really ownership)? The big media companies would rather not deal with this question, but they may have to since the current restrictions and DRM schemes prevent people from enjoying media as they please. For example, if people had more flexibility with the various movie download offerings, there's a good chance they'd be more inclined to use them. As it is, pirated versions are much more flexible (and thus useful). Now a new company is hoping to solve this problem with a system that specifically sells the right to access a given piece of media. In a perfect implementation, it would be completely device neutral, and have the added benefit of allowing the user to re-download all of their media should, say, their hard drive crash. The model would be similar to a subscription news site, which can be accessed from any device assuming the user has the password. The biggest challenge, with a system like this is getting various device makers and media companies to agree on a system. Similar systems in the past have run into these problems. Given how much restrictiveness helps a company like Apple, it's unlikely that they'll play along. Such a scheme won't solve all of the problems with DRM, but ensuring that when somebody buys a media file they can play it or use it anywhere, would certainly be an improvement.

Tom Abate blogs in the excellent San Francisco Chronicle's Tech Chronicles about new net neutrality legislation:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced legislation Friday that would define open access to the Internet and give the Federal Communications Commission broad powers to investigate alleged abuses. The Senate bill is a boost for Internet companies that are fighting telephone industry plans to create toll roads on the Internet, an issue dubbed "net neutrality." The newly-introduced Senate bill is virtually identical to legislation proposed by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) that was rejected by a House comittee last month.

In its current form the House bill gives telephone companies a freer hand to charge traffic-senders higher rates for faster service. Phone companies say they need this incentive to justify their investment in providing better broadband access to homes. The House bill is expected to come to a floor vote in June.

In a related development Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation Thursday that would make it an antitrust violation to set preferential broadband access rates, a stand favored by Internet companies

.

Daniel Shiffman >> MovieMaker Processing Library
Dan put up a movie export library for Processing.. Cool!

Sun blesses Java phone
With a nice set of libraries.. Might have to get me one of these :-)

Streamingmedia.com: How to Build a Video Podcast in 3 Steps
Haven't read it fully but looks to be a good resource..

National Day of Out(R)age | Save Access

Not only are the telcos giving over your call records to the NSA but public access and the like are in trouble with National Video Franchising legislation in consideration by Congress being pushed by the telcos.

People With Ideas ion 1.0 RC3 and iondb.com
Just had a short opportunity to try out the new ion and iondb. Haven't had a chance to get some heavy usage but right off the bat the webstart is great! The db is fantastic as well, sharing what you are watching with others is one of the first steps to making video on the internet more social and community orientated. Keep going!

One of these days I will contribute a bit back to this project.

NBC anchor Brian Williams says he sees "profound danger" in on demand technologies because they can insulate people from important information. "Our [journalist's] job is part civics lesson," he said. "Much of the news around the world, and the nation for that matter, is bad. Filtering it out of your day does not advance the public good, and it hardly makes us better and more informed citizens of a complicated world." Agree or disagree?

OhmyNews International starts a new citj section on their site. "We strongly believe that citizen journalism can take root anywhere, not just in South Korea. For it is better to have citizens voice their own ideas and interests than to let the media represent them on their behalf."

AlterNet: Are we passive consumers of news no more? John Gorenfeld conducts a survey of innovative news sites that allow you to be the editor.

The cost of rolling-out the technology and spectrum availability will be the major factors in determining which of the various competing mobile TV technologies will survive, according to Windsor Holden, senior analyst at Analysys. He thinks it will be very rare to have more than one technology operating in a country, especially smaller ones. UK is a prime example of standards overload, with DVB-H, DAB and MediaFLO all looking to set up operations within the country. Holden also has a good opinion of Alcatel’s satellite-based version of DVB-H, which is a late development but offers quite a few bonuses.
Meanwhile, there’s an interesting tidbit in an SMH article about media trends, that says that “long-form TV-style content will be wildly popular on mobile devices, despite the conventional wisdom that says two- to three-minute grabs is where the action in mobile content will be”.
In other mobile TV news, Taiwan is on the list of companies due to get it with a service due for launch in late 2007 or early 2008, an MDTV service from Israeli company Siano.

I am sure this paper is interested for Adam Greenfield’s next book (”The city is here for you to use”):
How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama For DIS2006:

It discusses how “our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world”, drawing on various theories of embodiment in the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

What is interesting is that articles presents some relevant arguments and examples that shows the importance of the body. It put the emphasis on the embodiment for (among others), I picked up those I was interested in:

• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and to
  communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s
  context
• Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
• The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
• hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
• kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
• Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
• Learning is situated in space
• Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.

Why do I blog this? This echoes with the literature review I did about how space/place affords socio-cognitive interactions. Embodiment is certainly one of the most interesting component of this relationship.

I also think one of the most important dimension is the inherent risk of physical actions, nobody gets physically hurt in virtual worlds but what happened while playing augmented reality quake?

Of course this is meant to support the “why” question of tangible computing?

Citizens for Global Solutions is a DC-based non-profit dedicated to building U.S. political will and increasing awareness among U.S. citizens about our global interrelationships. As a part of Global Solutions' educational and youth outreach initiatives, they've launched a flash video contest, asking students, and young designers to create videos that address global issues, and the role of the U.S. within them.

The contest has closed to submissions, but you can still vote for your favorite. There are twenty finalists, ranging in age from 14 to 32, and hailing from all over the U.S., Mexico, Germany, and Colombia. You can watch all the fims and vote for a winner here.

Thanks, Charles!

(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 11:59 AM)

The new music video for Pearl Jam's "Life Wasted" was released today under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that people anywhere can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip. This is the first Pearl Jam video to be released in eight years and, as far as we know, the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. Pearl Jam and J Records are offering the video as a free download at Google Video from today, May 19th, through May 24th. After May 24th, the clip will be made available for sale. For more information, check out PearlJam.com and CC's press release.

It’s easy to lose yourself in all the video at YouTube. You watch one music video, which leads to a spoof video, which leads to a stupid pet trick, which leads…who knows where. Before you know it, it’s time to leave work.

Free time just evaporates when you’re immersed in a viral video site like YouTube or iFilm, where people can upload and share their videos with friends or the entire world. So I wondered what you all thought about YouTube and other video sharing sites, and asked you to share your opinions.

Outside of concerns about YouTube’s business model (or lack thereof), most of you had positive things to say about the site and its competitors. Many of you correctly pointed out that online video is really in its early days, so other services might well eclipse YouTube in the future.

But let’s start with the praise for video-sharing sites, and how you use them. A blogger with the pseudonym Dolor Ipsum (at least I’m guessing it’s a pseudonym), noted that emailing video or making people download video would take too long — that’s why these sites have succeeded. Ipsum prefers iFilm for “the look and feel of the interface.”

Brian Goslow, who runs the Worcester, Mass., music site wormtown.org, celebrates the classic musical performances he’s found on YouTube, copyrights be damned.

“While fully understanding it totally disregards copyrights, YouTube has allowed me to see many music videos and moments — The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset; Abba’s Eurovision performance of ‘Waterloo’ that turned them into international superstars; the Beatles’ complete Rain and Paperback Writer videos; Sparks playing ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough’ for the first time on Top of the Pops — all musical moments I had only read about but never got to see,” Goslow wrote.

Editor/photographer Marcy, who runs the Root Magazine blog, says YouTube has been a great research tool for her to find examples of global dance styles.

“I’ve been able to post examples of ethnic dance and music on my site that readers never would’ve found on their own,” Marcy wrote. “It is addictive but once you figure out how to search without wasting time on adolescent party vids, YouTube is a wonderful thing!”

Nathan Schoenfeld, who’s a trained actor, decided to upload short 15-second clips of himself to YouTube and MySpace and was amazed at how many people watched them. Schoenfeld says it’s difficult for YouTube to stop people from uploading copyrighted material, but he prefers many of the home-grown videos anyway.

“These type of sites have allowed me to see some little movies that have been more satifying than your average sitcom,” he wrote. “I believe this will just compound the ever-growing list of things to do in front of a screen. Is it the wave of the future? It won’t take over TV but it’s not going away either. At least that’s what one guy from Middle America thinks.”

As for YouTube’s dominance, Brent Oesterblad, who runs the competing vSocial video-sharing site, had to admit YouTube was clearly leading the market.

“As a competitor within the video clip sharing space to YouTube let me clearly state — YouTube is kicking our ass,” Oesterblad wrote. “Sincere deserved kudos. YouTube has only validated the vastness the online video space represents — it is HUGE. Thank you. However, it is still only in the first quarter of the game. There is much to be decided in the coming months and years.”

Some of you noted a preference for alternative video-sharing sites to YouTube. Yael liked Metacafe because it “eliminates garbage,” while Cynthia thought ClipShack was catching on among Baby Boomers.

A couple of you included nice predictions of where the online video market is headed. Todd Zeigler, who writes the Bivings Report, said that YouTube works as both a place for people to show viral videos, and a place for folks to share videos with family and friends. Zeigler thinks that latter function might be usurped by other services over time.

“As the space grows, features like video downloading, editing, mass storage, higher quality, etc. will become more important to people and competitors will gain market share by focusing on these features,” he wrote. “YouTube’s sheer size will prevent these sort of innovations from being fiscally possible. Being smaller (and potentially charging a small fee) will be an advantage for the upstarts.”

Ged Carroll, who blogs at Renaissance Chambara, says that YouTube and others are just the first version of what’s to come in the future. Carroll lays out a whole lot of challenges for YouTube — including the fact that the startup is currently burning through $1 million per month in bandwidth costs.

“If we lose network neutrality, port blocking and throttling by telecom companies will seriously damage these businesses, especially as telecom companies are under the illusion that they are anything more than ultility companies and are looking to be content providers or purveyors of ‘value-added’ services again,” Carroll wrote.

And just in case we were living in our always-on broadband bubble, blogger Trudy Schuett pointed out the reality for many Americans who are not joining in on the online video revolution.

“There is still a large number of people (like me) that can’t access this stuff as there is no broadband available. (sigh) I’d love to be able to see this stuff!” she wrote.

PDAStreet: News: Placeshifting: Carrier Friend or Foe?
Will things like this convince the carriers that they should be just that, carriers and let people do what they will with the networks (oh my god, let people do what they want on OUR network, that's crazy..! wait a minute, isn't that how the internet became so useful?)

Cool Hunting Video: ITP Spring Show 2006
For those of you wondering what I do all day every day, check out this video of the ITP Spring Show from Cool Hunting. Very nicely produced!

By Susannah Gardner: Confused about who does what? OJR looks at features and functionality for the Web's most popular blog publishing software.

VOiP Monitor is live from ISPCON (Schedule, Exhibitors & Press Releases).

 

ISPCON, the leading event for wired and wireless ISPs, kicked off to a great start yesterday as industry luminaries spoke to packed rooms in five instructive and profitable session tracks, the first of two keynote sessions received excellent response and the exhibit hall opened its doors. ISPCON Spring 2006 is being held in the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD, and will continue through Thursday, May 18.

To begin the day, speakers from a variety of aspects of the Internet held general sessions on a number of topics including dial-up, Ethernet, SARBOX, wireless, Exchange hosting services, VoIP and CLEC strategies.

The general sessions are split into five tracks including: Access, Services, Strategy, Operations and Business. The first round of sessions has had extremely positive feedback and the remaining speakers are sure to maintain that momentum in the remaining two days of the conference.

The opening keynote session, entitled "Muni Networks: Partnering for Affordable Broadband," was delivered by Bill Tolpegin, vice president, corporate development and planning, municipal networks division of Earthlink Inc., and Raghu Rau, senior vice president, global marketing and strategy, Motorola Networks. These two industry leaders discussed their own partnership in municipal wi-fi, and how the Internet industry can collaboratively drive the use of wireless networks and affordable broadband.

The second keynote is titled "Neutrality Reality" and will be delivered by David S. Isenberg (blog), principal of isen.com LLC. In what is sure to be a profoundly enlightening and entertaining keynote, Mr. Isenberg will address what lies ahead for the Internet industry and economy as the issue of network neutrality looms.

The exhibit hall opened at 3:00 p.m. with the energetic buzz of over 70 exhibitors from all facets of the industry. Corporate host Motorola, who also sponsored the ISPCONNECT attendee communication system, displayed prominently in the center of the room. Other exhibitors included everyone.net, Verio, PEER 1, Sendmail Inc., Mirapoint Inc., Tucows Inc., Hostopia and Web Host Industry Review, among many others.

 

The president of the Society of Professional Journalists reacted to a blog post on ABCNews.com's "The Blotter" that reported that a federal source told ABC News that reporter calls were being tracked as part of an effort to identify leaks in the government. David Carlson said it would be "outrageous" and a "sad commentary on the state of the nation." Meanwhile, ABCNews.com has been following up on the story with reaction, including a quote from new White House spokesman Tony Snow. "I would be concerned if there was grounding to it," Snow said. "I'm sorry, the pieces just don't add up."

Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what's to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it's new "coming soon" video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck.

Yahoo! Video

The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references "My Studio" which could be a way for anyone to author and upload their own video files or maybe add some special effects. The new site supports personal favorites, tagging, and ratings of each video. The existing Yahoo! Video site does not include any user-submitted content or metadata.

Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! also showed off a new Yahoo! Finance design coming later this month. Charts are now interactive, showing the trading price corresponding to trading activity on a given day. It's now easy to overlay competitors or a benchmark index onto the graph for comparison. It looks like the only news correlation may be splits and dividends, but I'm only speculating based on a screenshot in a slide deck.

Yahoo! My Web

Yahoo! mentioned it has learned a few things from del.icio.us and is integrating its acquisition more closely with the redesigned Yahoo! My Web shown above. Bookmarks now have an interestingness sort and an easier way to add a link to your own bookmarks. Tags are now exposed for the entire community, brought front-and-center for easier browsing.

Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel says that while great media companies have great content, "content alone will fail. Content and distribution will fail. You have to have technology."

VScratch allows a visual transcription of every elements used for scratch composition. It transposes all sound nuances made by the rotation of the record: the variations of speed, audio spectrum and volume.

Narrator - Handy Mac app for reading out stories or scripts. Can give each script character a different voice, and leave a gap for you to say your lines.

"This book argues that there's a new cultural regime, one that is, I believe, changing how we define the individual, the self, our culture and our economy. Yeah, I know. It's shamelessly overweening. But, hey. ... Anyhow, I had occasion to reflect why Transformation is being written by me in 2006 instead of by someone else in, say, the 1980s. ... Someone coulda wrote this book and no one did. The question is why. I think it's because popular culture was still under the intellectual embargo created by the academic community in the postwar period."

projects on ionized air... not holographic

Finding things when your content is audio is hard, and BBC has a lot of audio content. So need to use metadata, so have info about whole programmes. Don't have data about how these programmes can be chopped up, e.g.

- news stories
- magazine programmes
- interviews
- music tracks

Acquiring metadata about programmes:
- in production process, either people or software, pre-broadcast
- media analysis of what is broadcast
- user annotation

Focusing on user annotation, which is the Annotatable Audio project. Aim is to get listeners to divide programmes into segments and to annotate and tag each bit. Demonstrated a pilot internally, and preparing for a live deployment.

Can annotate the audio by selecting segments (like 'notes' in Flickr) and add factual notes. Are thinking about adding comments about whether or not people like stuff. Wiki-like.

Intending to launch around a low-profile programme, probably factual so they promote the annotation angle, not the discussion angle. Users will need to log in to annotate, but any user can see the canonical version.

Will be able to then search within the programme, to generate chapterised podcasts, and also want to support chapterised MP3s.

Looking at using it as an internal tool for production staff, e.g. tracklisting for specialist music shows or live sessions where the tracklisting can't be pulled off of a CD.

Can add in tags and then pull out related Flickr photos, which can work nicely but sometimes doesn't.

Could be used for syndication, so people could more easily use a section or segment of a programme using a 'blog this' button on the interface which creates a Flash interface you can put on your site. Problems with editorial policy on that, but it's an aspiration for their department.

Regarding licensing, will initially be doing it with audio that there are not licensing issues for, which is either rights-free or for which the BBC has the rights.

Xtech Xtech2006

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Also check out Strange Attractor posts Tom Loosemore - Treating Digital Broadcast As Just Another API, and other such ruminations and Roland Alton-Scheidl - StreamOnTheFly network.

Public Insight Journalism is a new way for Minnesota Public Radio journalists to find the best sources and the best information. The centerpiece of Public Insight Journalism is the Public Insight Network - a group of thousands of Minnesotans who have agre

One hears a lot of sniggering in new media circles about how old media leaders just don't get it. Well, reading this speech from BBC head Mark Thompson will disabuse you of that notion. It's a smart, thoughtful, completely with-it analysis of the Beeb's "Creative Future" explorations and what they've taught the company about its changing place on the media landscape. Given the BBC's history, it's a pretty radical departure, and full of interesting lessons about broadcasting today:

There are two reasons why we need a new creative strategy. Audiences are changing. And technology is changing. In a way, everyone knows this of course. What's surprising - shocking even - is the sheer pace of that change. In both cases it's faster and more radical than anything we've seen before. ... Technology which empowers those audiences, transfers control from us to them, lets them consume what they want, when they want, lets them create content, lets them participate.

(thanks, Bruno!)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 09:20 AM)

camNet is a P2P Network to exchange Webcam images and videos. Therefore the P2P Network is aware of the location of it's participants and efficient location-based search is possible.

Fortune interviews Steve Chen and Chad Hurley:

The important question: How are you going to make money?

ng to sell sponsorships and direct advertisements. But we are building a community, and we don't want to bombard people with advertising.

Chen: If we wanted to, we could instantly turn this into $10 million in revenue per month by running pre-rolls [short video ads] on the videos. But at the same time, we're going to make sure that whatever revenue model we've built is going to be something that's accepted by the users.

Hurley: We're building relationships with studios, networks, and labels because they're looking for ways to reach new audiences, and we have a great platform and a great stage to make that happen.

"Practical, hands-on approach to diagnosing audio/video noise..."

It's that fun time again when we start contemplating versioning up the licenses. An outline of why we're thinking about doing this and how CC proposes to do this has just been posted to the cc-licenses list. Please participate in the discussions on the cc-licenses list - you can sign up here.

Doc Searls is giving the closer at Syndicate.

He says the problem with search is that it isn’t live. He says that search engines see the web as a static thing. But he says they do search the live web, they just hide it.

Yahoo has a news search with a blog search under beta but, he complains, it’s on the right side of the page where we’re trained not to look because that’s where ads go. Google’s blog search is there but hidden and he asks why it’s not included in the main search. He emphasizes that the live web is more than RSS and blogging; you know the list.

Repeating a wonderful line from his blog, he says that “the best blogging is about rolling snowballs.”

: UPDATE: See Doc in the comments clarifying what I mucked up. And see this post with a much, much better blogging of the talk. I got interrupted with a phone call and didn’t do it justice.

This is the best news ever, Amazon now has a industrial & scientifc (beta) section - They have metals, plastic, mechanical components, fasteners, wire, springs and of course tools. I'm going to see if I can make a complete project with just is available on the new section and save the list of parts/tools as a "wish list" or something shareable. Then anyone could read the how-to and hit buy it now. Also, it might be fun to make a SketchUp library with all the parts/materials from Amazon Industrial & Scientific and have an easy way for folk to get all the things they need for a project. Amazon gift certificates just got a lot more valuable, hopefully Digikey will do gift certificates soon too, or just sell through Amazon... [via] Link.

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Helio is a new mobile virtual network operator, backed by Internet service provider EarthLink and Korean-based SK Telecom, that has rolled out two phones being marketed especially for Myspace. They even have the tagline, "Helio: Don't call it a phone."  The phones are being marketed to 18 to 32 year olds, costing around $250 and between $85-135 per month for service.  The phones make it easy to photoblog, add friends or send messages on Myspace, as well as to gift or beg friends for content like games, videos or ringtones.

One of the funnier posts from the Myspace profile created by Helio:

"In about a month or 2 there will be kids, teens, adults <---- ewww to the adults. Walking around with no concept of theyre surroundings because of this device. . . .SHAME ON YOU"

Updated with new info from Rocketboom: No, we can’t make it to every conference so we’ve been following just-concluded Syndicate online. Josh Hallett did a great job with audio but has been asked by IDG to take it down. No word about whether IDG is going to fill the gap. Some of the coverage:
On the Avenue: During her keynote, Amanda Congdon said video newscast Rocketboom is considering charging $4 a month for access premium content, although nothing’s official. [Note: Congdon clarifies in our comments area: “… We are considering charging $4/month for premium content: outtakes, a bi-monthly podcast, a full screen DVD quality version of the show, forums, etc. The show, in its current form, will always be free.”] Also a good rundown of a session about how syndication is changing publishing, advertising, marketing.
(via Barnako.com)
– Richard Edelman: The PR exec went to the conference, saw a sparse turnout from the ad/PR community and blogged a wake-up call: “This is the future of our business, folks, and we have to remake our work flow and our work force to accommodate the change. We are not going to learn by talking among ourselves at the 4As or PRSA–we have to engage bloggers on their home turf.”
– David Weinberger has a transcript of Edelman’s keynote. and a blow-by-blof of the Jeff Jarvis un-keynote.
– Jarvis covers Doc Searls’ keynote.
– One thread showing up in a few places: the idea that it’s all about aggregation now, not syndication. It’s not either/all, folks.

Cyril has an interesting post about the “death of video-games”. IMO video games creativity is not dead. What is dead is the video game development model which suck and is so publisher-driven that it kills innovation. Garage studios are no longer viable, in-house studios are following the headquarters order and cut innovation; and even when it comes to outsourcing, there is nothing good out of it. Of course there are still some good and innovative studios (blizzard) but they’re less and less. I think Water Cooler also addresses that issue.

To me, what is interesting is that the most important innovation with regards to video games are

• not games but rather platforms, environment to do something together: I am thinking about WoW (even though has of course a RPG component) or Habbo Hotel (or even Flickr which started as a game platform).
• not classical platforms such as consoles but rather on the Web, which is the most open innovation platform for developing things.
• not game content but DYI game platforms (DYI MMORPG or at least 3D environment tools), artifacts (like game controllers as for the Nintendo Wii or the Sony augmented reality card game), machinimas or tools like Xfire (a very relevant tool to when your friends are online, what game they’re playing, and what server they’re on, join in on their games with one click and see what the friends of your friends are playing).

And this is interesting because video/computer games are now starting not only a tiny platforms but they’re is now an ecology of artifacts connected to them which eventually are targeted at engaging people in playful activities such as developing DYI games, creating or watching machinimas, playing games with tangible interactions…

Why do I blog this? I am interested in foresight issues related to this sort of activities and how games is evolving from a very precise activity to a culture with fuzzier boundaries.

Here's an interesting idea: Online photo sharing site Webshots.com has compiled a special album pegged to the May 19 release of the Da Vinci Code movie. The site's photo editors have sifted through users' photos and compiled an album of more than 300 photos that cover 50 locations and artifacts that are part of the movie, such as the Louvre and the Vatican Stairs.

This should give you some ideas for similarly sifting and compiling the submissions of "citizen photographers" on your news site. Obviously, many news sites do this sort of thing when disaster strikes, taking the best citizen submissions and putting them in a gallery. This Webshots.com feature reminds us that there are events and stories of less gravitas that could benefit from this treatment.

And, you may be able to use online photo services like Webshots.com and Flickr.com to incorporate photo albums like this into your own site, since both those services have APIs that support this.

With this weekend’s addition of Flickr Group Browser, FlickrRandom and GeotagIt there are now 68 Flickr mashups listed here.

Besides the ones above, some of the most interesting mashups all-round have been built using Flickr’s API: Colr Pickr, Spell with Flickr, the Fastr game, Bubblr, FlickrSudoku, Virtual Places, matchr puzzle, and retrievr.

These makeup about 10% of the total of 665 mashups on the site.

They're suing because XM is refusing to pay licensing fees after it introduced the "Inno," a portable device that records songs straight from satellite radio. XM says it's like a DVR: users can record on the device but they can't copy the songs anywhere else. But the recording industry calls it "massive wholesale infringement." You may remember Sirius decided to pay licensing fees after threats of legal action after it introduced a similar device.

Bernhard Warner, in an opinion piece at the UK's Times Online, writes:

No matter how unappealing it may sound, the blogosphere is duty-bound to adopt the basic tenets of journalism-- identifying your sources, checking facts and never sacrificing accuracy and fairness for the sake of a "good" story. The role of watchdog demands you be fully identifiable and accountable. (Full disclosure: we journalists need you.

But earlier in his piece he writes:

According to the same poll, bloggers suffer the biggest credibility gap of all with just one in four surveyed regarding them as a trusted source of information. Bloggers bellow that it is illogical and unfair to lump all bloggers into a single category, but, I respond, you could say the same about media and government and business.

That's the very problem with journalists. They accurately write what they are fed, even when it is unfair and illogical -- and I might add stupid. Try this question: Do you trust books? It depends on which books you are talking about doesn't it. Since blogs are basically blank pieces of paper that then are used in a million different ways, to ask if you trust them is asinine. You could say the same thing about most polls concerning media and government.

Even when credible sources produce these over reaching polls, they tell us nothing about particulars; however, that does not stop professional journalists from using them over and over again as proof to make their points -- even when the point they want to make is how reliable and trustworthy they are.

As U.S. legislators continue to debate whether the current system of providing Internet access should be changed, all agree that the development of the World Wide Web has revolutionized telecommunications and technology in general.

MyNetworkTV execs released a few details about the new TV network's upcoming website and mobile strategy. MyNetworkTV will offer 3,000 pieces of original video over the site and mobile, and fans will be able to send video content to their friends' cell phones. Plus, MySpace will continue to promote the network. MyNet is set to go live on September 5th.

A video ad should be counted when it begins playing, not when it begins buffering, according to new standards released by the IAB. (Free reg. req.)

In case you haven’t seen the last issue of Education Week, they’ve released their latest Technology Counts report. Each year, Ed Week takes an in-depth look at education technology in all 50 US states. They assign the states edtech report cards, analyzing how well they stack up against each other in terms of technology access, local tech standards for both students and teachers, data collection systems and other factors.

Asymmetrical technologies have a lopsided power structure; symmetrical technologies create a balance.

In the following blog entry, which I’m almost quoting in full, Kevin Kelly applies the concept to the world of privacy and control. An enlightening contribution.

Kevin Kelly:

“When communication technologies become ubiquitous and employed by powerful institutions they can scare us because they appear to be technologies of control – of us. Global positioning information is very handy but might also be used to follow us at all times. Web cams are cool, but also permit constant eyes turned on us. Digital rights technology can prevent illegal rip-offs, but it can also capture everything we do.

What scares us is that the communication in these examples is asymmetrical. Each technology moves information about us to some entity that we have no knowledge of. They watch us; we can’t watch them. They know us, but we don’t know them. It makes it hard to ensure the knowledge is accurate and appropriate. And of course we gain little either economically or informational from it.

Asymmetry of knowledge is what drives hedge fund operators, real estate brokers, and intermediates of all kinds. They have more knowledge about what we want they we do. From this disequilibrium, they derive their profit, which we normally will pay as worth the cost.

But sometimes the asymmetry is baked not into an occupation, but into technology itself. Very large computers that can mine trivial everyday data for patterns is one example. Here the inherent imbalance between the level of knowledge available creates uncertainty, fear, and resentment. If asymmetrical technologies advance and spread, those less in-the-know will rebel, avoid it, sabotage, or subvert them. But symmetry can be restored with better technologies that embrace reciprocal information. We can watch the watchers and as we watch, others watch us.

To put it personally, I am comfortable with having my movements tracked, my habits databased in aggregate, and my tastes networked IF — BIG IF:

1) I know what information is being collected, where and why, and by whom

2) I assent to it either implicitly or explicitly, and I am aware of it

3) I have access to correct it, and can use the data myself

4) I get some benefit for doing so (recommendations, collaborative filtering, or economic payment)

Right now, I go along with a technology if I can get 3 out of 4 of these demands. If these four conditions are met I am happy to have my everything monitored. Throw in some payments, or freebies and you can watch my boring life all you want. But remove those conditions and I am outraged. I find governmental surveillance particularly wicked because it meets none of those conditions.

David Brin, who explored this theme much deeper than I have in his book Transparent Society, suggests that the symmetry I propose can also be thought of as ‘'’reciprocal accountability”’ (RA). We could even call it symmetrical accountability.

Potential surveillance technology is not the only place reciprocal knowledge is important. As more of the technium is dominated by the intangibles of communication and information, symmetrical knowledge will become essential. The uncertainty and fear of new technology can be relieved, in part, but restoring symmetrical knowledge between creators, makers and users.

The necessity of symmetry applies not only to easily-monitored technologies such as computer networks, cameras, and digital rights, but to all technologies. Technology in general benefits by being transparent. Every technology would be improved by these three guidelines:

1) Users should know as much about the technology as the creators do. It takes an enormous amount of knowledge to create a new innovation. Some of this know-how includes information about what does not work. In medical studies this is called negative results. Both negative results, known bugs, expected side-effects, and possible dangers should all be disclosed to users as soon as possible. In addition the mechanics and logic of how an innovation works should also be transparent. To our great benefit patents encourage this disclosure, but many technologies are hidden behind proprietary veils. This is one reason open-source technologies are in ascendancy – because they are transparent and symmetrical. Users have as much information about the technology as the creators do.
2) The knowledge about a technology should travel with the technology. This meta information includes the transparent information about its mechanics, and its negative results, but also should include such things as its origin, the sources of its parts, the supply line of its vendors, the environmental impact of its materials, and the necessary work needed to dispose or archive of it properly. This should always be accessible, either by embedded tags, or in such a way (like wireless bar codes) that the knowledge is fully present to anyone using even a portion of the technology. Anything more than one click away is too far.
3) Other technology should know everything about it too. More and more, technology interfaces with other technology and not humans. Inter-operability with other technological systems is essential. The meta-information must be machine readable, and the technology should adopt as many standard protocols as possible. This is not only good citizenship for technology, but it permits large complex systems to retain symmetrical knowledge. Any node can, in theory, know what other nodes do.

Transparency does not solve all the problems with new technologies, nor prohibit them from being abused, but it lessens this potential. Restoring symmetry to our creations can help us better evaluate and manage them.”

Next week I'll be staying at Lake Como in northern Italy for a couple of days with Deirdré Straughan, a videoblogger as well as Director of Customer Experience for TVBlob.

They're onto something pretty cool and just announced a beta program that I thought would be worth sharing, especially with my friends in Italy:

We are about to launch a service that will be the first of its kind in the world! In short, this service enables people to video communicate through televisions when they connect our powerful set-top box to a broadband network. Just imagine...you will be able to turn on your television and make video calls to your family, friends, or colleagues, and even "make your own TV", be for it for live birthday parties, community events, or business meetings. The quality will be just as good as watching TV, and the convenience will be just as easy as using a TV remote control.

We are seeking people to participate in our first public beta test, scheduled roughly from late May to late June. Of course, we will provide our set-top box to you for free during the testing period, but before you say "yes", there are a few requirements in order to qualify.

The Early Bird Gets the Discount!

Coming to San Jose, California, August 7-13, Seven Days of Art and Interconnectivity: ISEA2006 Symposium Registration Launches 33% discount for Early Bird Registration through June 15th. Registration: Hotels: Press Release.

Early Bird registrants also receive 20% discount on ticketed events including blockbusters like Peter Greenaway, Tulse Luper Live VJ version, Survival Research Laboratories, Builders Association/dbox, Super Vision, and Ryoji Ikeda's North American premiere of data.matrix.

The most progressive artists, cultural producers, media theorists and curators from around the world will be gathering in the birthplace of computing innovation - Silicon Valley - to share and discuss the latest ideas and practices about art and digital culture.

The ISEA2006 Symposium is taking place in conjunction with the inaugural ZeroOne San Jose: Global Festival of Art on the Edge and offers attendees an immersive, interactive, exposure to the art, ideas, theories, and new developments in the field of interactive media and digital art as it relates to the symposium themes of Community Domain, Interactive City, Transvergence, and the Pacific Rim.

Online pre-symposium paper abstracts and a pre-publishing model for Symposium presentations and participation, allows the public to join the discussions online both before and during the Symposium. This innovative structure is designed to enable lively, free conversations across disciplines, ideologies, and philosophical frame-works.

For One Week Only ISEA Registrants will have the first opportunity to purchase event tickets - tickets that are sure to sell out - in advance of General Public ticket launch. May 12 - May 19th, ISEA2006 Registration

Click Here to Sign Up.

About the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts: The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. The ISEA Symposium is an international conference on electronic art that is held every two years in different locations around the world and attracts attendees from over 50 countries. The Thirteenth International Symposium on Electronic Arts is being held in San Jose, California, August 7-13, 2006, in conjunction with the inaugural biennial ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.

About: ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge is an innovative, ground-breaking biennial art festival in the Silicon Valley designed to show exhibits, performances, workshops, and events that have been created using the newest developments in contemporary art practice. The festival's themed projects examine and reflect issues and experiences of everyday life. Artistic and revolutionary digital culture elements are woven throughout. A serious art event, ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge provides academics, artists, and technology enthusiasts an inside look at new territories in creative imagination and inventiveness. However, the event is also designed with facets of learning, play, and virtual technology that make it an enjoyable experience for families, students, teens, underground culture enthusiasts, and explorers of new millennium digital culture alike.

Many thanks to our sponsors: Adobe Systems, City of San Jose, San Jose State University, Comerica Bank, IDEO, Montgomery Hotel-Paragon Restaurant, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Knight-Ridder, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Sun Microsystems Inc., Flora Family Foundation, Arts Council Silicon Valley, IBM, Intel Corporation, DIVCO, Inc., and all the individual contributors and volunteers that make ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006 possible.

Steve Dietz
Director, ZeroOne: The Network
Director, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge: August 7-13, 2006

According to The Wireless Report, "investigative ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito were told by a "senior law enforcement official" that the government is tracking their phone numbers so they can find out who their confidential sources are. Ross and Esposito were advised that they should get some new cellphones immediately".

... "ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls".

... "Other sources have told us thatphone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation."

[The Blotter via The Wireless Report]

Consultancy Ferris Research recently calculated how much it would cost to archive voice calls -- an issue all the more intriguing in light of the government's phone records controversy. Ferris estimates that storing one hour of voice calls takes up about 5 megabytes. So if a user is on the phone for an hour 200 days a year, that adds up to 1 gigabyte of storage a year. That amount of storage costs between $1.60 and $2.10.

So, in theory, recording calls -- either by the government or corporations that want to keep tabs on employee activities -- would come at a trivial cost.

As an increasing number of phone calls are being routed via the Web, through Web-calling services, they are becoming easier to record than traditional phone calls, as they are in a digital format. Considering voice archiving's low cost, I think it's a real possibility that corporations -- and, potentially, the government -- could start to record phone calls.

reBlogged from The Tech Blog (Business Week)

Holy cow. MySpace is going to be offering downloads of 24 at $1.99 a pop, on pages sponsored by Burger King, the motto of which is 'Have It Your Way'.

Gawp.

Obligatory buzzword-congested blurb from over-stimulated Fox president of digital media:

“This is truly the perfect marriage of compelling content, an extremely creative advertising partner and the Internet’s leading site for young adults,” said Peter Levinsohn, the president, of digital media for the Fox Entertainment Group.

“It really exemplifies our overarching strategy of doing deals that make sense organically, and we have high hopes that MySpace users will find it an attractive offering.”

Yesterday, I had a discussion with the boy about how fast the world is changing. It's easy to forget on a day-to-day basis, but Burger King and MySpace distributing TV? Who'd have thought?

It was fun to think back to pre-internet days, and imagine what our 1980's incarnations would have thought of the world we're living in today. It's only 20 years, and yet.. mobile computers, the internet, online gaming, daily blogging, RFIDs, iris scanners at Heathrow (ugh), Shazam, Skype, eyeToy, Wii, Smart cars, being fingerprinted and photographed going to the USA, biometric ATMs, DisneySea. When you think about it, things have changed a metric sodload, most of it for the better, I think (except for the privacy-invading stuff).

The speed at which broadcast is changing is quite amazing. There are announcements like the above on an almost-daily basis these days. The cacophony of offerings by this time next year is going to be something else again, and in five years time..?

Hurry up, future!

Following up on my previous post about upcoming conferences, here’s another batch of conferences of interest to GTxA readers.

ACM Multimedia 2006 Interactive Arts Program
ACM Multimedia is the premier annual multimedia conference. The ACM MM Interactive Arts Program brings together the arts and multimedia communities to explore, discuss, and push the limits of both multimedia technology through the arts, and the arts through multimedia technology. They’re looking for both papers and interactive art exhibits. ACM MM will be held in Santa Barbara, California (USA), October 22-28, 2006. Submissions due June 1.

Future Play 2006
They’re looking for both paper and game submissions. The keynote speakers are Ken Perlin (NYU) and Don Daglow (Stormfront Studios). Future Play 2006 will be held October 10-12 in London, Ontario, Canada. Submissions are due July 28.

Gathering of Animated Life-like Agents
GALA 2006. The place to present your interactive virtual character in action! Special track and Jury Award of 350 euro for students. On-line showcase for the best entries in three categories. GALA 2006 will be held as part of the IVA 2006 conference in Marina del Rey, California (USA), August 21-23. Submissions due June 15.

The fallout from last week's allegations that several major telephone carriers turned over customer calling records to the National Security Agency continues, with all three companies -- AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon -- denying any wrongdoing. The three carriers have been on the end of a lot of criticism, perhaps looking at all the credit Qwest is getting for not playing ball with the NSA with a bit of envy, and it looks like all they're trying to do is save some face. They've issued vague denials that, for the most part, dance around the heart of the matter. They deny very specific allegations that are tangential to the underlying point, or say they won't comment on "national security matters". They also talk about only acting with "legal authorization", giving no indication of exactly where that authorization came from, like, say a judge, or just from one of the company's lawyers. AT&T also got dealt a setback in the whistleblower case alleging it gave the NSA illegal access to its users' internet traffic when a judge ruled against the company's motion to suppress some evidence, though the case must still survive a government motion to dismiss it for security reasons. What's really happened in both of these cases isn't clear, and it doesn't look like the truth is anywhere close to emerging. But, for the companies involved, the real damage may not come in the form of privacy lawsuits, but in damage to how consumers perceive them -- and some half-baked denials several days late probably won't do much to help.

Omidyar Network continues in its effort to reinvent philanthropy as a network enterprise. The online community, Omidyar.net, experimented with community-based funding last year, which led to a rich, passionate, and contentious online discussion. Having evaluated that experience and redesigned the process, O/Net has announced a new round of team-based funding, with a new process:

On June 1, 2006, Omidyar Network launches a $50,000 team-based collaborative funding project with the omidyar.net community.

In this funding project:

* The community will form small teams to propose funding the nonprofit organization(s) of their choice.
* These proposals will then be voted on by the larger community for funding.
* Nonprofit organizations named in the approved proposals will be funded directly by Omidyar Network.

Please see Team-Based Funding Project FAQ's for answers to common questions posed by the omidyar.net community.

There has been an interesting debate going on between Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Hamlet at New World Notes. It’s a discussion centered around the Second Life virtual Darfur Camp built by several activists to highlight the plight of refugees from the conflict in the Sudan.

Ethan’s contention is essentially that while it might geeky and cool to build a virtual refugee camp in a 3D “metaverse” environment, this should not be confused with actual activism that will make an impact on the horrible tragedy over there. His experience with real refugee camps make it difficult for him to stomach a sanitized, empty simulcrum of a refugee camp. He was particularly bothered by the pristine campfire in the center of the virtual camp. He contrasted this with the reality of cooking fires in Darfur’s camps

(Continued at Rickomatic.com)

Filed under: Digital Cameras, GPS, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

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Research paper by Tom Bridge: "Over the last few years, weblogs have developed a unique role in the mediasphere as both errata and appendix. Blogs are correcting journalists, they're covering stories that are ignored by modern media and making them part of the media matrix. This process is crucial because it's changing the way that mass media is covering stories and handling their business."

Tech Dirt has a funny post about the The Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank. One of PFF pet causes is spectrum allocation.

Earlier this year, they came out with a report saying that unlicensed spectrum stunted innovation -- despite a variety of counter-examples of products (WiFi, cordless phones, etc.) that make use of unlicensed spectrum.

The folks at PFF are back beating this drum again, focusing on how the FCC shouldn't turn "white space" spectrum into open spectrum, but instead auction it off to the highest bidder. White space spectrum is (more or less) spectrum the TV broadcasters have been granted, but don't use, which the FCC is looking to get into the hands of those who might actually use it.

PFF supporters include big telcos, of course. But it's hard to imagine the world would be better off if cordless phones, WiFi and Bluetooth were replaced with a "licensed" operator (for a modest monthly fee). Let's not forget that broadcasters get their (licensed) spectrum free.

CNET's Declan McCullagh has the latest on a Congressional effort to force ISPs to store your browsing and on-line history. Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year, claims the report. "The Internet Safety Act gives the attorney general broad discretion" in what data will be stored, claims McCullagh. "That generous wording could permit [Attorney General] Gonzales to order Internet providers to retain records of e-mail correspondents, Web pages visited, and even the contents of communications," he states.

Java app automatically downloads TV shows that you add to a subscriber list (like a pirate TiVo).

"Will Video for Food" is dedicated to helping video junkies make better viral videos, earn a side income on them, and stay current on the rapidly changing landscape of online video sites, tools and software. This is a spinoff blog from www.Revverberation.com. The editor of this blog also maintains www.CubeBreak.com, a video site for bored office workers.

An academic project that hacks congressional video, web 2.0 style. Using closed caption text from the CSPAN feed and OCR to compile metadata it provides a remix interface using AJAX.

Just got this info from Nick Fortugno at gameLab on what looks like a great game festival -- they are looking for submissions for those of you interested in Big Games!

MISSION
The Come Out & Play Festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
Come Out & Play is the first festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks and celebration, all focused on street games. The festival will have a headquarters in downtown Manhattan where participants can learn about upcoming games and see documentation of completed games. The games themselves will be run in a variety of public locations around New York City. From massive multi-player walk-in events to carefully constructed play performances, there will be something for every type of player. Throughout the festival players and designers will have the chance to interact during games and panels and jointly conceive the future of this growing form.

Electrical tape wearing thin holding together my old cell phone (Samsung i500), I decided it was time to give in and upgrade to a new phone. I drank the kool-aid on a 2 year Sprint contract given the discounts both on the phone and in my monthly service, and in the end settled on the Samsung a920. It's an EVDO enabled phone with Sprint's $15 unlimited monthly data service. Playing around with the mobile TV functionality (that's an extra $10/month but I was enjoying the first month free), I had one of those lightning bolt moments.

Why not stream my own video to the phone? Better yet, why not just automate my MythTV to convert my recorded programs and automatically have them ready to be streamed whenever I care to watch them on the phone?

A bit of research later, I discovered SlingBox can stream your tv to your phone, but it needs to be a Windows mobile phone and then there's the monthly service fees and the box to buy. I also found random mythtv devotees with similar ideas at least as far back as January 2005, but couldn't otherwise find a concise guide or more information. Inspired by ZooVision, I knew it was possible for users to stream their own content to their phone, it was just a matter of putting the pieces all together. A couple hours of tinkering later, and I've got a working solution... my "tivo" on my cell phone wherever there's sprint evdo access. So here are the steps:

1. Get MythTV up and running. I won't go into that, but it's worth the hassle even if I couldn't stream it to my cell phone.
2. Follow these directions which will get you an updated version of ffmpeg (named ffmpeg3gp) and a myth3gp script which, in combination, allow you to take Myth recorded video and convert it to 3gp, a mobile video format standard that most multimedia phones support. However, instead of using the myth3gp script from there, you'll likely want to use this myth3gp script as I've included a couple of necessary changes. Save that txt file as /usr/local/bin/myth3gp on your Myth box.
3. Create a directory to hold your 3gp videos on your Myth system. Open up the myth3gp script from the previous step and change the line that says:

   out="/mnt/drive2/myth3gp"

   to:

   out="/directory/for/saving/your/3gp/videos"

4. Install gpac. Once you've compiled and installed gpac, it will provide you with an executable called MP4Box which is used to convert the 3gp file from step two into a 3gp file that is streaming enabled. The myth3gp script calls MP4Box to take care of this for us.
5. Find an internet connected server which can house your 3gp videos and be available to stream them at will to your phone. On said server you'll need to install Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Installing it can be a bit of pain, but just be sure to have port 554 open so that it can handle the rtsp streaming protocol. For me, getting Darwin to work took the most effort. If your MythTV box has a static IP and is internet accessible, that should work fine, but in my case I'm uploading the videos to another server.
6. We're in the homestretch. We've got programs to convert Myth recorded video to a phone friendly format, and we've got a server that can stream them to our phone. We just now need an automated process to convert the video and upload it to the server running Darwin and we'll be in phone tv nirvana. Myth can do this automation for us. You'll need to exit out of Myth and run:

   mythtv-setup

   From there, choose the "General" menu item and hit enter until you get to the "Job Queue" screen. Put a checkmark in "Allow User Job #1 jobs and continue to the next screen until you get the page with label "User Job #1 description". Give it a description like "Myth 3GP" and for the command, use (note the quotes):

   /usr/local/bin/myth3gp %DIR%/%FILE% 
   
   "%STARTTIME%~~~%TITLE~~~%SUBTITLE%"

   Save your changes, exit, restart the mythbackend and restart Myth.
7. With Myth restarted, go into Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General and click through until you get the "General (Jobs)" page. On this page, put a check in the checkbox next "Run User Job #1 On New Recordings". This will ensure that our process gets run after each new recording. Important Note: For all existing recurring recordings that you had prior to setting up Myth3GP, you'll need to manually edit the recording options and in "Post Recording Processing", you'll need to switch its setting so that it says "Run 'Myth3GP'".
8. If your using your local Myth system for Darwin streaming, just be sure that Darwin knows where to find the 3gp files on your system. Otherwise, edit the myth3gp script from step number two and set the darwin_username, darwin_hostname and darwin_dir as appropriate for your external server. At the bottom of the script, it uses scp to transfer the file from your Myth system to your Darwin server. Though, for everything to be automated, you'll need to set up scp to not require a password. Directions for password free ssh/scp are short and sweet. Once you can transfer files between systems sans password, you are good to go.
9. The final step. On your Darwin machine, make sure you have a web server running (apache), php installed and place this php script somewhere in a web accessible folder. It's job is to scan your 3gp movie folder for movies and generate a webpage with rtsp:// links so that you can access your recordings from your phone. Edit the php script and change $directory to the directory path for your 3gp videos and set $hostname to your hostname. With that installed, you're done. You can manually convert your old recordings by starting the "Myth3GP" job on them and any new recording will automatically get the mobile treatment. Fire up the URL for the mythmobile php script and start streaming.

mph. Indeed some beautiful uses of fair use. Fair use to record the tv program to my hard drive... Fair use to convert the video format to one viewable by my cell phone... Fair use to stream it to my cell phone for my own personal enjoyment. Now imagine trying to do any of this with the broadcast flag in place.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a website here. The website is very much a community and collaboration digital creature. Several features contribute to rolling out the latest information about the emerging laptop. Included is a website wiki that encourages public contributions while retaining content control by the OLPC team itself. The team-focused OLPC wiki page also links out to the “comprehensive description of the project” to be found at Wikipedia.

Check out this just-posted interview with Negativland's Mark Hosler on MNstories.

He says "You don't get total control" when you put a creative work out into the world. If you want total control, keep it in your bedroom.

I tend to agree. That's not to say you shouldn't get paid for your creative work. But if you put something out into the public consciousness, you've already surrendered how that work will be perceived, contextualized, and interpreted. Or even mentally remixed, you might say.

Our lives are mashups. The whole fucking world is a mashup.

For this reason I'm increasingly against the "No Derivatives" clause of Creative Commons licenses. Let me give you an example. A couple weeks ago I was feeling a bit dispirited about staying up all night doing web production. A piece of art by Hugh Macleod *almost* represented how I felt. It was a purple scribble that said "We can't go on like this." I made it red and changed it to say "I can't go on like this" and posted it on my blog.

While Hugh kindly says I can do whatever I want with his art for personal use, his CC license says "No derivatives." Those conflict. That license says I can look at his work, and remix it in my head, and create a personalized version of it, but I can't show anybody. I can't recreate or regurgitate my experience of Hugh's art - according to that CC license. Well, I say I can and I do.

This is particularly true in the digital age. Hugh is not losing anything (especially monetarily) by my personal remix of his art. You can say the same of using commercial music and images in your videos. If you're not trying to redistribute or profit from another's copyrighted work, why NOT include it in your creative palette?

The world around us is our creative palette. We have the right to express the world around us, as artists and human beings.

(END RANT)

Atmel and Wavesat said Tuesday they were working together in California to design a deployable WiMax Customer Premise Equipment that will cost under $100.

Nokia expects more user-generated content on mobile Web

While mobile telecommunications providers worldwide are spurring on content providers to target the mobile space, Nokia is expecting that half of web content accessible to mobile phones would be user-generated.

[...] "It’s personal empowerment, especially when mobile phones become commodities and people prefer to use them over their PCs. With their phones, they could share photos, videos and post these on their blogs. The more the devices and services are available, the more user content can be generated," Nokia Asia Pacific Multimedia Experiences director Jawahar Kanjilal said.

A Nokia-sponsored research conducted last year, which covered 5,500 respondents in 11 countries, showed that 44 percent want to replace their standalone digital cameras with phones that have integrated cameras.

Another 67 percent want to use their phones to download music and browse the Internet.

Via Amy

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about this curious socio-cultural practice in Uganda: veejaying: the act of translating in real-time foreign movies for the audience:

“Veejaying” is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which - for many veejays - often means taking considerable creative license.

o jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs.
(…)
The festival features a “Veejay slam,” in which some of the country’s best-known video jockeys display different styles and compete for the best audience response.

Why do I blog this? it’s curious to see that this practice goes further than just translating, and it eventually lead to new forms of entertainment in the forms of slam competitions or DVD editions.

A new form of tinkering cultural content.

Researchers in LA are trying to help world’s biggest media companies and their high-profile clients understanding the divided consumer’s attention span (source: NYT):

The Emerging Media Lab is run by Interpublic, a holding company for media- buying firms like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L’Oréal and Microsoft have been using the lab to try to figure out how to reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously.
(…)
Market researchers as a whole are struggling to understand the realities of what often is called “concurrent media usage.”
(…)
For advertisers, the challenge is getting the message across in one medium while the consumer is simultaneously active in several media.
(…)
In the Emerging Media Lab, advertisers can observe “engagement.” Using cameras that feed back into an observation room, advertisers watch consumers use old technologies or try new ones.

oes seem that a consumer who is multitasking is not devoting an equal amount of interest to all those activities. “Terms like multitasking imply equal attention,” said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. “But cognitive science tells us this isn’t possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages.”

Research or market research?
It’s clear that they are facing a real challenge but I tend to be quite pessimistic towards the advertisement world, which is actually not so much of a problem to me…

"Prepare for the launch of AOL Uncut (currently in open beta), a near perfect clone of YouTube."

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Vivid Entertainment (warning: adult content) will be offering movies for download onto DVD's that can be played on any DVD player.

Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.

It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.

"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.

nemanowvivid" title="Cinemanowvivid" src="http://mike.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/cinemanowvivid.jpg" border="0" />

The $19.95 movies will use a new form of copyprotection (not CSS) that will prevent them from being copied.

Mark Jenkins, the Wooster Collective, the Graffiti Research Lab, and Geek Graffiti.

Eyebeam and the Wooster Collective present a night of technology based graffiti projects. Mark Jenkins, the Graffiti Research Lab, and students from the Parsons Geek Graffiti course show a range of experimental work in new materials and techniques for urban communication.

Monday, May 22nd
5:30 – 8pm
Eyebeam
540 W. 21st Street,
New York, NY 10011

Originally from Wooster Collective / A Celebration of Street Art, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 16, 2006 at 03:19 PM

The 3D cards that power games are increasingly enabling new interfaces for music, merging the visual and aural realms. One of the most stunning experiments yet is the Fijuu, which just premiered in its second-generation form as a commission for Cybersonica sound art show in London. (Earlier versions have been seen around since 2004.) Fijuu lets visitors sculpt sound, then record the results on tracks, leaving sonic “footprints” as the sound creator describes them. The interface is entirely controlled by a standard PlayStation 2 controller, as shown in this screen grab.

It could be an isolated wonder, were it not for the entirely open source nature of the project. The code for Fijuu itself is open (though primarily as a model, as it’s built for this specific installation), and everything in it was creating with open source software, from Debian Linux to the phenomenal OGRE 3D engine that handles the 3D magic. Figuring out how music should translate to three dimensions, both in terms of visuals and interface, is no small problem. Open sourcing the results is essential if other artists are to take this idea and develop it further. In the meantime, Fijuu is incredibly gorgeous, which is why I’ve officially dubbed it “the hotness” on behalf of the CDM staff.

For more on Fijuu, see the official project page (with source), an interview with the creator in the Cybersonica video, and further discussion from Cybersonica’s curator, Chris O’Shea, at his blog, Pixelsumo.

3D, alternative interfaces, cybersonica, installations, interactive, Linux, open source, PlayStation, sound art, synesthesia, visual

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

While on the topic of locating yourself using sound, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to Freesound, the fantastic community sound library (currently pushing some 17,000+ Creative Commons-licensed samples). If you’re not yet familar with Freesound, you can broadcast your recordings to the planet, free for use in music worldwide, and pull recordings without attracting the attention of intellectual property lawyers.

Rather than dig through samples by abstract categories, you can use Freesound’s geotags to pull the exact ambience of certain parts of the world. It gives you the power to soak up the vibe of the beach at Playa del Medio without having to actually suffer through . . . erm . . . being at the beach. Okay, bad example. But while there’s the expected bias toward the U.S. and Europe, field recordings are slowly finding their way from other corners of the globe, too.

Aside from samples, it’s not hard to imagine geotags being used to help find musical collaborators near you . . . especially as latency increases over longer distances.

Community, Creative Commons, mapping, recording, Sound design, sounds

Slate plans to begin "textcasts" of stories to iPods, Adweek reports.

Users can receive the full text of its daily "Today's Papers" feature, which aggregates the days news. The downloaded story will appear in the iPod's display window. Slate will deliver the text attached to 15-minute silent audio file.

Sascha Meinrath says HandsofftheInternet.com is yet another prime example of astroturf in action.

I can only suspect that telecom incumbents pay some sort of professional PR group to create websites like this specifically to misinform and mislead the public. So I decided to start an investigation to figure out who HandsOff actually was.

A look at the "Membership Organizations" section -- and low and behold, membership organizations included: AT&T, Bell South, Cingular Communications, The National Association of Manufacturer and a host of industry front groups

Now, this is rather enlightening, and I probably could have stopped there. But what happens if you delve deeper?...

The Portland Oregonian editorialized (anonomously) that Net Neutrality is a bad thing:

Congress can't always tell what's best for the Internet, especially in anticipating problems that haven't yet occurred.

Net neutrality -- the idea that everybody should be equal in cyberspace -- has gained momentum as a populist movement but seems no closer to becoming law. A House committee recently rejected a Democrat-led effort to legislate the principle, and a current Republican-sponsored draft telecommunications bill mostly avoids the subject...

Rich Bader who runs EasyStreet Online Services, the largest independent ISP in Portland, has complete coverage of the Net Neutrality issue. Bader is pro-netneutrality. But he doesn't hit you over the head with his side of the story.

David Isenberg is the real deal. He’s put together the most definitive presentation about the Net Neutrality issue I’ve seen. It’s here with audio narration. For those of you looking for the “dumbed down” version of the issue, here’s a video, while not entirely accurate in my view, introduces the subject to lay people.

Anonomous editorials are a vestige of the 19th century. They should stimulate people to think and consider the issue. Not pitch a company line.

Advance/Newhouse Communications -- which owns the Oregonian -- is linked in a joint mobile partnership with Sprint Nextel. The newspaper never mentioned that fact.

Who would you be more inclinded to believe?

The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible.

The presence of so much cool content collected in one easily accessible and fee-absent place makes it easier to turn a blind eye (Napster, anyone?).

Welcome to Hollywood's Napster moment. If movie studios hope to dodge the fate of the music industry, whose growth was cut short in part by illegal downloading, they need to come up with a solution to illegal copying. Part of that is to develop a model for legal movie downloads over the Net. Hollywood has taken baby steps in that direction. Studios have two Web sites, Movielink.com and CinemaNow.com, that offer movies via the Net. But downloads are slow, and the movies, which cost a few dollars to rent and $20 to own, can't be burned to a DVD. So studios also are prodding the feds to put some fear into pirates. The goal: stem the $6.1 billion that the industry estimates was lost to illegal copying in 2005. (Worldwide box-office sales were $23.5 billion.) Half of pirated material is in DVDs sold on street corners, but $3 billion comes from pirates stealing digital movies and posting them online. And stolen movies are also sent via the Net to facilities where the illicit DVDs are made. So, "the Internet is very much involved in all forms of piracy even if you're talking about street piracy," says Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Lee Dryburgh — a friend and recovering SS7 signalling guru — has stumbled upon a barbed and thoroughly wicked anonymous denunciation of the "Quality of Service" efforts of some distressed incumbent telcos. He’s posted it up over at TelephonyDiscussion.com.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:45 AM

---

Comments: (post your comment)

Wired News: Brave New World for Public Media

I have the immense pleasure to be sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois at Chicago for the First Monday conference, FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content. (And, what is more, I am sitting next to the stellar Eszter Hargittai, another weery traveler fresh off the Beyond Broadcast meeting.) Without a doubt, it is the most internationally and racially Internet event I have ever attended, in real time, at least. I arrived in time to hear Michael Goldhaber's paper on "The Value of Openness in Attention Economy" which posited that the "trust authenticity" that blogs enable will replace the tradition peer-reviewed journal approach. Nick Jankowski of New Media and Society just disagreed, arguing that a blog will not help a junior professor get tenure. Fascinating question– I wonder what Daniel Drezner might say?)

The conference and First Monday itself walk the talk: volunteer-driven, with the scarce resources available to them devoted for travel stipends for what is, from what I have heard from audience questions, is an impressive set of scholars. (The organizers even worked what surely must be a daunting UIC bureacracy to provide us with wireless access. Thanks!)

Last week, CNN correspondent Joe Johns stopped Sen. Ted Stevens and interviewed him with a small digital camera in a Senate hallway. The story aired, and Stevens filed a formal complaint with the Radio-Television Correspondents Association saying he didn't realize he was on camera (it was a "digital camera more commonly used for stills.") Now the RTCA has ruled it was not an ambush interview, but the incident has escalated the fight between broadcast journalists -- who are restricted to an interview area -- and print journalists who can roam the halls with audio recorders. If you ask me, good for Joe Johns.

I was going through the file folders of my handheld digital audio recorder throwing away some extraneous files when I found some audio I recorded for a podcast at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow last September. The audio included an interview with Brian Rowan of the broadcasting equipment manufacturer Clyde Broadcast Products. Clyde Broadcast has been working with a group of Scottish secondary schools to develop a network of low-power radio stations programmed by students. The interview, which is about six minutes long, was recorded in a very noisy expo hall with one of the student radio stations broadcasting in the background. Combine that with Brian's Scottish accent, the interview takes a bit of concentration to follow, so I'd recommend listening to it with headphones if possible.

Enjoy the podcast. -andy

What can you do if you have a tiny marketing budget? The main message on this blog is that if you can't out-spend, you can out-teach. But another way to look at this is to out-inspire the competition. He who helps his users do more--reach more--engage more (I'm trying really hard to avoid saying, "kick ass"), might have the advantage.

The goal of this web site is to contain all information which applies to Flash on the Sony PSP.

More evidence that word of mouth drives business growth:

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

The figures are based on surveys conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science and The Listening Company in the United Kingdom and compared against 2003 and 2004 sales data from banks, mobile phone networks, supermarkets and car manufacturers.

What this means for companies: Get baseline figures comparing your word of mouth to that of your competitors. A word of mouth goal or a composite Customer Evangelism Score makes it easier for employees know how well they're doing in the word of mouth arena.

Via: WOMMA

There is now a perl XSPF module on CPAN. This is written by Dan Sully from Slim Devices for use on their Squeezebox device. What this means is that you can enter the URL of a playlist in the Squeezebox controller and listen to it on your living room speakers.

Can we create a world where content is commonly created like software - with roadmaps, feature feedback, and versioning? We see parts of this emerging in officially sanctioned fansub contests and open source documentary projects. What comes next?

(Ryan or I should have a more explicit blog post in a few days or so. In the meantime, check out the Iterative Media entry on the Beyond Broadcast wiki as well as Jon Garfunkel's notes on 'Constructive Media'. -kc.)

[bliki | What is a bliki?]

7th Annual Organizers' Collaborative
Grassroots Use of Technology Conference
Saturday, June 17, 2006 -- 8:30 to 5:30
U of Massachusetts, Boston
Wheatley Hall - Snowden Auditorium-Register

Schedule

We aim to present tools that make the sometimes challenging tasks associated with nonprofits and organizing much easier to accomplish, so that our groups and movements can better achieve their goals.

presentation at this conference will be delivered by folks from the Citizen Action Team., who used grassroots technology to organize aid for hurricane Katrina relief victims.

CONFIRMED WORKSHOPS
Here are the workshops confirmed as of 5/9:

o register your domain name and find a place to put your web site -- Jamie Mcclelland, May First Technology Collective
* Technology Decision-Making for the Non-Technical Executive -- Alissa Fencsik, Harbinger Partners
* Changing the Look and Feel of Your Content Management System -- Ben Dimaggio, IT Consultant
* Simple, Cheap and Secure Options for Credit Card Donations -- Dan MacNeil, Community Software Labs
* Getting Your Message out in the Age of Spam -- Panel convened by Jamie McClelland of MayFirst
* Effective websites for community groups: tips and tools using Plone, an open source CMS-- Nate Aune, Jazkarta Consulting
* Moving from the desktop to hosted web publishing: a case study in coordination of a multi-state grassroots campaign -- Cliff Graves and Josh Myles, IT Consultants
* Helping Your Computer System Grow Up -- Adam Frost, ComputerCareAndLearning.com
* Organizer to Organizer: What do you do with all that data in the database -- Sarah Bennett with Eric Weltman and Amy Mello
* Tech Workers Unite! Organizing the people who make technology happen -- Jennifer Doe, Mass Jobs With Justice
* Leveraging your Members for Political Change -- Marc Eisenberg and Steve Daigneault, Kintera

"The user interface is a pair of illuminating gloves that can be used to track intuitive hand gestures like grabbing, pulling, reaching and rotating."

Originally posted by deusx from del.icio.us/tag/future, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 14, 2006 at 10:10 AM

Professor Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University just gave a fascinating talk about her research on how college students use the Internet, the digital divide that exists in terms of how people use the Net, and its policy implications. Here are some notes. -andy

The digital divide: We need to move beyond the binary thinking of haves and have nots and start thinking about the second-level digital divide - differences between people who are online and how they're using the Internet.

Various factors influence IT use - socioeconomic status, equipment, autonomy, social support, level of experience. And skills play a major part in influencing how they use digital media. But how do all of these factors interrelate? What's the relationship between skills and socioeconomic status, for example?

She tries to focus her research on average users rather than niche groups. The average person comes up with things you'd never imagine as they try to figure out how to manouver online.

She collected data from 270 young adults in a fall 2004 phone survey. She found that people with higher education had higher levels of online skills. But what really mattered was whether or not they had autonomy in their use - could they use it at home on their own terms.

People in more privileged positions might be using the Internet in ways that really benefit them - this adds to the divide.

Now she's looking at college student use of the Internet, based on 1,300 students at University of Illinois/Chicago (UIC) between Feb and March 2006.

Demographics: 58 percent female, less than 50% white - very diverse.

Used the internet for six years on average, 12 hours a week, with 80%+ using it several times a day. Around 87.5% of their use is at home, with only 8.2 percent in a library or lab, and 1.7 percent at work.

When asked how often students visit blogs, 29.1 percent visit personal blogs of friends and family on a daily basis, with 60 percent doing it sometimes. Interestingly, the least likely category of blogs they access are political blogs, even though these are the blogs emphasized in mainstream media.

Types of sites used: facebook, flickr, google, craigslist, livejournal, blogger, delicious, dig, skype, youtube, myspace. Facebook was most popular - 78 percent - and 50 percent for myspace.

64 percent have ever visited the Chicago tribune, 62 percent BBC, druge 3 percent, instapundit 1 percent, daily kos 1 percent.

Most popular activities: getting info for school work, downloading/ listening to music; looking up a word or definition; finding a fact about something.

41 percent knew what an aggregator/newsreader was; 36 never read privacy statements.

User backgrounds and types of activities: there are statistically significant differences in behavior.

Groups that use the Web less frequently: Women, African Americans, Latinos, parents with limited education, people who don't access the net at home much, people who don't own laptops, people who know less about the Internet

Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality. Skill differences may result in differential web use, suggesting different opportunities. It's not enough to focus on technical access; training and support are absolutely necessary.

tag: beyondbroadcast

The Communication Mods exhibition in Toronto features five works by Mark Argo, that explore human-to-human communication through the process of modification. Each piece asks the audience to participate by submitting some of their music, photos or videos using laptops and cameraphones. The end result is a snapshot of a particular community at a specific time and place though the catalog of collected media.

WhereTheHeartIs asks the audience to use their cameraphones to contribute iconic images of Toronto to a screen in the gallery. The images are then sent to small screen which Mark Argo wears over his heart. During the two-month exhibition, this installation will create a direct link between the artist and his home city, regardless of location.


WhereTheHeartIs, .dot.dot.dot and hugMS

hugMS and .dot.dot.dot are two bluetooth objects designed to augment mobile phone communication. The first one attempts to transmit hugs, using SMS messages. Sensors inside the device read how long and how hard you have squeezed and format a text message based on your hug (movie). The other, .dot.dot.dot, is a wearable display that shows to the people around you who you are talking to, or what you are messaging (movie).

CoDeck, developed in collaboration with D.Melinger, S.Van Every, Ami Wolf, is a platform for community media sharing embodied in a late 1970s Betamax machine. The community can upload media using a laptop or local desktop computer, or record an 'on-the-spot' message by pushing record on the video deck and speaking into the attached video camera. The CoDeck is connected to a TV and plays a constant stream of community-shared video content. Written comments can be added to each video, displaying at the bottom of the screen while it plays. (video: mpeg4 )

CoDeck and Bass-Station

The Bass-Station, with Ami Wolf, is a mobile and networked community-media space housed inside a vintage ghettoblaster. Contained in the ghettoblaster is a modern computer that creates a localized wireless network, and features bulletin boards, chat rooms and music. Music can be uploaded, downloaded and played by using a laptop or the knobs on the front of the boom-box.

York Quay Centre, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, through July 9th.

Other works by Mark Argo: Left, Right, Center - Your Pictures Your Politics, the Nicebots.

Via Fabrica.

I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a "new generation of storytelling online". It's described as:

"MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat at the table in the early stages of content creation and production."

Together with the media industry, we can create unique, made-for-broadband experiences that use video, interactive editorial, online community, and more to take storytelling to the next level."

Advertising is one of the main pitches for this, as it is with anything Yahoo does these days (Y! CEO Terry Semel said recently: "Our fundamental business is selling advertising..."). So that disturbs me a little - is MSN Originals just going to be another vehicle for media to assail us with their adverts? Or is it really about creating new forms of storytelling for the Web?

MSN Originals has already struck up partnerships with Hollywood production studio and distribution company Reveille (which has produced tv shows like NBC's The Office and The Biggest Loser, FX's 30 Days, MTV's Date My Mom) and with Be Jane Inc., a multimedia content producer and web community for women's home improvement.

But is anyone else disturbed by this statement?

"We're excited to team up with the media industry to drive new innovation in online advertising and branded content integration. Together we will push the boundaries of what interactive means for consumers and marketers by bringing together the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Redmond," said Microsoft senior director of the MSN Branded Entertainment and Experiences Team Gayle Troberman.

Call me artsy-fartsy, but MSN Originals seems to be more focused on advertising and marketing -- than on storytelling. Indeed it seems very much like a Web version of a television network - the network (MSN) gets original programming from content producers, wraps it up in advertising and then broadcasts it to consumers.

Second Life Virtual Festival

While E3 rages on over Stateside, here in the UK it's wellies and arm-waving in the Dundee sunshine: Radio 1's One Big Weekend, all weekend, all free, all festival fabulous: starting tomorrow. And if you're nowhere near Dundee or didn't get a ticket, you can still join in, because the Radio 1 team have only gone and built a virtual festival in the also-free Second Life:

Every virtual festival-goer will get a wee digital radio to take away with them, which will broadcast Radio 1 in-game, wherever you are.

There's also, I hear, these Radio 1 teeshirts for your avatars. And dancing. And a chance that you could appear on-screen at the actual festival - the jumbotrons may or may not take screengrabs of the in-game festivalgoers.

Obvious disclaimer: I work for the BBC, and I work with the guys who made this happen, and I TOTALLY {heart} them. This blog is still all my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. Disclaimer over.

If you're in there, say hi! Just load up SL, search for Radio 1, and head over - but not now, because it opens tomorrow morning, GMT. Or IM me, and I'll teleport you there: Crystaltips Pavlova. [Posted by Alice on Wonderland] [Related]

"Time and again, bloggers draw their readers' attention to what they have read in papers, such as the Times." Successful bloggers will be: branded, well-connected, brilliant, or link aggregators.

richdun writes "Yahoo! is carrying an AP story explaining how ISPs are worried large streaming videos could 'choke the Internet.' This is used as a yet another reason for tiered pricing for access to content providers." From the article: "Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example."

Marc Cuban’s rant about blogging vs. traditional media doesn’t really break any new ground, but this observation did get me thinking:

99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money. Which is exactly what leads to the resentment between bloggers and traditional media and why blogging on traditional media websites will find it tough to be successful.

There is almost no one who makes a living at blogging — blogging is fundamentally an avocation (and nothing suggests this will change any time soon). In fact, most “user-generated content” is created as an avocation.

The debate over avocational media has generally focused on the quality and “validity” of avocational media relative to that of vocational media. Regardless of the actual differences (real or perceived) on those scales, there is an inherent difference between activities we pursue to pay the bills and activities we pursue for other reasons.

Media has traditionally been vocational because most people could not afford the time or resources necessary to create media on any meaningful scale in their spare time. Now that technology has made avocational media possible, we see the emergence of entirely new motivations for and approaches to content creation.

Marc Cuban bemoans the limitations place on traditional media companies that are accountable to shareholders and the limitations on individual media producers who are accountable to their employers. Of course, that’s easy for someone who’s independently wealthy to say.

While avocational media is “liberating” and absent any such limitations, it is also largely absent any accountability. One might argue that the blogosphere is its own ombudsman, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

I think the tension between blogging and traditional media that Marc Cuban points to is driven largely by the vocational/avocational divide.

But there are vocational media companies like BusinessWeek that have successful blogs, and there are a handful of bloggers, like Darren Rowse, who make a living at blogging.

What’s interesting is that when you look closely at these vocational blogs, they occupy a constructive middle ground that holds many lessons for “rigid” vocational media and “unfettered” avocational media, e.g. with freedom comes responsibility.

Heaven forfend we might actually find some middle ground, where vocational media “loosens up” and begins embracing the new forms of media pioneered by avocational bloggers and avocational media “grows up” and starts behaving more accountably — as if their livelihoods depended on it.

Kent Bye is here for Beyond Broadcast and showed me his recent post, Video: Media, Politics & Social Change: An Overview of The Echo Chamber Project | Echo Chamber Project:

"This video provides explains how the media fits into political and social change and specifically addresses the following questions:

* How is the Press supposed to Work?
* How and why does the Press act like an Echo Chamber?
* How is media changing?
* What does it mean that the 'news is becoming a conversation'?
* Will these new media changes affect the nature of politics?
* How does The Echo Chamber Project fit into all of this?"

Michel Bauwens: I would like to introduce two important concepts that I have found in a document by Ezio Manzini

Multi-local Societies = a network of interconnected communities and places, at the same time, open and localised

Cosmopolitan localism =  the balance between being localised (rooted in a place and in the community related to that place), and open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things and money

Here’s a relevant quote explaining them in more detail:

“Cosmopolitan localism, intended as the result of a particular condition characterised by the balance between being localised (rooted in a place and in the community related to that place), and open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things and money. This is quite a delicate balance as, at any time, one of the two sides can prevail over the other leading to an anti-historical closure or, on the opposite side, it can lead to a destructive openness of the local social fabric and of its peculiar features.

‘'’Creative communities, cooperative networks and cosmopolitan localism are, as it has been said, the building blocks for a new vision: the vision of a sustainable society that can be defined as a multi-local society. I.e. a network of interconnected communities and places, at the same time, open and localised.”’

Small is not small and local is not local

In the framework of the multi-local society the dominant ideas of “global” and “local”, and the ones of “large” and “small” are challenged. In fact, for its nature the multi-local society is an highly connected world. And, in this kind of world, the small is not small: it is instead (or it can be instead) a knot in a network (the real dimension of which is given by the number of links with other elements of the system). Similarly, and for the same reasons, the local is not local, but it is (or it can be) a locally based, cosmopolitan community.
In this conceptual and practical framework, the multi-local society appears as a society based on communities and places  that are, at the same time, strong in their own identity, embedded in a physical place and open and connected to other places/communities .

In other words: in the multi-local society, communities and places are junctions of a network, points of connection among short networks, which generate and regenerate the local social and production fabric and long networks, which connect that place and that community with the rest of the world. Junctions that connect  “long global networks” with “short local networks” and that, doing so, provide support to organizational forms and production and service systems based on the subsidiary principle (that is: to do on a larger scale only what cannot be done on a smaller scale, i.e. at a local level).

Today, the vision of the multi-local society is still far form the mainstream, but it indicates a direction that, for several reasons, can be successfully undertaken.  In fact, not only it is locally practicable, given that, as it has been said,  it is based on real cases of social innovation (the creative communities and the collaborative networks), but also it is coherent with (another) strong driver of change: the rise of the distributed economies as a potentially successful option.”

Part two of CSI's season finale airs next Thursday night, and CBS.com is pulling out all the stops. First, you can watch two of the producers' favorite CSI episodes online for free (and no ads as far as I can see.) And second, they've created a cool Flash animation (teased on air) that allows you to zoom in and analyze a crime scene for clues that will come in handy when watching the finale. (Thanks, Jan!)

This afternoon at COOP2006, I enjoyed a short paper by “Supporting Collaborative Reflection with Passive Image Capture” by Rowanne Flec and Geraldine Fitzpatrick.

Her PhD research is about how the a technology such as Microsoft’s Sensecam can support reflective thoughts in different situations (teacher’s practices, everyday reflections… learning from experience).

The SenseCam is a digital camera that has a light sensor and a temperature sensor (allows to trigger images to be taken)… a passive images capture tool. Then you can get a storyboard of the pictures taken.

She ran an expriment in which students when to an arcade to play games with the SenseCam. They played the game and then went back to their HCI class in which they had to discuss some HCI questions. Some groups had the images, some others not (two experimental conditions). She looked at the “goodness” of answers and the number of issues raised in discussion.

Results:
- discussion-led use of images: to ground the conversation (referential communication), as an objective record, to talk about something missed by partner or “just in case”
- image-led discussion: trigger memory, confirm/disconfirm memory, reveal something missed at time (”it’s quite useful for getting a look at what you’re actually because we did not use those buttons in the game”.

Why do I blog this? I am actually interested both by the study and the tool. I would be super happy to have this sort of tool for my research project about location-based applications and about video games. It would be a nice way to get some traces of the activity that I’d be able to use to get back to the users and discuss them.
Here is how it’s described by MS:

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.

trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this light change transition is detected and the room image is captured with an ultra wide angle or fish-eye lens.
(…)
The sensor data (motion, light, temperature, and near infrared images) is recorded for later correlation with other user data, for example in the MyLifeBits system. (…)MyLifeBits will allow the large number of images generated daily to be easily searched and accessed. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Now, can you handle it, or do I have to write it out in braille and shove it up your ass? - The Gauntlet

BetaNews reports Nokia and Google plan to announce Tuesday a version of Nokia's Internet tablet preinstalled with the Google Talk.

The Nokia 770 WiFi Tablet (below) would be available globally for about $390. The Google Talk service would allow for free voice conversations and instant messaging.

There's the gauntlet. Run with it.

AT&T's WiFi TV is getting competition from on-line video hosting services like YouTube, that allow users to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDAs. ComVu is working with Modeo, which is rolling out DVB-H services in the US, and expects to be operational in 30 major US cities throughout 2007. It allows live broadcasts from a PocketPC to millions.

In other news, Skype is now offering real-time language translation services for Skype voice calls with 150 languages supported. A live human supplies the interpretation through a partnership with Voxeo and Language Line Services.

It costs $2.99 per minute and you can use this on the fly with no scheduling. You can get an interpreter on average in 45 seconds after an initial request.

Paul Golding writes:

In the mobile setting the user is frequently motivated by an intent to find something out fast because they want to do something else there and then, like make a phone call, book a flight, catch a train etc. This "saving time" objective is distinct from the "killing time" one. In the "saving time" frame of mind, there's almost zero tolerance to anything remotely like surfing (i.e. faffing) around. In that setting, the whole web paradigm falls apart very quickly, especially if it's actually the standard mega-screen web experience shoe-horned into a mobile nano-screen.
...
Therefore, it seems perfectly obvious that any self-respecting site that wants to extend its wares to the billion mobile windows in the world should contain metadata to answer these simple questions and this is all that gets dished up to a mobile device, most likely ranked in order of most actionable data first, like phone number (one click to dial it), then address (one link to map it) and so on. After all, the world of going to sites via search engines is a rather uncluttered affair of visually uninteresting, but apparently useful, text-only descriptions and links - albeit presumably relevant ones. Once at the destination site we are looking for answers to those questions, not fluffy flash movies and the like.

Andy Carvin just started "Learning Now," a new blog for PBS on "the crossroads of Internet culture and education." Yesterday, he discussed a new bill from Congress that would that would

require schools and libraries to block access to online social networks…According to the proposed legislation, the bill

prohibits access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room through which minors may easily access or be presented with obscene or in- decent material; may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults may easily access other material that is harmful to minors.

Andy adds this caveat:

The bill does have a loophole for allowing educational uses of online social networks. The legislation states that the filtering may be switched off "during use by an adult or by minors with adult supervision to enable access for educational purposes." It remains to be seen whether schools will allow educators to deactivate the filter to allow such access, given the poor track record many schools have for letting educators make decisions over which sites get filtered and when.

The suit is modeled on the human skeletal form using rotational sensors placed on the joints. The GypsyMIDI simply plugs into a MIDI interface and arm movements are converted into a real-time stream of MIDI data. The mapping interface eXo-software allows the user to define how the movements are translated into MIDI control, including the ability to trigger notes, generate continuous control commands or even play scales.

If anything, releasing the raw footage via CC license would revitalize interest in the film as people compared the raw footage to the finished product. One might even imagine a double-header at a movie theater -- the original vs. the remix.

This post is intended for individuals who learn best by example. Most of the listed tutorials come complete with instructions and source code.

Apparently you don't! Who'd have thunk?

The people behind Outfoxed are building a distributed network of volunteer documentarians and helpers.

Using the OKN system, people in Africa, Asia and Latin America can create digital content in their own language, which is then exchanged with others through networks of existing community Access Points staffed by what OKN calls ‘Community Reporters’.

Minnesota Public Radio's participatory media effort.

Electrical engineering students at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created the world’s largest 3D-display. The display consists of 8,000 suspended ping pong balls that each contain a red LED light.

Deborah Scranton described making The War Tapes as "directing through instant message" in her talk at beyondbroadcast. "We will tell your story," was what she told the soldiers. She got five volunteers. She trained them on mini-dv cameras, tripods, blank tapes, and her IM screename. The solidiers came up with ways to rig the cameras to their helmets, tanks, etc... They shot 800 hours. Tape took 2 weeks to get home. Soldiers were on IM with her all the time. She'd watch the tapes and then talk about them on IM. Deborah never went to Iraq. It interfered with the goal of the film. The soldiers were participants. Deborah and the crew at home were doing their jobs. It's a participatory production indeed. I haven't seen the film. But I'm looking forward to it. And I'm sure the success of The War Tapes is going to stimulate interest in more participatory cinema. It was the web and IM that helped make this happen. And it will be interesting to see how network-connected cameras change this. However, there's still the problem of producing a traditional linear film. There needs to be a better way to achieve the goal of sharing the lives of the participants, yet still providing directorial control. Interesting dilemma.

In what has clearly been a busy day for Panasonic, the company today announced that it has begun developing technology to record HD video onto Secure Digital (SD) cards using the AVCHD format. This format, which was also announced today, will be implemented in the DVD camcorder, as well.

"Panasonic's efforts to develop the technology to record HD images onto SD Memory Cards and construct a new playback and editing environment, in addition to its establishing the AVCHD standard for 8 cm DVDs, will serve to further stimulate development of products that take advantage of the characteristics of both media," said Mr. Akihiro Nakatani, Director of Video Camera Business Unit, Panasonic AVC Networks Company.

The manufacturer has already put one SD-based camcorder on the market, the standard definition SDR-S100, which was released in September of last year. Panasonic did not specify any specific models, either DVD or SD-based, that will utilize the AVCHD format. Burt Desmond, Vice President of the Optical Group in Charge Product and Marketing, was able to confirm, however, that the public could expect to see products delivered "in late 2006 or early 2007, depending on the market."

Just listened to the 'What the Broadcasters are doing' panel at Beyond Broadcast. I'm always surprised at the number of audience members who choose to spend their mic time poo-pooing 'broadcast' for being inaccessible and not being inclusive. But all of that's a given.

Broadcast grew up in an era of two World Wars, the mass industrialization and institutionalization of society, and the invention of the Superblock. Broadcast works for institutions and the State while failing to represent the diverse perspectives of the individual. While cablecast is limited by definition (closed-circuit), Broadcast is limited by good old fashioned physics and geography. Broadcast doesn't scale down. So what does?

If you're reading this post, you've answered the question.

Bruce Schneier, in a Wired story, ‘Everyone Wants to ‘Own’ Your PC’, classifies DRM along with worms and viruses as all being specifically intended to remove control of a computer from the user/owner.

This is a particularly succinct quote:

“When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is designed to serve others, over the owner’s objection, it is oppressive.”

I think that pretty much sums up what ‘architectures of control’ are: products, technology and environments designed to serve someone other than the user.

Now that ’someone else’ might be ‘the good of society’, but in more cases than not, the someone else is a company wanting to enforce a business model on the user, or a government wishing to enforce an ideology or mode of behaviour.

(original story via Boing Boing)

Vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write).

Today at comp.compression, Brendan G Bohannon announced a vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write). The format will assume no fragmentation of smaller files, rather a file is to be moved if it expands beyond the space available to it.

Current default file extension will be “zpk” and will use deflate with a 64kB window. The CRC algo will be the same algo used in ZIP and PNG for example.

You can checkout the code and format specs.

From the press release."Creative Commons and Vogele & Associates today unveiled the Podcasting Legal Guide,which was prepared by both organizations together with the invaluable assistance of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw.The Guide was prepared as part of the Stanford Center for Internet & Society’s Non-Residential Fellowship".

Podcasting Legal Guide Released To Assist Podcasters Navigate Potentially Troubled Legal Waters

We've been working hard on ccPublisher 2 lately, and I'm pleased to announce that the third beta is available for download. You can find release notes and downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux here. This release is stable enough for regular use. If you've tried ccPublisher in the past and want to upload a work to the Internet Archive, I encourage you to try this release. We're still working on ironing out the last few wrinkles, but overall this release is more stable and flexible than previous ones.

ccPublisher 2 doesn't add lots of new features to the original ccPublisher feature set, instead opting to focus on the infrastructure of the application. I think it's a strategy that's paying off, and will make the addition of new features far easier in the future. We're already seeing results, as bugs and major improvements to the code base are far easier than they were with ccPublisher 1.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, or bug reports, we'd love to hear them. You can file bugs in the ccPublisher tracker, or join the cc-devel mailing list to communicate with the developers.

Whitney Independent Study Program is setting up Image War, an exhibition of artistic works that remix, transform, or mimic images from the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans, hijackings, popular uprisings, recent American military interventions, and other violent political events.

Among the works featured in the show:

In his Afghan Dialogs series, Rainer Ganahl took taglines from the bottom of cable news channels during the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. He embroidered them into silk banners, and sent then to Afghanistan, where residents were given the opportunity to stitch their own responses to these taglines.

Joy Garnett’s painting Kill Box (part of the Night Vision series) appropriates a night-vision image of a tank from the First Gulf War as made iconic by TV news coverage.

In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1995-7), Johan Grimonprez mines archives of televised
airplane hijackings, remixing the material into a disco-driven video narrative that rethinks depictions of air terror and that, some say, eerily foreshadowed 9-11 (video excerpt and trailer).

Beyond Manzanar: An American Internment Camp: Between Fears and Realities, by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand, uses navigable 3-D game technology to immerse viewers in an historical and cultural space and engage them as participants in history.

"The piece explores media scapegoating of immigrant groups in times of crisis," said Thiel, who compared the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar, Calif., during World War II to the threatened internment of Iranian-Americans during the 1979-80 hostage crisis. "The installation also finds echoes in post-9/11 discrimination against people of Middle Eastern extraction today," Thiel added. (via)

Other participating artists: Willie Doherty, Claire Fontaine, Coco Fusco, Jon Haddock, Amar Kanwar, An-My Le, Din Q. Lê, Radical Software Group (RSG).

Image War, at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, May 19 - June 25, 2006.

Press release (PDF)
Via Rhizome < Newsgrist.

="http://feeds.we-make-money-not-art.com/~a/wmmna?a=YBADXx">

T-Mobile in the UK has launched an HSDPA-enabled data card in the UK, but at the same time has banned the use of VoIP across the service. The fine print on the new Web'n'Walk Professional service explicitly prohibits both...

Continue.

(Phone service is not an app! Don't look behind that curtain! -kc.)

"The global distribution of Internet users has sharply shifted away from the largely American base of years past, giving the "world" in World Wide Web new legitimacy,"this IHT article says."Figures from March show that fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were in the United States,comScore Networks said in a report last week. A decade ago,the rate was about two-thirds.ComScore,a market researcher based in Chicago,says it believes that its latest research is the first worldwide survey that uses consistent measurements in all major markets,including China and India.Of the 694 million unique visitors over the age of 14 who used the Internet in March,the most were in seven countries:the United States (152.1 million),China (74.7 million),Japan (52.1 million),Germany (31.8 million),Britain (30.2 million),South Korea (24.7 million) and France (23.9 million),it says.Together,China,Japan,India and South Korea represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population,168.1 million users,a figure that in the aggregate is 11 percent larger than the U.S. online surfership.That is true even though the research excludes traffic from public computers like those at Internet cafés,a primary means of access in Asia,and access from cellphones or PDAs".

The End User:More world on the web

On Monday, May 15, the Online News Association will begin accepting entries for the 2006 Online Journalism Awards.

Deadline for entries is June 15. In yesterday's ONA newsletter, outgoing ONA executive director Tom Regan emphasized that there will be no extensions this year. So if you want to enter, make sure you get your entry form in on time!

Note that the entry form is not yet online, but will be available shortly on the ONA site.

I'm stunned by a statistic in a RTNDA/Ball State University survey of local TV and radio websites. Get this, 50% of TV news directors surveyed say they don't know if their station's site is profitable. Since the level of profitability of a station's website has a direct correlation with how well a news director can defend his/her level of spending (let alone make intelligent resource reallocation decisions), don't you think EVERY news director should know this little detail? And if the station isn't breaking out these numbers, they should. Anyway, the survey is here ("TV Websites Helping the Bottom Line"), but it's for RTNDA members only. So I posted a couple more stats below...Survey of news directors regarding TV and radio websites.

What do users want from your site?

1. Local weather
2. Local news
3. Money news
4. Other information
5. Entertainment news
6. Headlines
7. Local sports
8. Weather elsewhere
9. Live cameras
10. Traffic

What's your web content staffing (TV)?

Markets 1-25 -- 2.24 full-time, .47 part-time
Markets 26-50 -- 1.34 full-time, 2.55 part-time
Markets 51-100 -- 1.64 full-time, 2.07 part-time
Markets 100-150 -- 1.37 full-time, 3.04 part-time
Markets 151+ -- 1.32 full-time, 2.08 part-time

(Source: RTNDA/Ball State University)

E-Commerce Times interviews Amazon VP Paul Misener about net-neutrality. "[Incumbents] say they will not block or degrade service otherwise, but that is not possible if they are prioritizing some content," argues Misener. He goes on to lament the state of competition in the broadband sector, suggesting that "if [consumers] had more choices of providers, this wouldn't be such a dangerous situation." Amazon spent $460,000 in the first half of '05 on all technology lobbying issues. Google spent $220,000 in all of 2005. Expect those expenditures to sharply rise thanks to the net-neutrality issue.

I just wanted to write a quick post about the ITP Spring Show. A friend of mine talked me into going on Tuesday and it turned out to be a very interesting experience. The ITP Sring Show is where graduate computer science students at NYU showcase projects they’ve been working on all semester (thesis projects or some kind of academic thing). Most of the exhibitions fell into one of three categories: very artsy, educational toys or a mobile based web 2.0 app. Obviously I was very interested in the mobile apps (at least from a browserless perspective), although there was some interesting projects like the live action super mario brothers or the drawing produces from conversations on blogs. I think that MoBeeLine is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Out of the mobile/web 2.0 apps (hence forth refered to as “mobile 2.0″), I saw a lot of innovative projects and some emerging trends. Here are some of my favorites:

Snagu.com, the mobile scavenger hunt. Very interactive and potentially addictive. Everyday they send you a word and you have to find a picture that matches it. Then your photo is compared with others with the same word and the commuity votes on which photos are the best. An interesting use of mobile technology and bringing a web based game into “real life”.

PlacesToDo is a mobile 2.0 app that allows you to set up a “to do list” of places by sending the location via SMS to a server. It logs the location and what you wanted to do there (examples are the store, an art gallery you walk by or a hot girl’s apt). Then you can share the list in a social fashion. Useful app if they have a good breadth of locations in their system.

free4md (pronounced “free formed”) which is a clever perl hack that allows people to upload video from their phone and put it into a community structure. The asthetics could use some work, but the idea is solid and will provide a great tool for capturing live, unfiltered events. Though I have questions about the quality of video captured from most mobile phones, all it takes it one major event uploaded before the site becomes very popular.

You Are Hear’s GeoTag lets you associate a sound file with any location a map. It doesn’t have GPS capability (yet), but you can put in an address and link a sound to that. If they could just come up with a “tour of the city” feature that will let me walk around and quickly for an audio guide at any point in the city. Also very useful for identifying good bars, exhibits and loose women.

The mobile 2.0 concept is new and very interesting. It combines the attributes of most web 2.0 sites (social, tagging, gibberish name) with the real life experience of walking around. You still have to use the website to register, etc in most cases, but much of the interaction can be done only using the phone. One of my favorite tricks that I saw was encoding an audio file from a phone conversation and associating it with a location (you walk by a bar, call a number then leave a review. Then users from the web can hear your review as opposed to reading it). I think this a great combination of web and non-web interfaces and a great example of mostly browserless technology at work. I wish all of these students well and I’m sure they learned a lot in putting together these interesting apps.

Paid Content is again updating its list of media conferences. Panels for all!

Still cameras that record HDTV may require solid state memory to keep them compact. That means MPEG-4 AVC encoding will be required to lower bandwidth.

Panasonic and Sony took a step in that direction today when they jointly announced a new MPEG-4 digital-video-camera/recorder format.

The new "AVCHD" format, which will allow recording and playback of high-definition 1080i and 720p video onto 8-cm DVD media, far smaller than today's conventional 120-cm DVD discs, or even the 12-cm miniature DVDs currently used for recording.

Separately, Panasonic said it would use the AVCHD standard to allow consumers to record HD video to standard SD memory cards.

Neither Panasonic nor Sony said when products using the technology would be sold. At the high end, the AVHCD format will allow recording at 1080i at 60 frames per second (1080/60i), 1080/50i, and 1080/24p; while midrange 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p formats will be complemented by a 480/60i format at the low end. In HD, a bit rate around 18Mbps is used.

The AVHCD format will use the AC-3 audio codec to acheive between 64 to 640 Kbits/s of audio data over 5.1 channels, or 1.5-Mbits/s of PCM audio over two speakers.

Panasonic believes the SD Memory Card is the recording media best suited for video cameras, and has already released a professional-use HD video camera that uses SD memory card technology. SANYO's $799 Xacti HD1 can record both 720p high-definition video and 5.1 megapixel digital still images to a standard SD flash memory card. It can record over 21 minutes of 720p HD video on a 1-Gigabyte SD card and 42 minutes on a 2-Gigabyte card.

A cost/effective MPEG-4 AVC encoder might be the tricky bit. Maybe Panasonic will add an audio input jack on their still cameras, too. One can hope.

Social networking sites have gone from being the next big thing to the thing itself. But, asks Sean Dodson, can they continue to hold the fickle attention of today's teens?

"In December 2005 I was interviewed for Printed and Disposable Electronics News about the Touch project, the future of RFID and on the social implications of NFC. Here is the plain interview, since an online version of the magazine is not available."

A Swarm of Angels is a new way to create cult media. The project is a giant new media experiment to gather 50,000 people paying £25 each to create a new type of movie.

The new book, ""How Would a Patriot Act: Defending America from a President Run Amok," has risen to become the number one seller on Amazon.com -- before the book has been published. How? Bloggers.

Hope to see you there.

Technorati Tags: omds, beyondbroadcast

great little village voice piece about the budding chemistry between vlog stars ze and amanda.

The Show is everything that is right with the Internet. --GH

Originally posted by moth23 from del.icio.us/moth23, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 11, 2006 at 08:23 AM

Today's digital micro-cameras and other optical devices use lenses based on human-type single aperture eyes. These lenses, which are manufactured with macroscopic technology, do not get thinner than about 5 mm.

However, insects such as fruit flies and moths have a completely different type of eye called compound eyes to accommodate the animals' small size and low brain processing capabilities. Compound eyes consist of up to tens of thousands of tiny sensors called "ommatidia" that detect light and sometimes color. Flies and moths see images made of a combination of inputs from the ommatidia that point in different directions, forming a large field of view while the total volume consumption remains small.

"While human eyes use a spherical volume, compound eyes use only a spherical shell, so that much of the space and weight is saved for the brain," Jacques Duparre, coauthor with F. C. Wippermann of a recent paper in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, told PhysOrg.com. "The arrangement allows for a large field of view, but does not require large signal processing."

Although single aperture eyes have advantages in resolution and sensitivity in large lenses, compound eyes have the potential to make more compact, robust and cheap vision systems. At the micro level, compound eyes' individual viewing channels on curved lenses have minimal aberrations, or focusing errors that cause blurring. Cameras with compound eye lenses could have applications in many tight spaces, such as those encountered in automotive engineering, security and surveillance, and medical technology.

A good movie overview of what's new in Drupal:

4.7-whats-new.mov (video/quicktime Object)

ABI Research has released a report showing that “placeshifting” technologies (Like Slingbox, Orb) will face opposition from carriers who see them as a threat to their own mobile video offerings. This seems to be an extension of a release issued last month and the idea is not really new, although its pointed out that the operators are not the normal combatents against new technology.
“New digital distribution technologies typically meet the stiffest resistance from content owners such as movie studios,” says principal analyst Michael Wolf. “With placeshifting, we believe the biggest opponents will be mobile operators who see these solutions as rogue network applications that could potentially paralyze their cellular networks, as well as keeping consumers from paying for mobile video offerings being offered over new mobile video networks.”
This could be the case…Yesterday WSJ ran a story about some users of unlimited data plans being asked to use less data, which included the tidbit that carriers are developing technology to sense what applications consumers are using — I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that placeshifting technologies are one of the applications they’ll be looking for.
To be fair to the carriers, placeshifting technology uses a lot of bandwidth and doesn’t really add anything to the mobile ecosystem — for example the payments aren’t made through the carriers. In fact, mobile data has a pretty high value. If someone tries to download a large file over the mobile network (not including e-mail attachments) the chances are very high that they’ve already paid for the content. With placeshifting devices there tends to be a one-off payment so the price of the data sent becomes very low.
I still disagree with the carriers’ marketing practices…unlimited should mean unlimited. They should rather set an amount, high enough that a heavy user of mobile content wouldn’t be affected but lower than that required by a heavy user of a placeshifting service.

Whew!  At least I can legally say what the name is!  That’s been an embargo for almost two months now - as the code-name AIMspace leaked out in late January in Businessweek.

So now starts the next phase - testing.

So thanks to everyone for their interest, this IS a big story and REALLY big play and a disruption in the force - as we know it.  Whenever a giant dinosaur changes its direction, attitude and strategy - it effects us all.  And AOL is getting a clue, a major clue - almost in real-time. 

The ramifications of how this will effect things - will unfold over the next few months.  Certainly by the end of the year we’ll see if MySpaces supposed ‘inpenetrateable’ armor can be cracked.

From my vantage point - all I see are the features that DIDN’T make it into this rev.  I see a year’s worth of work ahead of us and LOTS of great people to do that work.  The trick will be to get a decent feedback loop setup between the developers and decision makers and the end-users - to make sure that everyone gets what they want.

Having a large company be responsive, relevant and open is a victory for the Cluetrain, open standards and the blogosphere.  This is a direct response to the efforts at Yahoo to open up and can be credited with starting with AOL’s Live8 promo last summer (which they won an Emmy for - BTW.)

See how these battling dinosaurs effect us?  Yahoo is buying up companies, hiring people and setting new levels of openness.  Well now we got AOL doing the same!

Now we just need them to one up each other!

So be to clear - this is not a launch, but just the beginning of testing.  But it IS AOL, and it IS based upon working with AIM and they ARE Time-Warner, so………

a set of simple line & bar graphs that enable users to compare the world's interest in up to 5 different topics. the visualizations depict how often these topics have been searched for on Google over time, how frequently they have appeared in Google News stories & which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
see also google finance & google zeitgeist.
[google.com]

AT&T and MobiTV today announced they will deliver mobile television content over AT&T's nationwide Wi-Fi network. The service will enable AT&T customers to view live television while connected to one of AT&T's/SBC's Wi-Fi hot spots.

The MobiTV service includes 15 channels spanning national news, sports, entertainment and full-length music videos. The service will be available this month at nearly 7,000 AT&T owned and operated Wi-Fi hot spots, which includes airports, coffee shops and book stores, with plans to expand to additional locations.

Users will have a basic channel line-up available through a monthly $11.99 subscription or for each 24-hour session for $5.99. Additional premium television channels will be offered soon.

"Having topped 1,000,000 subscribers and growing faster than ever, we've proved MobiTV's technology, business model, and profitability on mobile networks across international markets on three continents," said Dr. Phillip Alvelda, chairman and chief executive officer for MobiTV. "Now, in partnership with AT&T, the nation's leading DSL provider, we are proving that the MobiTV service can deliver premium quality content seamlessly across any of the latest broadband networks."

AT&T operates one of the nation's largest Wi-Fi networks with connectivity available at nearly 11,000 hot spots nationwide. AT&T's Cingular Wireless offer AT&T Yahoo! Go Mobile, for customized online content, services and community on a wireless phone. Customers of AT&T Yahoo! DSL landline service can also subscribe to AT&T Wi-Fi services for as little as $1.99 a month.

On-line video hosting service YouTube, now allows users to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDAs.

"The good thing about it is that you don't have to go home to YouTube anymore," said Steve Chen, one of the company's founders and its chief technology officer. "People may not carry their digital cameras with them when they go out. But everybody carries their cell phone.

Mobile Burn reviews the Nokia N-80, a 3 megapixel camphone with WiFi and miniSD storage which will be available through Cingular. The phone can also run Nokia's LifeBlog software as well as the free ShoZu (beta) application which enables easy photo uploads to a number of free photo services including Yahoo's Flickr, Buzznet, TextAmerica and Webshots. The N-93 features a 3x Carl Zeiss zoom and DVB-H mobile tv.

Both can capture MP4 videos at 352 x 288; 176 x 144, and 128 x 96 pixels. The Panasonic Lumix FZ7 still camera (with SD card slot) can capture 640x480 or 848 x 480 pixels at 30fps.

Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to a TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.

YouTube allows any user to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDA but Nokia and Yahoo make it particularly easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr.

Scoop broadcasters and newspapers...for pennies. Could you make $1000/week (or more) in local advertising? Find out today.

Meanwhile, Wi-Fi TV announced today unlimited free calls to any phone number in the United States or Canada. Wi-Fi TV members must download dialer client software to their PC which delivers advertising while they talk.

"As a global delivery platform for live TV and an online community, Wi-Fi TV Inc. is honored to be working with AdCalls to be bringing our members the best online phone service at no charge whatsoever for phone calls. The Wi-Fi TV branded dialer, powered by AdCalls, just keeps getting better, and Wi-Fi TV Inc. is launching the latest version online today," said Alex Kanakaris, Chairman of Wi-Fi TV Inc.

Wi-Fi TV members can also have the additional savings and convenience of being able to have food delivered to their door and use coupons for all kinds of savings on items for sale near their home or office.

In other news, TiVo will enable about 400,000 subscribers who have their "Series2" DVR machines connected via broadband to use their TVs to watch Web videos from Brightcove. Specific programs to be offered — possibly as early as June — have not been named, but Brightcove clients include Discovery Communications, MTV Networks, Reuters, The New York Times, National Lampoon, SmartMoney and Farmers' Almanac TV. Starting in summer 2006, users will be able to download their TiVO clips from the Verizon Wireless Get It Now onto applicable handsets.

Multicasting mobile television to millions simultaneously (like television broadcasting) is another route.

Aloha Partners will use two 6Mhz television channels in the 700 Mhz band utilizing the DVB-H system (HiWire), Verizon will use MediaFLO (on channel 54) and Cingular may use Modeo (at 1.6 GHz) for mobile tv.

Related DailyWireless stories include; WiFi TV, NAB 2006, Open Revolution, Camphones for Journalists, Rebuilding Media, Newspaper Podcasts?, Portable Photostories, PBS + MovieBeam, MediaFLO Gets Satellite Backbone, Mobile TV: The Battle is On, New Mobile TV Flavor: TDtv, Verizon Goes with FLO, Global Mobile Television, Sprint: Go with the FLO?, T/W, Cingular: On Demand, DVB-H Headend Software, Intel On DVB-H, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, The 700 Mhz Club, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 Mhz FCC Auction, Winner of the Triple Play, Satphones Localize, TiVo on a Stick, Clear Channel Podcasting, Multicasting the Olympics, WiMax Handsets, Laptop Television, Sirius Portable Radio, U.S. Broadband Policy?, XM Buys 2.3GHz, Sprint Gets Sirius, MPEG-4: Satellite, Cable & Wireless, Satellite TV on Cell Phone?, Sprint Bundles EchoStar, Satellite WiFi, DirecWay Modem Shares Access, Satphones Get Giant Antennas, U.S. Cellsats and FCC Approves Big Mobile Sat.

"ViTrue connects Brands with Consumers through our Video Infrastructure Tools and User Generated Content." In other words, your customers will make ads for you...

Googlebombing as literature/art: Kenji Siratori is "a Japanese cyberpunk writer who is currently bombarding the internet with wave upon wave of highly experimental, uncompromising, progressive, intense prose."

Reuters has invested in Global Voices Online, a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Global Voices says:

We’re thrilled to announce an alliance between Global Voices and global media company, Reuters. Reuters has been supporting Global Voices efforts since late last year, when they hosted our annual conference at their global headquarters at Canary Wharf in London.

Yesterday Reuters announced a major contribution to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Global Voices is based. This contribution has allowed us to hire our managing editor, Rachel Rawlins, to continue supporting our outstanding team of regional editors and to bring on translators, to provide better coverage of content in languages like Arabic and Russian. Support from Reuters will also allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers. Reuters’ generosity allows us to expand the range and quality of information we make freely available to anyone who cares to use it.

We’re especially excited about the relationship because we see a great opportunity to help Reuters - and the global media community as a whole - to understand blogging better and the impact of Citizen’s Media on the world of journalism. We believe that the information, opinions and perspective that bloggers share complement conventional journalism and that bloggers and journalists can work together to give us a more accurate and representative picture of events and opinions around the world.

You can already see some of the fruits of our work together. Global Voices worked with Reuters on their recent Iraq Newsmakers event, where bloggers from the Middle East participated in a conference in New York via streamed video and IRC, asking journalists tough questions about whether media coverage of Iraq has been fair. In the near future, you’ll see content by Global Voices editors and contributors appearing on Reuters websites, providing additional information and context to some Reuters newswire stories.

Global Voices Online is possible through the generosity of two groups: the editors and contributors to the site, and sponsors who make the site possible. We’re grateful to everyone who has made Global Voices possible so far and we thank Reuters for making it possible for us to make this site even better.

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USA Today reports that the National Security Agency is in possession of billions of records of domestic telephone calls. An unnamed source for the story reports that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth have turned over records of calls and that is the NSA's goal "to create a database of every call ever made". Of the major local telecom providers, only Qwest declined to cooperate with the NSA, citing "it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants." The EFF recently filed suit against AT&T for alleged wholesale delivery of phone and Internet data to the NSA without any judicial oversight.

There is no blogosphere. There is only the people in it.

It drives me nuts when peope continue to try to treat us as a mass. The blogosphere isn’t a thing. It is an uncollection of completely independent people talking. That is still the best definition of blogs I can think of: People in conversation. Just people: constituents, voters, customers, students, parishioners, neighbors, people.

But mass media keeps trying to lump us into a mass — the mass where we lived until we had the means to be heard as individuals.

Here’s Vaughn Ververs reacting to Richard Cohen reacting to the reaction to his column reacting to Stephen Colbert, to which Howard Kurtz also reacts. (And they call us an echo chamber?):

At the risk of running this topic into the ground, it follows my argument that the blogosphere is risking marginalization if it is perceived as a cauldron of anger rather than a repository of thought-provoking conversation.

mass, not a monolith, not even a medium. We’re just people talking. You’ll agree with some, disagree with some; like some, hate others. It’s just like life. It’s just people. The sooner you stop treating “the blogosphere” as a medium, the sooner you’ll understand how to interact with it. It’s made of people. Talk with them.

I'll be in Boston this Thursday eve - Sunday for Beyond Broadcast and OMDS II. If you're attending and would like to chat, email me at elichapman at gmail dot com. I'm looking forward to finally meeting Terry Heaton and having half the unmediated crew in my hometown. Hopefully we'll make it to The Publick House.

Kowon (not to be mistaken for Cowon) presented these rather cool TV-glasses at the COMM Korea 2006 fair. They can be connected to your TV and provide a superior quality of viweing broadcasts. The manufacturer claims that the experience is similar to watching a 32" LCD Tv at a distance of 2 metres. The image is displayed on a 4.8mm by 4.2mm micro LCD screen, and personally, I would really like to test these... wait & see...

By CutKillAvince

Here's a great discussion of Brazil's moves to redistribute the future by spreading open source software, free digital culture and copyleft. Well worth a listen.
(via BoingBoing)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 12:04 PM)

It's always a blast to be at Mediamatic. I could only attend the first day of their RFID and the Internet of Things workshop but i came back with several stories for we make money not art.

Yesterday afternoon, Andy Smith made a demo of the Symbolic Table developed together with Willem Velthoven. It's a very simple-looking table that works as an interface-free and tactile media player, no screen, no button, no mouse required.

The first table is audio only and can be used by kids to play: as they put on the table small plastic toy animal tagged with RFID transponders, the sound made by the animal can be heard (sometimes quite loudly as in the case of the elephant!). The second version of the table has a beamer built-in and can be used for projections. Put something on the table, then the table will play the video that goes with that object. In both cases, the object is a symbol for sound or image. If you take the object off, the video will pause or the sound will stop. If you put something else on the table, something else will play.

Each symbol is linked to one or more AV files in the built in website of the table.

To make it even more human and non-threatening for the technophobes, the technology is "hidden" under the table: in the tabletop there are a compact Linux PC, the RFID reader and loudspeakers. The image tables also have a beamer. The software is open source and can be operated from a distance via internet. The table also works without an internet connection.

The table can be used as learning tool, to add new elements to games such as "Guess & Check", etc.

Another application for the table is to use it in an Arduino environment. Old immigrants have many interesting stories to tell but when their menory needs a little help, postcards put on the Symbolic Table would trigger videos and also jog their memories of past events. Other ideas for applications include interactive photo albums, interactive art, etc.
A few images on flickr.

Related: RFID video player, With Hidden Numbers, video of artists from the RFID-Lab in The Hague demonstrating a piece featuring hats rigged with RFID that triggered Flash animations (via Wired).

Bangladesh's booming mobile phone industry has emerged as a key driver of the cash-strapped nation's economy, creating nearly 240,000 jobs and adding 650 million dollars to gross domestic product, reports the AFP.

"The mobile phone industry in Bangladesh employs 237,900 people directly and indirectly. These are well-paid jobs with salaries many times the national average," said the study by the international consultancy firm Ovum.

the world's poorest nations with nearly half its 140 million population surviving on less than a dollar day. Around 70 percent depend on agriculture to make their living".

Call for Work

The curators Scott F. Hall and E. Brady Robinson of Mobicapping invite submissions for possible inclusion in their upcoming international juried online art exhibition,"Mobicapping: Mobile Image Capture in the New Century."

Definition: mobicapping is the new creative and technological practice borne of the instant capture and immediate international distribution potential of images, movies, and sounds via cell phones and other portable electronic devices.

Mobicappers may submit their mobicapps by May 15, 2006 to contact at mobicapping.com as email attachments. Submit either A) five still images (600 pixels longest side, max 250 kb per image) or B) two .MOV silent or sound movies (320 pixels longest side, max 500 kb per movie) or C) two MP3 sound files (max size 500 kb per file). Include artist name, email, location, and an artist statement / bio (max 150 words). No fees. Submission deadline: 05-15-2006. Exhibition opens: 08-15-2006.

MOBICAPPING: A PREMISE

Today, we record temporal moments with our cell phones and other small mobile devices which exist now and which are incessantly soon to be invented. The cell phone and its like, however do not elicit familial bonding as it has been in the past with the snapshot. There has been a marked cultural shift; our moments are more empty, more banal. Yet, paradoxically, we find ourselves and our experiences so much more interwoven--so much more widely shared--today than in any age prior. Such moments can now be found throughout the Internet. Instead of having a shell life in a shoebox stowed away in the family closet, our images and moments quickly move between emails, websites and even podcasts. But, where is all the art in this instantly local, regional, national, and international sharing? And, what do we call it?

We feel that this new form of image sharing in the 21st century is best described with a new term: mobicapping. Mobicapping means: mobile image capture (still, moving, and/or with sound). Those who participate in mobicapping--virtually all of us--are no longer photographers but are more accurately to be called mobicappers. Together, we are sending out a call for experimentation and exploration of the potential of the art of the mobicapper. The exhibition that we propose here will feature artists who are investigating this completely new creative and technological practice. "Mobicapping: Mobile Image Capture in the New Century" will open in August, 2006.

--E. Brady Robinson & Scott F. Hall

Reporting on sports video games, that is. ESPN.com will launch a new video game section this fall with content provided in part by Ziff Davis. Good idea.

Plus: VH1.com to feature new gaming channel

On the surface, the announcement that YouTube will allow people to upload video straight from their cell phones may not seem like that big of deal. But in effect, the biggest user-submitted video site on the web has just armed millions of people with the ability to cover news instantly from the field. When the next big domestic story breaks -- especially if it's in a major U.S. city -- YouTube will become the source of user-generated video. And it could potentially equal or surpass the video traffic served up by conventional online news sites.

I just stumbled across a cool tool on Media Post that lets you evaluate new “quality” product placements each week. It’s powered by iTVX, a firm that measures the quality of product placements. 50 different variables are simultaneously calculated to reflect the quality of the product placement. Measuring something so abstract will never be perfect, but it’s one cool tool!

Steven Soderbergh wants to release his latest film using Bittorrent. No word on how/what/where/when.
Other bittorent-related happenings are in the news, Scott at CinemaTech has the scoop.

(Via ustudio)

"More than 100 page layouts with a single CSS file at just 1.82KB"

Instead of sneaking products into a show, some wily TV executives have decided to sneak the show into the ads.

I was having a conversation with a startup around social software the other day, and those conversations almost always end up being around issues of control. I was trying to explain them that mechanisms of control don’t necessarily need to be mechanisms of all-out restriction, but are often social mechanisms of setting examples, social control, deciding what content to surface and such.

So today I am happy to find this excellent blog: Architectures of Control in Design

How do we succeed in putting our ideas into words, so that another person can understand them? This complex undertaking involves translating an idea into a one-dimensional sequence, a string of words to be read or spoken one after the other. Of course the person on the receiving end might not get the intended point: The effective expression of one`s ideas is considered an art, or at least a desirable and important skill.

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Lars Erik Holmquist’s column is about designing mobile applications. He starts from a not-so-commonsensical take (at least for app developers):

the accepted wisdom from decades of research on interfaces for stationary computers simply does not hold for mobile devices. You will even hear HCI researchers and UI designers complaining that mobile devices are too small and “limited” to permit anything interesting. But the real difference has nothing to do with size. Instead it comes down to the fact that what we do with mobile computers and the situations in which we use them are fundamentally different from what we do with the desktop. (…) Mobile devices follow us through the day, which means that they are used in many shifting roles

Then he presents what he’s doing at his lab:

The goal was to investigate mobile services that, rather than just being smaller versions of desktop applications, take advantage of the fact that they are inherently mobile.

the mobile services that were created in the project were based on local interaction. For instance, MobiTip from the Interaction Lab lets you share “tips” with other users in the vicinity through a Bluetooth connection. (…) Another example of local interaction is the Future Application Lab’s Push!Music. What would happen if the songs on your iPod had a mind of their own? In Push!Music, all MP3 files are “media agents” that observe the music-listening behavior of the user and other people in the vicinity. (…) The eMoto project by the Involve group extends the possibilities of mobile messaging by adding an emotional component. By shaking, squeezing, and otherwise mistreating the phone’s stylus after you have written a message, you generate a colorful background pattern that expresses the emotion you want to put across.

And this actually nicely exemplifies his claim about mobile design:

Those who still worry about the “limited” interaction possibilities of mobile devices should note that all the applications mentioned above could be used on a standard mobile phone today (with small modifications). Yet at the same time they drastically expand the interaction parameters of mobile devices by taking advantage of local interaction, observations of the user’s behavior, physical input, and so on.

Why do I blog this? I like this emphasis on taking advantage of external elements in the interactions (spatial proximity, tangible inputs…) and not relying on a limited input/output device.

During an interview at NCTA, Brian Lamb, the chairman and CEO of C-SPAN, spoke of the bandwidth costs and demands faced by the not-for-profit network’s increasing online activities. One option under discussion — a deal with Google Video — would include bandwidth and reduce the strain while offering ways to make money from some downloads or links back to DVD sales. The unexpected demand for Stephen Colbert’s controversial performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner gave the prospective partnership a chance for a test run. C-SPAN asked viral video sites iFilm and YouTube to pull the user-posted copyrighted material from their sites and, instead, chose Google Video as an non-exclusive provider. (The video already was available free on cspan.org and is still.) In exchange, Google agreed to offer the entire 95-minute, 17-sec. video intact for free alongside full excerpts of the most wanted segments — and to link back to C-SPAN’s front page as well as the cspanstore.org page where the dinner DVD is on sale for $24.95.
From a C-SPAN statement: “It is important for online video providers to understand that C-SPAN-produced programming is protected by copyright in the same way that the video of any other news network is protected. Our goal in enforcing our copyright has been and continues to be to ensure that C-SPAN’s reputation for unbiased coverage of the political process is maintained.”
Meanwhile, I just started the stream of C-SPAN’s coverage of a 43-minute speech by President Bush — unauthorized and uploaded by a political organization to Google Video.
Related: Brian Lamb, Chairman & CEO, C-SPAN: Exploring Online Money Making, Google An Option

Ross Mayfield recently published an interesting hierarchisation of the concepts of collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, in his post on the Power Law of Participation, which has an interesting graphic, available here; the issue is well summarized by Sam Rose:

For example, a case study of the Apache project published in 2000 found that 80% to 90% of the submissions came from a set of 15 core developers in a community of more than 3000 people. A study of the GNOME project had similar results with 11 people contributing most of the output. Relating this back to the Power Law of Participation, the small number of core community members leads to collaborative intelligence, while the larger community provides an important collective intelligence by contributing bug reports, ideas, and comments. These two types of contributors and the resulting intelligence generated both feed off of each other and allow the community to prosper.

A previous attempt was made by Jon Collins in his blog. Here we have a hierarchy going from connectedness to participation to collaboration.
Laws of connection

1. Connectedness is about joining in
2. Joining in happens automatically when the barriers to joining are low enough
3. Connections form between individuals, not organisations
4. Connections link devices, services and people
5. Connections are two way
6. The value of connections increases based on the number of touch points
7. Connection is a means to an end: the end is participation

Laws of participation

8. Communities form as a natural consequence of connectedness
9. Communities define their own mechanisms, language and etiquette
10. Individuals occupy roles within communities
11. Participation can be active or passive, hub or spoke
12. Declaration is a pre-requisite to active participation
13. Participation is a means to an end: the end is collaboration

Laws of collaboration

14. Collaboration is the achievement of goals by a connected community
15. Goals benefit individual participants, not the community
16. Active feedback is essential to achieving goals
17. Success is proportionate to the number of participants
18. Open collaboration is self regulating

These laws are not specific to any technology or group. Example themes that have driven these laws are: text messaging, Make Poverty History, Blogging, Marillion, BNI, LinkedIn, Cluetrain, peer to peer, mashups, Warcraft, ecademy, eBay, street teams, open source, Skype, Flickr, wisdom of crowds, SOA, agile development, Usenet, Sharepoint.

Unsurprisingly, The Boston Globe says that online plagiarism is rampant in the blog world. They cite my blog as one example, but they also travel down the Long Tail of content to show how this issue can effects any publisher.

In the article, via a blog called Plagiarism Today (now I'm subscribed!), the Globe offers advice for bloggers hoping to protect themselves. This includes shortening RSS feeds to summaries.

I gotta wonder if plagiarism will kill full-text feeds one day. My blog is republished all across the Web. I have come to accept there's nothing I can do about it. I am personally not ready to give up full-text feeds by a long shot. However, I bet I am in the minority.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism

I think this was supposed to go out a bit earlier, but SirsiDynix has published the latest issue of Upstream. I'm excited about this one because I helped pick the theme and suggested a few librarians to send the question. The issue deals with examples of community building.
You can download your copy here. The question posed was:

"What is the best example of libraries building communities that you have come across or experienced? How will libraries in the future be empowered to play even a greater role in their communities?"

Thanks to the 9 other librarians whpo provided answers. And a personal thanks to Thomas A. Tarantowicz for answering questions about the Brentwood Public Library, here on Long Island.

(cross-posted on the Libraries Building Communities blog)

I've always regarded the Web as a programmable data source as well as a platform for the document/software hybrid that we call a Web page. Early on, programmable access to Web data entailed a lot of screen scraping. Nowadays it often still does, but it's becoming common to find APIs that serve up the Web's data.

The holistic view of that network [of databases] should be our focus. In [Kingsley] Idehen's view, you'll use something like SPARQL -- a query language for the semantic Web -- to traverse a graph of interlinked sites, and to merge interesting sources into a virtual collection. Then you'll dispatch queries to each member of that collection. They'll offer a range of query styles ranging from free text search to iteration over simple key/value pairs (accessed by way of RSS or Atom) to tree traversal (XPath, XQuery) and relational query (SQL). I think he's got it exactly right. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

This week's column alerts the open source community to the arrival on the scene of Virtuoso, a universal server that supports a wide range of access methods and query styles. Yesterday I met with Anders Hejlsberg and Paul Vick to discuss LINQ (language integrated query), which takes apart all those access methods and query styles and then puts them back together again as a new style of data-oriented programming. ...

WSJ writes about Esther Dyson's views:

The Internet will have become more ubiquitous but less visible. It will still exist as PCs and monitors, but it will also be all around us in other devices: everything from buses and luggage transmitting their locations so they can be tracked, to friends and children signaling their presence anytime you might want to reach them. Rather than being a separate virtual world, the Internet will encompass the physical world as well; most things will have Internet identities available remotely as well as a physical presence available only if you are nearby.

nd applications, the biggest issue will be not search but filtering: So much will be knowable, but what do you want to know. People will initially be overwhelmed with choices, but vendors -- competing vendors, I hope, rather than monopolies or governments -- will make default choices for individuals.

Joystiq's got a blow-by-blow account of the Playstation 3 presentation from E3. This bit really stood out - using the EyeToy, the PS3 will be able to process augmented reality gaming:

Neat! Adrian Woolard at work will really dig this, he's been building some awesome AR stuff for the past few years... one for you, Ade.

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 9, 2006 at 07:41 AM

Not everybody has access to podcasts. No everyboday can afford the hardware, connectivity, or has time to listen. What kind of democratising notion is it if it requires a capital outlay, an understanding of computing, and free time to browse before one can participate? What is the nature of this new media democracy?

Additionally, whilst you reach an international (niche) audience with a podcast, you can't reach the people in your own street.

Broadcast Your Podcast enables and encourages podcasters to break out of the net and to transmit their podcasts on FM.

BYP units are handmade FM transmitters, following the circuit design of Tetsuo Kogawa. By connecting a BYP unit to your computer or mp3 player podcasts can be transmitted on FM in a radius of about 100 meters.

The idea is to allow people to hear podcasts without the need for expensive equipment or fast internet connections.

BYPs strategy is to distribute these units for free to podcasters so they can extend their practice, reaching beyond the net and into local radio space. If you're a podcaster, you can request to receive a BYP-unit or read a manual by Adam Hyde, on how to make your own Mini-FM transmitter.

By Amsterdam artist and designer Lotte Meijer. Another of her projects: Blitze Gidsen.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 9, 2006 at 08:19 AM

Originally from FutureWire - futurism and emerging technology, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 9, 2006 at 08:36 AM

Library lends out 100 cable modems with service to patrons, pretty awesome

Three computer geeks at the U of T are renowned developers of anti-censorship software, including a program out this month that could allow people to outwit the world's most repressive regimes

PCCW, which runs the largest IP-TV service in the world, with some 549,000 IPTV subscribers in Hong Kong, is going global, expanding into the Middle East, South America and Mexico.

Headquartered in Herndon, VA and Hong Kong, with teams based in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, PCCW Global, is a leading global MPLS VPN provider, delivering IP-TV to millions.

The PCCW Global network now covers 70 countries and over 700 cities worldwide. Their MPLS-based platform, says PCCW, makes it easier and more cost-effective for U.S., European, and Asian-based multinational corporations to provision global networks and bring services geographically closer to the customer. It can be used to carry many different kinds of traffic, including IP packets, as well as native ATM, SONET, and Ethernet frames.

"The Middle East and South America are both key parts of our global strategy and this expanded connectivity is in direct response to the growing market demand for converged IP solutions in these areas," stated Dan Lovatt, PCCW Global CEO.

AT&T/SBC's Project Lightspeed uses VDSL-2 over twisted pair to deliver the last mile. Verizon's FiOS fiber uses passive splitters in the neighborhood. Verizon users get fiber to the home but they must share bandwidth (and television programming) with their neighbors.

MPLS-based networks can bring GigE home. Dedicated, flexible and relatively inexpensive Ethernet. It's similar to Utah's UTOPIA model. It's more costly than Verizon's Passive Optical Networks or AT&T's VDSL, but an MPLS backbone can support all flavors of IP and can be managed at low cost.

According to a company memo obtained by Reuters, Verizon is fighting back on Net Neutrality, warning the financial services industry that the internet may not be secure enough if Congress adopts laws governing high-speed Internet broadband networks.

The financial services industry is weighing whether to wade into a fight over legislation on broadband service, known as "Net neutrality." It fears that without safeguards on pricing for network access, the costs to financial institutions could rise.

Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. telephone company, opposes legislation for Net neutrality and sent the memo to its consultants urging them to discuss with banking industry clients the arguments against possible legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Verizon's chief congressional lobbyist Peter Davidson warned that the financial services industry "better not start moaning in the future about a lack of sophisticated data links they need" if Net neutrality laws were passed because the communications industry may not invest in new networks.

Maybe the financial services industry -- and consumers -- need MPLS. Municipal MPLS. Owned and operated like WiFi city clouds. With net neutrality.

The game may now be moving to another level.

Verizon is investing in Super Computer International (SCI), a leading provider of high-performance game-server hosting solutions. The Verizon-SCI relationship will focus on next-generation, online platform called PlayLinc with expanded support for IM and VoIP, team management and buddy tracking.

Verizon and SCI plan to conduct a limited trial of an all-new browser-messenger that's powered by PlayLinc, then open the trial to the public this summer. Today, Verizon offers online gamers its Verizon Game Network which allows users to join one another online to play interactive games.

Meanwhile, India's House of Tata, as it is respectfully called in India, is investing $140 million in a company to design and develop supercomputers. The company’s first project will be to build a machine based on a parallel-supercomputing architecture developed by renowned computer scientist Narendra Krishna Karmakar. The architecture will be implemented using a high-speed switching chip devised in Israel. The machine reportedly will use off-the-shelf 64-bit Itanium processors.

Tata runs the global show via Singapore-based VSNL International. VSNL is the world’s biggest IP wholesaler.

Warner Brothers announces that it will sell movies via BitTorrent. That’s good news on many levels: It’s another attempt to take out the middleman (sell your Blockbuster and cable stocks!) It’s a conforming use of P-to-P. And if BitTorrent can be adapted to handle this, I’ll bet it can be adapted to handle advertising and if that happens, networks will run, not walk, to distribute shows online.

This morning, I listened to the latest Diggnation as Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht positively raved about the new ABC pilot of streaming some of its shows for free online (taking out its middlemen — sell the rest of your cable stock). They predicted that if the networks keep doing this, then in three years, more people will watch TV via the internet than via networks. Well, stranger things are happening.

Only thing is, once that happens, the networks themselves are middlemen. How long will it be before Warner Brothers makes shows to sell (or give away with ads) online direct to the audience, without networks or cable or video stores or dvd retailers or movie theaters?

: LATER: I should have said that Warner will distribute both TV and movies.

The General Accounting Office has issued a report (pdf) on broadband deployment in the United States, that criticizes the FCC's determination of just how wired America is - and recommends improvements.

"For its zip-code level data, the FCC collects data based on where subscribers are served, not where providers have deployed broadband infrastructure," the report notes. "Although it is clear that the deployment of broadband networks is extensive, the data may not provide a highly accurate depiction of local broadband infrastructures for residential service, especially in rural areas."

This is what critics of FCC policy have been saying for some time. The FCC has taken a largely hands-off deregulatory approach to the industry, based on its own data suggesting everything is looking good. But if measurement of broadband coverage isn't accurate, obviously the question arises how effective policy can be.

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, FCC chief Kevin Martin praised his policies, stating that America "leads the world in the total number of broadband connections with 38 million subscribers," and that we were "well on our way to accomplishing the president's goal of universal, affordable access to broadband by 2007."

But even fellow FCC Commissioners have found fault with the FCC's penetration methodology. "Finding one high-speed subscriber in a zip code and counting it as service available throughout is not a credible way to proceed," stated Commissioner Copps in 2003. He similarly has taken issue with the FCC's classification of anything over 200kbps as "broadband". Regardless, little in the FCC's data collection and reporting methodology has changed.

"All of the statistics in the FCC report are "up and to the right" and thus look good," recently complained the Technology Security Officer at Harvard University - and frequent critic - Scott Bradner. "It's too bad that it actually does not tell us all that much about Internet service - Maybe someday we will find out, but maybe not from the FCC."

These FCC reports were required as part of the 1996 Telecom act. If they show penetration issues (to say oh, rural America) the FCC is expected to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability." Unfortunately, critics lament, FCC policy in recent years has been driven by political think-tank idealism and a hatred of all regulation - not impartial technological need.

The only way to prove such criticism inaccurate is by reforming the FCC's data collection mechanism. Only then can the agency illuminate coverage gaps and implement effective policy.

Are you interested in learning more about how to use Google's free 3D software? A good collection of links to resources for Sketchup.

Sketch & Share by Robert Faludi, John Schimmel & Grace Kim is a collaborative sketch pad toys for sharing drawings and sounds over distance. Developed as part of the networked objects & toy design class at ITP.

"MySpace users are filling out marketing profiles that are mined by the company that are then presented as these people's personal webpages. MySpace knows that controlling content on these profiles is essential, which is why they will commonly censor anything they disagree with. Considering MySpace has a considerable amount of bloggers, this is a serious issue for free speech advocates."

Declining an offer from the New Hampshire National Guard to embed herself in Iraq, Deborah Scranton instead gave the soldiers cameras and trained them as cinematographers.

This Refresh! archive forms a unique educational resource for new media practitioners, historians and learners. Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, the Refresh! conference on the Histories of Media Art discussed for the first time the history of media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art.

Leonardo/ISAST, Banff New Media Institute the Database for Virtual Art and UNESCO DigiArts collaborated to produce the first international art history conference covering art and new media, art and technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as pertinent to contemporary art.

The ad agency that went after a Maine blogger has just dropped its suit in the face of big blogger pressure and consequent bad press. Bravo to the Media Bloggers Association for making it happen.

Troy, created for the Experimental Gameplay Competition, is a game about invasion of privacy on the internet. As visitors to the site try to download a game made by a fictional character, they are lead to a 404 site.

The average visitor would probably not bother clicking on the link to the parent directory. But visitors who are inquisitive and prying enough will click on the link and be lead to files and information they weren’t supposed to see. If they keep going through this data, they'll get passwords to spy into more of the fictional character’s personal information. For example, they'll learn that the game developer has just broken up with his girlfriend Becky, and as visitors progress through the game, they uncover very private stuff that gradually reveal what went wrong in their relationship.

Eventually, the curious would get a hold of the game they were originally trying to download, but it turns out to be a trap that the fictional character set for the player, as a punishment for going through his stuff.

Via Neural. DOC.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 7, 2006 at 02:12 PM

As mobile phones become an integral part of life - a fashion accessory as much as a necessary gadget - design trends of handsets are becoming more segmented to satisfy the needs of customers in different age groups. "Select and concentrate" has become a catchphrase among domestic handset marketers. JoongAng Daily reports.

Some highlights:

-- One focus this season is businessmen - Samsung Electronics recently began selling its Platinum Card Phone" (SCH-V870), which is 8.9mm thick and can fit into one's wallet. It comes with a case that doubles as a namecard holder. Pantech has also developed a phone targeting business workers in their 30s.

-- As "slim" is today's fashion buzzword, cell phones makers are focusing on slim handsets. Skinny jeans and leggings were trendy this spring, according to the Samsung Fashion Research Institute. ... Almost 50 percent the phones Samsung sold in the first quarter of this year were "slim-type" phones, up significantly from less than 10 percent in the same period last year.

-- The dominant color is white, away from black popular for the last few seasons. "

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 7, 2006 at 03:06 PM

Root markets + playsh + game neverending = bud.com, which "will turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game... bud.com proposes to make that web more engaging through surveillance with non-threatening stakes: browser-based multiplayer play."

That's my bread and butter! I'll be watching this closely. Thanks, Justin!

Blog first, link later: I just noticed the playsh website has relaunched as a wiki with a useful reference of inspirational projects.

The diffractive planar optics is combined with a microdisplay source, such as micro LCD, LCOS or OLED, to provide the users with a color video image equivalent to a 40-in. screen viewed from a distance of 7 feet.

Extensive turorial and explanation guide on how to de-interlace video. From Divx to your DV camcorder, it's all covered. What is deinterlacing? How does it happen? How can it be avoided? Tons of examples.

As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don't have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on the Web now, unlike 12-18 months ago when I had to track it all down myself. Of course my job as a researcher and analyst is to go much deeper than the high level product data - I then need to turn it into practical insights, recommendations, knowledge, etc.

Anyway here is (in no particular order) a list of the web 2.0 lists and other helpful product data that I've found on the Web. I encourage you to add other sources in the comments.

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

I'm sure there are more web 2.0 lists out there which I've forgotten to mention, so please add in the comments and I'll update this post as they come in.

Update 7 May 06: Added more lists based on comments. Will do more updates as required.

archived video and web chat of the OnHollywood panel I participated in the other day. You decide if we were funnier than Tom Green.

DMasia reports that "there are an estimated 694 million internet users worldwide,according to a report from Comscore World Metrix.The study reveals that the internet is truly expanding worldwide,with the US representing less than 25 per cent of global internet users as of the end of March.The 'major' Asian countries,China,Japan,Korea and India,currently represent almost 25 per cent of the world's internet population,with 168.1 million users.Combined,these four countries have a larger internet user base than the US,which has 152 million users, the largest of any single country.China comes in second,with 74.7 million users,followed by Japan with 52.1 million.The report also measured the average hours spent online per visitor during the month of March 2006.Somewhat surprisingly,Israel topped the list,with each user average 57.5 online hours per month,compared to the global average of 31.3 hours per month.South Korea and Taiwan came in at three and five,respectively,with 47.2 and 43.2 hours per month.Though internet use is increasing in Asia, the region is not yet producing online content which globally competes with its US and European counterparts.US companies contin