Adam Curry's Weblog: "I've been talking to a couple of folks in the past few weeks about using rss and bittorrent to flow video through the exisiting weblog infrastructure. Dave and Andrew's visit to Amsterdam really got things kick-started.
After a near perfect iChat/AIM video conference last night with Dave, the current plan is to develop a 'transmit/receiver application in it's simpelest form, using python, rss and bittorrent. Marcus is working on it as we speak.
Once broadcasting through this app is as easy as dragging a media file (video you made, mp3 recording etc) into a folder and forgetting about it, I expet we can get folks interested in at least using the 'receiver' portion."
Sounds somewhat like the videoblogging desktoptool I wrote about at the me-tv.org wiki.
The Zen TV Experiment: "2. Watch any news program for 15 minutes without turning on the sound."
(via Victor) Yahoo! News - Audio/Video - AP: a kind of news videoblog.
Conversations with Dina: "Annotated Pictures form an integral part of any ethnographic study. And i see huge potential for Moblogging or Photoblogs as a form of sharing, exchanging ideas and reporting - especially when you have a large team like we do on this study."
Breaking new ground! I was thinking this yesterday, and here it is. Lazyweb, I love you.
TheFeature :: "Inverse Surveillance" -- What We Should Do With All Those Phonecams: Howard Rheingold: "Cameraphones could create an opportunity for the public to snoop on the snoops and watch the watchers."
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Mobile phones the talk of Africa as landlines lose out.
Joel on Software - Mike Gunderloy's Coder to Developer: "You know what drives me crazy? "Everything?" you ask. Well, OK, some of you know me a bit too well by now. But seriously, folks, what drives me crazy is that most software developers don’t realize just how little they know about software development. Take, for example, me."
I really hate Joel: effortlessly beautiful technical writing. Darn!
Language Log: The Languages of the UN: "While we're on the subject of international languages, the choice of languages at the United Nations is interesting. The original official languages were English, Chinese, French, and Russian, not coincidentally the languages of the permanent members of the Security Council. The choice was largely political. English had perhaps the strongest case.
[...]
Although in theory all six languages have equal status, some languages are more equal than others. English, French and Spanish are the working languages of the General Assembly; English and French are the working languages of the Security Council. Public information is often not translated into Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese."
Joho the Blog: Seeking middle ground on torture: "Can we get even to that common ground? Can we as a nation say that we abhor torture, except in the rarest of cases? That we do not believe in the institutionalizing of torture? That we will fight it around the world? That we believe in the rule of law and that no one is above the law? That we believe in treating even our enemies with dignity? That we support the established international conventions for treating prisoners? That we are sorry about what went on at Abu Ghraib?"
What amazes me is the lack of outrage here in the US. After September 11, many Americans expressed disbelief. "Why do they hate us?" They didn't understand. Now, my friends here and the people that I speak with don't seem to understand the magnitude of what's going on. America's leaders are not clearly apologizing. I know humility isn't America's greatest strength, but I do hope someone sets up a website, americansapologize.org or something, where real people in America can write heart-felt apologies (not excuses - apologies) for what their leaders and their country is doing. Take some responsibility, and at least try to counter some of the hate that is being generated here. I won't set this up - I'm not American. But I hope someone does.
Prince on the cover of RollingStone.
Jon Udell: Adobe Designer 6.0 preview: "A more descriptive name for Adobe Designer 6.0 might be "InfoPath for PDF." The concept is brilliant: exploit Microsoft's failure to make InfoPath ubiquitous by putting interactivity and XML smarts into Adobe's free PDF viewer, and by offering a forms builder that targets both Adobe Reader and Acrobat."
(via Ben) Japanese trailer of Immortel, a movie version of the Yugoslavian Enki Bilal's classic sci-fi comic book in which the Greek gods come back to earth. It sounds dumb, but Bilal's unique style and storytelling make this a true classic. New York 2095! The official movie site. It looks like Bilal directed it. I hope his directing is as good as his books.
The comic book:
The movie:
Another follow up on my Nested facets post.
I was thinking if the "nesting" or "scope" is a property of the facet being nested or of the category that "contains" the nested facet.
Then I realized that these nested facets have another property that makes them unique: they should not be shown in the UI at the first level. Normally, you'd show all facets available at the first level of the UI. For nested facets, it only makes sense to show them once you've drilled down.
So being a nested facet is a property of the facet (so we can determine wether to show it at the first level), AND scope is a property of the category that has a nested facet scoped to it.
Or something like that. I'm continuing to try to create a useful model of the structure of facets, again, so that this can make it into our toolset. I know Travis from Facetmap has done some good work modeling facets, I should discuss this with him.
It also marks a change in my thinking. I now am starting to create object models of many of the concepts that relate to the websites I build. Not to directly program using these objects, but to understand the domain.
My boss here at work used to work with AlanKay (link) at Xerox, one of the fathers of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. There's a line I don't want to cross though, where the object model becomes more important than the user experience. It still is only an abstraction. The hard part is to find the right (useful) level at which to abstract.
unmediated: PBS May Launch "Video Blogs"
This is a list of (hopefully!) inspirational videos showing ubiquitous computing interfaces. Some of the videos simply show visions of what the future could hold (e.g. from major computer companies), and others show working prototype systems built in laboratories."
I added to and cleaned up the press articles page at the videoblogging wiki: VideoBlogging : Press Articles.
Location dependent camera phones. GPS is being built into more and more devices.
ASIA GRACE by Kevin Kelly | Production Notes: "I investigated several different options to have the slides and negatives scanned. The official way to make an art book is to have each image drum-scanned at a cost of $20-40 a piece, and then to have them color corrected by a pro for additional fees. It would not be unheard of to spend $20,000 for scanning the amount of images in this book. Therefore I looked into home scanners by Nikon and Polaroid. These could have done a pretty good job, but the prospect of spending weeks scanning 600 shots didn't appeal to me. In the end I went with a consumer scan called the Kodak Photo CD. For about $1.20 a piece, I had my slides and negs scanned at a local service bureau specializing in digital scanning. They were returned digitized on a CD. The resolution of these scans are right at the edge of what is needed for a book this size. (For those who care, the typical file size for an image in this book is 20 megabytes.)"
Worth the Wait® | Teens | 101 Fun Things To Do (Besides Having Sex):
"10. Play capture the flag.
19. Organize a bake sale or car wash in your neighborhood and donate the proceeds to a school or community project.
43. Volunteer at the local animal shelter, hospital, nursing home or another place that interests you."
Americans are weird. Via Havalais: "As we go further into the site, we learn that The best time to have sex is when you are an adult in a loving, committed, mutually faithful relationship with another adult person, which for most people is marriage. Now, in principle, I have to say that I am very happy with this sort of sex. But, on the other hand, I suspect that this sort of sex represents the minority of the best sex that happens in America. It is also very much a matter of opinion, not medical fact, that this is the best time to have sex. Show me the stats: who have they surveyed to discover that this is the best time? Or is it the consensus of medical opinion that the best sex happens only between two people for the rest of their lives?
[...]
Its worth remembering that the leading cause of death among teens in the US is not sex, but car crashes. The only 100% guaranteed way to avoid the death and injuries caused by automobile accidents is to abstain from driving or being a passenger in a motor vehicle."
Momentshowing: Let's argue about the philosophy of videoblogging like ancient Kung-fu fighters. Videoblogging can be useful for arguing as well! "First, I work at a community TV station where anyone can come in and make a TV show for free. We have 1200 original shows per week and most of them are unwatchable."
Interesting. Structured blogging.
Mblog / Upload Camera Phone images to website - active server pages, ASP, vbscript: "This code will allow cell phone users to send pictures to a web server and have them post automatically. The code will grab all of the emails and save the attachments to your web server."
How does uploading video/pictures from cellphones work? Is it just an email with an attachement sent to a certain email address? Any PHP implementations?
SENT: cameraphonepicture art "During a specific period of time leading up to SENT, and while the in-gallery exhibit is under way, images will be submitted by the public and published through an online, massively collaborative phonecam blog. A grid of multiple plasma screens in the sixspace gallery will display these images in a constantly refreshing display (refresh rate for each screen will be staggered so that only one image changes at a time). Printed versions of invited artists images will be displayed on the gallery walls."
Phototalk: "...that over 800 million camera phones will be sold worldwide between 2003 and 2008 (market research firm Strategy Analytics),
...that camera phones are going to replace low- and mid-sized comsumer digicams ("Sony has already ceded the low-end digital camera market to camera phones", see below)
...that 2 Mpixel phones appear early next year and 5 Mpixel versions after them (Link)
...that 312 billion digital images a year will be captured, stored or shared in 2008 (Gregg Patterson, a vice president in HP's printing and imaging division; Link)"
Refering to Photographs and Memories article: "The immense popularity of the cameraphone may ultimately signal - like the ascendance of reality TV - a victory of content over art, or message over medium. Sure, we'll get a whole lot more well-documented car crashes. But our experience of photography may be reduced from moments of inspired awe to ephemeral voyeuristic gaping.
". (Follow up discussion)
Nonono. I think he's missing the point. The value in photographs lies in the sharing (the stories, not just the pictures themselves), not in the "inspired awe". Sharing is the challenge with digital pictures.
I'm sure you've had a family scene where you page through photo albums with your grandma or something. That experience is what it's about. Not looking at a picture and going: "Wow!". That's not it. (I was trained as a professional photographer.) It's about sending a picture of your baby to your mom (their grandma) with your picturephone and talking about it for a few minutes. Sharing.
audblog : sounding out: "audblog is a service that provides bloggers with the ability to post audio to their blogs from any phone. At the end of the trial sign up we will provide you with the telephone number...all you have to do is call the number and the world hears you. Use it to make a difference...Use it to make your voice be heard."
winkflash ;) is aggressively competing with Shutterfly and other online printing providers on price. They only charge 18 cents per picture (Shutterfly charges 34 cents). Worth checking out.
Steward Brand likes a computerized to-do list. I myself am more one for structured procrastination.
Videoblogs and the creation of shared understanding.
Why are videoblogs promising? So I had this idea:
Consider what happens when you are watching TV (say, the news), and you discuss this with your partner who is watching the same program.
As you discuss what you see, you are building Shared Understanding. Because we are social animals, building shared understandings is crucial to our functioning and understanding of the world. We don't just think about the world and then come up with an interpretation (although that happens as well), most of the time we discuss the world and build a shared understanding within our social circle. After all, most people don't really want to have opinions that their social circle strongly disagrees with.
TV has made building shared understanding less of an activity between equals. More of the understanding is built by the journalist/presentor/actors... When we watch people discuss something, we are also building shared understanding, but we are not participating. In this, we loose something.
Now that some of our communities are moving to the internet, building shared understanding is blossoming through the conversations held on weblogs.
However, there are few discussions about the news we see on TV. We can discuss facts (easy to list), or newspaper articles (easy to link to), but discussing what Bush said at a certain point in a video, or what happened in a video of Iraq is harder. It's hard to describe. It's very hard to link to. So it becomes hard to discuss, and little shared understanding is built by us. The big media are still in control.
When we can easily videoblog, and quote video, we may be able to create conversations about the TV we watch and thus take back some of the autonomy lost. This, for me, is a large part of the promise of videoblogging.
The New Yorker: Facts on the horror stories of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. This stuff is well documented and it doesn't look like it's just one wacko guy. How can this happen? Someone commented that this set back "the US's efforts in the middle-east by 20 years". I worry that something like this (together with America's attitude over the past 2 years) creates a level of hatred that probably has never been reached before. Nobody (I mean nobody) outside of the US is going to trust the US or its army again in decades to come.
I added a whole bunch of history to the Video Blogging Timeline, from 1970, AT&T offers Picturephone for $160 per month, to 2001, TV reporters use $7,950 portable satellite videophone to broadcast live from Afghanistan.
Streaming Video Hosting: US$50 a month, 25 Gigs of bandwidth.
YickertyYackety: Videoblogging: (2003) "Is videoblogging a wave of the future? Probably, eventually, when someone comes up with something good to do with it. But not for this site while I'm paying $10 per gig. And for me it conjures up visions of public-access TV. So I'll stick with the mainly text variety for the time being."
$10 per Gig? That's way too much!
I added "Textamerica Introduces Camera Phone Video Moblogging" to the Video Blogging Timeline. What important videoblogging events are we missing?
VideoBlogging : How To Video Blog From Mobile Phone: "Mo Blogging is blogging from a mobile phone. One of the earliest growth areas of videoblogging is blogging little videos from mobile phones. The quality is low by default, so bandwidth is less of a problem."
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen blogs about videoblogging at solitude.dk.
News.com started doing email alerts, taking a cue from Google. They also seem to be starting an aggressive campaign to sign up members by making their new series reports downloadable as PDF for members only.
News: "Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet. Viewers will be able to scan an online guide and download any show. Programmes would be viewed on a computer screen or could be burned to a DVD and watched on a television set."
Darknet - Wiki: "Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television is an upcoming book from John Wiley & Sons. It focuses on the digital media revolution, exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media."
The soon to be published book is open for collaborative editing on the wiki. Nice idea, sure to get publicity. I'm curious how it turns out. Editing is really an art, I'm not sure a wiki will work. Then again, I've been wrong before. Many times!
I like the idea behind the book. Take the media back! That's why I've started me-tv.org, and I've got some other plans.
Was the bible the first blog?
Semantic World and Cyberspace - the Holy Bibel as Placeless Content: "Inside a book, a destinction into chapters was made. So we have John 1,2,3,4,5 ... 21. In each chapter the verses where numbered. The verse number is written after the chapter number, normally like: "John 3,15". And voilá, we can identify bible passages in all languages and cultures and over the last 1000 years with this system. Great, isn't it, if you read age-old books about the bible, they use the same URIs as we do, where do you find this persistency anymore ? If I go to the St. Stephen's Cathedral in the Center of Vienna, there are stones from the 15th century there quoting bible passages, using the same identifiers as I am using here to quote Joh 3,15 (this is in german). So referencing works in all Bible Translations in all languages and cultures."
Meatball Wiki: DoubleWiki. Here's an example. Some interesting structure for a wiki: 2 columns with a pro and con. More ideas on DebateTool.
Shelter.nu : Here is a How to Topic Maps, Sir!: "This is not a tutorial. This is an essay written to be preceding a tutorial I'm writing about Topic Maps and how to Sort your CD collection with it, which in itself will come in parts. The reason for this prelude is two-edged; philosophy vs. real-life;
There is a great deal of philosophy involved in working with Topic Maps. Not in the sense of arguing for extentionalism or purport a theory of when cats die in boxes, but in the sense of epistemology, the philosophy of learning. It is about how we perceive things, how human cognition works, about how we label things, how we categorise and find our way in the vast information layer between our brains and our tools.
The other reason is that this essay was easier to write. Bare with me."
Alex is writing a tutorial on topicmaps that I'm really looking forward to. To start things off, he wrote this article. Check it out.
Added what I think is the first videoblog post ever on the Video Blogging Timeline. If you know of an earlier post of video in a weblog (before November 2000), let me know. (Or add to the page)
I started a Video Blogging Timeline on the wiki. Contributions very welcome!
SubrosaSoft.com - FTP Droplet: could be another part of the technologies needed to make videoblogging painless. You set it up, and drag&drop a file onto the icon, which then gets FTP'd to a server. It even copies the resulting URL into your clipboard, so you can past it in a blog entry. Mac only. although I know similar products exist for Windows.
Mega Upload :: PHP File Upload Progress Monitor: "It took me five years to figure out something that PHP cannot do. For a recent project we needed to display a progress monitor as files were being uploaded to the server. We quickly realized that PHP cannot produce such an indicator dialog."
There's also the Rad Upload Java applet, lite version free: "The Plus version allows you to drag and drop entire folders onto the 'drop target'. The applet will then upload each file within the folders and their sub folders recursively. This recursive folder upload can be made to either a web or FTP server." I'm sure there's other solutions as well. (like ImageUploader, and ActiveX control)
I know you get a server error when trying to submit comments. I'll look into it when I have a moment. Meanwhile, sorry.
Pac Manhattan: in Washington Square Park, kids from NYU are playing LIVE pacman games. Pretty cool.
A Modest Search Algorithm Proposal || kuro5hin.org: "The problem with your approach is not that you can't code (I'm sure you can) or that I'm employed by some evil commercial-code corporation (I'm not). The problem is that it's just so damn stupid." And more fun discussion.