dcinput

I spent today at the London Geek Day Out organised by Hugh MacLeod. The idea being that we spend far too long on front of our computer screens and so are desperately in need of some culture.

Faced with this scary prospect, it was thought best to first meet up for lunch and a couple of beers to dull the pain. We then all moved on to the National Gallery where, for at least one whole hour, we freely self administered ourselves with 200 years of culture. And boy did it feel good.

It was great meeting people from all walks of life and in a small way the art has quite honestly made me look at the world with a slight tint of creativity. Hopefully it will have worn off by the time I get to work tomorrow. Hugh thanks for a seamless afternoon.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice the indie film makers responsible for Four Eyed Monsters are videoblogging daily from the Sundance Festival. If you don’t know anything about them then watch a few of the videoblogs they used to promote their film here [start from the bottom].

The teaser video they made before they left is here.

You should be able to find the the videos as they post them here.

This year the Sundance Channel has been setup where you can find all sorts of interviews and festival dailies.

If you work in film keep an eye on what’s going on here because the indie film makers are really starting to embrace the web and use it, not only for distribution of media but as an entire platform for making films. As people in the film industry we need to be following these digital media evangelists, interacting, connecting and experimenting with them, finding out how they are making films in this new world so we can figure out how we can help them.

All I can think right now is why am I not at Sundance?

It’s very interesting to see how other industries are being affected by the web. Jeff Jarvis tells a story about his experience of working for People, following 289 people loosing their jobs at Time inc yesterday.

Watch YouTube videos on your ipod or psp with Free YouTube to iPod Converter.Some Wordpress tricks and plugins.

The latest podcast from fxguide is with Tyler Leshney from Ascent Media talking about their Digital Media Data Center in Burbank and how they maximise content lifespan. If you want to know the sort of world I work in, listen to this.

Will Video For Food: “Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg will give aspiring filmmakers from around the world the chance to earn a $1-million development deal at DreamWorks”.

Ze Frank has been playing with his Wii.

I’ve had a Wii at the flat since they came out and they are a lot of fun. Four player tennis gets pretty interesting, I’ve had other people’s controlers hit me in the face a few times. I’m not massively into gaming so the novelty is starting to wear off. I don’t know where Ze’s getting his games from though, sounds like pirate Wii games to me.

Follow this link for an amusing take on the Anshe Chung Second Life Scandal.

Ze Frank goes to Hollywood! I’ve always thought that Ze was the webs answer to Andy Koffman. It sure will be a sad day on March 17th when he posts his last show. Better to quit while you’re ahead and move on to bigger and better things, that’s what I say. I’m imagining a film kind of like War Games but instead of playing thermo-global nuclear war with Joshua, he plays bizare games with people all over the world using only a powerbook and a dv cam.

Steve Rosenbaum: “Power is shifting from content pipe to contextual”.

Jeff Jarvis reports on how the Davos conference this year is experimenting with the web by opening up the conversation into and out of Davos. Get to the Davos conversations here.

Reuters: “U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion”.

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax. You can sign up for the Beta now. Ted Patrick presented Apollo at Mashup Camp.

Cinematical: “Crumley and Buice have been asked to travel to Sundance to shoot daily videos which will be broadcast through YouTube as part of a collaboration (their first) with the Sundance Channel”.

The collaboration comes right after their very successful experiment in Second Life. Anything that the guys from Four Eyed Monsters touch I’m sure will be huge. I’ll definitely be watching. Independent film making is breaking out onto the web quick. If main stream film companies want to know what the world is going to be like in a few years, this is the direction they should look.

Tickets for the Camden Crawl are on sale. Here’s a video from last year. I love living in Camden.

Hugh Macleod: “These days I’ve started seeing the internet as just a manifestation of something far more primal and ancient […] It’s all about Human Connection. Love. Everything else is secondary”.

8/12/06: Susan Buice: “Feeling connected to the world and to other human experiences is what makes me feel alive and happy. When I don’t feel connected I feel like a meaningless blob of flesh and I want to die”.

Valleywag: “We suspect that companies such as IBM, which have assigned marketing budgets to Second Life, expected to reach corporate decisionmakers, rather than a few fetishists who got lost on their way to the nearest online brothel”.

I agree with Hugh that humans have an inbuilt urge to connect. We want to connect with people in all sorts of ways, we also want to connect ideas in our head together and share these with others. Why did I post the last three links? Because in some way I felt they were all connected. I didn’t start out with the aim to do this, it just kind of ended up that way. I think connection (love?) is how we make sense of things.

Mark Pilgrim has written a history of DVD copy protection which is very interesting, especially in the light of all the talk about the Netflix anouncement which I’ve been waiting for since Scoble wrote about it.

Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service, will give customers the choice of either having the DVDs sent out to them or watching the content straight on their PCs.

Screencast Demo of the new service.

Robert Sobble’s not too happy about the streaming: “Hollywood: you need to find a better solution”.

Dave Winer: “It’s another example of the movie industry’s lack of will to compete”.

Mike Arrington: “Studios contributing to Netflix’s new service include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema.”

Thinking different…

This video for the Apple “Think different” campain is great. Ignore for a second that it is an Apple branding exercise and just look at the message. This is the sort of thing that is happening on the web every single day.

I’ve been reading Jello Biafra’s Wikipedia page.

He is an american punk rock musician and politcal activist best known for being the lead singer and song writer of the Dead Kennedys (78-86). Inertia, my high school’s best band when I was there used to do loads of covers of theirs.

A bit of Googling revealed that his record label Alternative Tentacles have a podcast covering the music they release and also some polical speaking by Jello.

I also found a very old interview with him by an impressively young Jools Holland.

Wordpress not good for my feed?

I’ve noticed recently that because of the way I write the blog if you read this via the feed you might miss updates that I make throughout the day. I tend to make one “dcinput daily” post and add to it. Unfortunately if you read the post early in the day and mark it as read in your aggregator then following updates won’t show up. I am looking for a way of using Wordpress to get around this currently so sorry about that. Suggestions welcome.

Windows adverts sure aren’t what they used to be. Bring back the 386!

Mike Curtis links to a video showcasing a 3D Morphable model face animation. Wow.

Great link from George Nimeh to a YouTube of The Truth in Advertising.

David Carr: “24 Hour Newspaper People”.

Doc Searls: “By making a commitment to a closed iPhone, Apple has opened the door to some serious competition. Backlash by the customersphere, the journalsphere and the developersphere to news that the iPhone is closed is a huge gift to the iPhone’s many new competitors. The market points to a clear and wide opening both for product differentiation and for giving customers what they want. Which is an open phone.”

Understanding the web

When I first moved to London about 10 years ago I knew London was big. I had grown up in Brussels, which is a pretty big city but in comparison to London it’s small, and I knew this because people had told me. So when I arrived, though I knew it was big, I had no real understanding of the bigness. Not that it bothered me, it probably didn’t even occur to me.

About five or six years later I was traveling on the Central Line, which is a London Underground line that goes from the very West to the very East of London, and I remember suddenly thinking that I was actually starting to understand how big London was in much the same way that I understood how big Brussels was. I always found it strange that it took this long.

Recently I’m starting to get a similar feeling about the Web. Not about the its bigness, I’m not sure that’s all that important, and not really about how all the pieces work (I’ve learnt these as I went along) but rather I think I’m starting to develop an understanding how the web enables conversations to happen, how those conversations are making a difference and how the effect they have will continue to grow more rapidly.

I know it’s very early days, I’ve hardly been on the web at all compared to many but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s taken me at least two years of reading & writting for the web, listening to podcasts, watching videoblogs, occasionally entering Second Life, attending conferences online and offline (etc…) to get to the point where I’ve realised that I might actually be starting to develop an understanding of this thing we call the web. If you haven’t already, start getting involved online it’s the only true way to start understanding.

The trailer for Hot Fuzz is out and it promises more fantastic comedy story telling from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright who wrote and stared in Sean of the Dead (trailer) and perhaps my favorite TV series of all time Spaced (episode 1).

Micki Krimmel: “We’re at a turning point with how we consume, interact with, and pay for media. How well technologists and media people can play together at this moment will surely have a huge impact on our culture”.

A great essay bringing together many of the current topics under the microscope in the online video world. Certainly an area to keep your eye on.

Imperial Collegue Union Bar is 50 years old. I spent many an evening on the ale in this establishment in my student days and somewhere along the way a tankard with my name on it was presented to me but it never make it onto the shelf unfortunately.

Jeff Jarvis: “The Guardian says YouTube is thinking about starting a TV channel”.

Morenco Kemp: “Don’t hate the media. Be the media” - Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys). Days when new episodes of NYUB show up in my aggregator are good days.

Andrew Orlowski’s take on the Net Neutrality saga is very interesting.

Scott Kirsner: “In a world where channels are increasingly irrelevant, content producers need to pay attention to ways to build a loyal following, by building mailing lists, maintaining RSS feeds and blogs, or getting viewers to “subscribe” in some other way to a continuing string of videos”.

Hugh MacLeod’s is collecting and publishing manifestos. Great idea. I like the latest one - the social customer manifesto. Good ideas need to be spread around. He is also organising a day out at the Tate in the hope that it might drag people away from their screens and inject a bit of culture into our web heads, init.

David Sacks seems like a pretty interesting entrepreneur. His new project called Geni will attempt to create a family tree of the whole world.

Sundance’s online efforts are ramping up. I attended a screening in Second Life only a few days ago which was certainly interesting and they are to start selling short films on iTunes“. It’s really exciting to see film makers starting to embrace the web and start to experiement. In the comming years independant film making is going to explode.

Wired: “The festival seems eager to come to you. A push to make the influential event accessible to the masses is under way, with a series of initiatives designed to spread the gospel of Sundance-branded independent film around the world”.