dcinput

The 1K project II is a short generated entirely from digitally combining over 1000 car races in the driving simulator Trackmania. Sounds majorly geeky but it’s actually pretty cool.

Techcrunch reports that Amazon may have inadvertantly let slip that they are releasing a new web service called SDS - Simple Data Service…or maybe not.

One of the most frustrating things for that I find with itunes and the ipod is the whole way the syncing process works. The whole idea of syncing is appealing to me since like most people on the planet I’m a pretty busy person. The ability to be able to wake up in the morning plug the ipod into the laptop for a minute while your latest podcasts load up and then skip off to work listening to your favorite mind snack is a killer feature.

Unfortunately the apple implementation of this feature is pretty lousy. Out of all the settings, what I want is to only have on my ipod at any one time all the podcasts that I haven’t listened to yet. Now iTunes does have such a feature but according to iTunes listening to 1 second of a podcast equates to listening to the whole thing. Setting out on a journey expecting to continue listening to a podcast that you have partially listened to, only to find that it has been marked incorrectly as played and therefor has been removed from the player can do only one thing: it makes me mad.

Anyone thinking of making a podcast device needs to fix this. Please.

Something I realised today about the disintermediation caused by the web: if your profession has the word intermediate in it, start getting worried. For some reason this wasn’t obvious to me yesterday.

It’s looking like Jason Calacanis, Peter Rojas and Dave Winer are seriously talking about making an MP3 player that is specifically designed to play podcasts. I’m interested in this for two reasons.

Firstly, I’m a very big podcast listners. I’ve been fascinated by the medium since I discovered it just over a couple of years ago. It has changed my life in many ways, opened my life up to an incredible array of new ideas that would never have been possible previously. I find now that the time I spend listening to my ipod is almost exclusively devoted to podcast listening. Obviously the possibility of making that experience better is very exciting.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, I’m interested because it will be an unparalleled oportunity to learn how to use the web to make money. Dave has written and talked about how to make money on the internet many times before and recently I’ve been exploring how these ideas apply to the industry that I work in.

I’ve listened to Jason many times on the Gilmor Gang and also on his new podcast and I have no doubt that he’s a guy who has incredible vision and an ability to get the job done. I don’t have any real knowledge of Peter but as the co-founder and editor in chief of Engadget there’s no doubt that he would fit perfectly in this trio.

A guy who with a new philosophy on how to make products, a guy who’s extremely sharp and knows how to get stuff done, and a guy who has an incredible understanding of his audience. Leverage all this with the ability that all three have to use their personal media platforms and you have at the very least something that will be fascinating to watch. Who said building a business can’t be entertaining.

How to make money on the internet: the case study.

Links to the first few conversations: Jason, Peter, Dave, Jason.

Looks like they’re taking feature requests.

It’s made it to the last item on Techmeme.

If you’re wondering what all this videoblogging stuff is all about then check out this little report by Chuck Cirino of Weird America at the Vloggies. Even though this happened a while back I only just saw this footage now. Sure looked like fun.

Washington Post: “No single programming department can outstrip the creativity of the entire Internet. When carriers limit the choice of programming to whatever sites or services can strike the best deal with carriers — wriggling past the usual palace guard of marketing reps and lawyers — they weaken the entire appeal of phone video”.

Mike Arrington: “Let’s just declare TV Dead and Move On”.

Intelligent users are generating content

Today I’m linking to Dave Winer’s 10 minute podcast entitled How to Make Money on the Internet. He’s written about this subject several times before and each time I’ve found his ideas helpful in understanding the changes we’re seeing in society as well as in business as the web grows in importance in our world.

I felt it was particulary relevant to my recent posts exploring the disintermediation of film making [2nd heading down]. If disintermediation in this space is to happen at all, instead of being brought about by people making films funded by eyeballs and advertising, maybe it will be caused by people making films to sell products.

Dave’s vision is that entrepreuners will be able to make products that users actually want and they’ll do this by paying close attention to all this user generated content. Until recently the users have been treated like an audience. Funnily enough, it’s actually the users, formely treated as the audience, that hold the intelligence.

Is this still film making? And who are the middlemen that get disintermediated here? Who’s making films, the users or the entrepreneurs? Hold on but the users are the entrepreuners, so it kind of seems like everyone’s making films. In fact it’s looking like everyone’s going to have to use their personal media platforms (blogging/podcasts/videoblogging) just in order to get anything done properly. Hmm.

Ben takes a photo of himself everyday. Sheer genius.

I’m looking for online (as in on the web) video editing applications. Does this even exist? If you know of any then let me know.

Update: Looks like I found a company that does something vaguely related to what I was looking for. Cuts allows you to remix video by creating cutlists that you can share over the internet. In an interview on the Scoble Show a while back, Evan Kraus explains that although currently you need a thin client, when they launch early next year there will be lots of APIs and he hints at it working in the browser. A tool for disintermediation.

Video of a conversation with Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google at this years Web 2.0 conference. If you have time it’s a really interesting interview. He’s a pretty smart guy. Some quotes:

“As the internet phenomena occurs and all of us are a part of that, it’s beguining to affect industries that really don’t know what to do about it and it’s worth reminding yourself that it’s a mistake to bet against the internet. Don’t bet against the internet.”

“The era of huge, massive servers, which Google and many other companies are now building in these massive server farms are fundamentally going to be more reliable than the things they replace and that shift, which is a very user centric shift, means that the users can get back to whatever they were doing rather than debugging their software. It’s fundamentally better to keep your money in a bank than to keep it in your pocket.”

Quite a few people that read the blog seem to be subscribed through the Google Reader. I might have to give it a try as I’ve heard many good things about it. I like the idea of reading things as a river of news.

I’ve got a head full of great ideas on how to use all these great web technologies that are emerging, a sea of APIs, everything there just waiting to be connected up in interesting ways. All this while listening to the new Beatles album…

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Here comes the sun everybody!

D-Cinema Bond

Last night I went to the Odeon in Leicester Square to go and see the new James Bond film Casino Royal. I chose that cinema because I new that they had a d-cinema screen there. Now I’ve seen what the d-cinema screen at work looks like but never actually been to a big theatre with one. I knew that the trailers and adverts most probably weren’t going to be digital but as soon as the feature started it was obvious to me that film is dead. If you don’t believe me then watch the opening credits to Bond on a massive d-cinema screen. The colours are so incredibly vibrant and everything moving on the screen so incredibly crisp that you find yourself looking with your eyes wide open in amazement.

Google Video: “This short by Neill Blomkamp depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa. Producers: Neill Blomkamp, Simon Hansen, Sharlto Copley, Shannon Worley”. Amazing what a few people can do these days. I’d love to know how long it took them, what tools they used, what workflows they were using, how they colaborated etc. Great short.

Another great short by Vancouver Film School graduate Ori Ben-Shabat. Lots of neeto vfx in this one.

More on the disintermediation of film making

Wired News: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right? […] You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15″.

A few days ago Penelope Trunk’s post Thinking about videoblogging? You should probably forget about it caused all sorts of discussion on the videoblogging mailing list. Anne from Loaded Pun explains why people on the videoblogging mailing list were annoyed and also ends with what I think the crucial question is: What are you hoping to get out of your vlog?

After reading my post on the disintermediation of film making, Penelope asked me via email whether I thought that the lonelygirl15 affair (check this article) on YouTube was what I was talking about and yes that is absolutely an example of disintermediation of film making. There is a guy, he has this idea for a web based show, he shoots it and puts it out there. Classic disintermediation. What was Mesh Flinders hoping to get out of his vlog? There’s no doubt about it, he was wanted to make money.

So to make money you have to have a product. What’s his product? He’s giving away the show for free to his audience, so it’s not that. He sells advertising space. That’s his product. It kind of feels like it’s the show, but actually it’s the advertising space. The more people watch his shows the more his product is worth. Seems simple doesn’t it: that’s how you make money in videoblogging.

The truth however is slightly different. In fact to see the truth you have to think a little differently. You see lonelygirl15, Rocketboom and ZeFrank are special cases. The thing they are selling, their product, happens to be the videoblog itself (well the advertising really). The vast majority of people in the world sell things we more easily associate with the word ‘product’ like software, food, televisions, holidays.

Blogging, podcasting and videoblogging are all personal media platforms. They are personal information processors that you can use in any endeavor you choose, from making a web based show to raising money for charity to making people aware of a particular issue, to building a business and more generally for selling products of any kind. Use them for communicating, for publicity, for feedback, for gererating new ideas. You’re in control.

You think Adam Curry just has a hit podcast called Daily Source Code? Wrong. The Daily Source Code is his media platform for building his business called Podshow. He also sells advertising so it’s a little confusing. Wait until people start using these mediums to sell products, build companies or to run political campains. That’s when things will really get exciting. That’s what I saw at Podcastcon UK last weekend: normal people who run normal businesses using the mediums in new and interesting ways.

Film making won’t disintermediate with people in the film/entertainment industry alone. There aren’t enough people and there isn’t enough money to be made. It will disintermediate when every person in every industry can use it to build their business. Sure you’ll need some talent, but you need talent to be a good at anything in life.

In the mailing group the title that linked to Penelope’s post was “Disturbing opinions”. I would disagree entirely. I think her piece was a fantastic conversation starter. It got everyone thinking. No doubt some people will think I’m talking a lot of crap, but then we’re all learning as we go along.

Over the last few years I’ve been watching and learning what effects the web is having on business, on society, on people. As I learn, there are all these new words, ideas and technologies that are floating around in my head like podcasting, videoblogging, Web Services, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Salesforce On-Demand Architecture, open source, virtualisation, vendor relationship management, gestures, and more. Everyday is like one of those tests where you have to find the odd one out from a set of shapes. As time goes on these various things accumulate in my head, some get thrown by the wayside, but for some unknown reason others clump together because they seem related in some way.

The one big idea that I keep coming back to is the Internet as the Great Disintermediator: the disintermediation of the aggregators and repackagers of the world. I keep wondering how this idea applies to film. How will film making become disintermediated? A few experiences over the weekend have helped me get closer to the answer to this question.

I was at Podcastcon UK over the weekend. I don’t have a podcast and I’m not a videoblogger but I find both of these activities so interesting that I thought I should go down there just to see what people were talking about and also to be in an environment where others understood this interest [most of my friends think I’m mad].

What’s funny was that the panel sessions that I thought I would find least interesting ended up being the best ones and the ones I was really looking forward to ended up being a bit of a disappointment. The Creative Podcasting session in the end became a session about advertising and the Citizen Journalism segment ended up being a discussion about nomenclature and old media techniques applied to podcasting.

It was the Business of Podcasting panel that surprised me the most. This was all about how people were using podcasting within the corporate space to expand and often to diversify their business. One example was Tom Hall from the Lonely Planet who explained how they were using podcasts to compliment their travel books with travel casts of various locations around the world as well as using user generated audio from travellers moving around the globe.

Last night after I posted about the Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary, I was pondering why it was that I had found that so powerful and why it was that the seemingly boring Business of Podcasting Panel had turned out, imho, to have been the most creative. It suddenly dawned upon me that the first question to answer shouldn’t be ‘how’, rather why should we disintermediate film making in the first place? If everybody could make films easily, why would they do it at all?

Making films is about telling a story. It’s about getting ideas from inside your head into someone else’s. Loosely speaking, the film landscape tends to have factual documentaries on one edge and fictional films at the other and there’s obviously lots of mixing in the middle. Now although there are plenty of people who create fantastic fictional film work, I would imagine that for most of the people on the planet, it would be far more useful if they could quickly, cheaply and easily use the medium of film to put across an idea in business.

It’s very hard with words alone to put across an idea that has been building in your head over many months, sometimes years to someone (perhaps a boss, or investor) who has not met the people you’ve met, not read the articles you have, not payed attention to the people you find influential. Making money by the disintermediation of the film making process is going to be made by giving people a way to make their profession easier. In the future CEO’s will be film makers.

Who knows, maybe there will come the day when you can walk around putting bits of media in your pocket as you roam and you then seamlessly use this accumulated media stuff to tell stories to your friends around the table down the pub in glorious 3D hologram. Fictional story telling is for fun, thank goodness.