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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.

Want to know what files are being exchanged on the darknets? Check out Peer Mind which lets you see the popularity of music, film, software, games and ringtones on P2P networks. Om Malik explains that although they don’t yet give rankings that include Bit Torrent they soon will as well tracking Fast Track, eDonkey and Gnutella networks.

Om Malik: “Improbable as it may seem, but the bandwidth glut created by the telecom bubble of the late nineties might be coming to an end”.

I’ve just gone through my bloglines feeds and deleted just under half of them. Maybe I’ll sleep easier at night now.

Ever wondered what the inside of the Beeb looks like as you’re leaving? Check Kosso’s sidebar video.

I haven’t been writing much about documentaries recently. In fact since finishing my documentary making course last month I’ve pretty much haven’t even watched any. I do remain hugely interested in documentaries however, which is why I was so happy to come accross a link from loadedpun to a site called iamorlando which finds and makes available excellent documentaries that are on Google Video

Sure is refreshing to see content from a video sharing site that’s a little more serious. The “History of Video Games” one is great. Kind of reminds me of reading “Hackers” by Stephen Levy.

I’ve noticed that my adventures in webland over the last two years have given me the same feeling of interest and excitement as when I was reading this book. It’s almost as if the web itself was a documentary except you get to see events unfold as they happen and, should you wish to, you get to participate in them. If you decide to remain an observer you get to decide the direction of the plot by which links you click on.

I think its high time for a Web 2.0 equivalent of War Games. Anyone want to write a screenplay with me?

Google Video: The Easter Bunny Hates You [violence warning].

Its April fools day today so watch out! I slept in till late so no one managed to get me.

I’m blogging using the OPML editor and it seems to work pretty good! Houray. You can find the instructions of how to set it up to work with your Wordpress blog here.

You might have noticed a lack of presence the last few days. I’ve been really quite ill all week and it’s been pretty unpleasant but I’m on the mend now, finally.

While I was ill I started buying good old fashioned newspapers and actually had time to read them cover to cover, with all the supplements. Really quite refreshing. Some interesting articles.

Did you know that in the UK the Sale of Goods Act offers rather a lot of protection against faulty goods even when the manufacturer’s guarantee has run out? The act says the goods must last a reasonable time and can be anything up to 6 years.

The article in the Guardian that I was reading gives the example of a faulty ipod. Even after the 1 year waranty has expired you should be able to demand a complete refund so long as the fault lies with the goods manufacturer rather than abuse to the machine. I’ve had to get my ipod replaced a whoping 4 times so far so this might come in useful for when it fails out of waranty.

I’ve ended up about a week behind in my listening to the Daily Source Code due to being ill. So I’m currently playing catch up. Adam is running a golden ticket competition. They have chosen 1 listener at random who ends up with a slightly different show to everyone else’s. I guess when this person listens to the show they get told they’ve won. Great idea for a competition.

Looking at his weblog no one has claimed the prize yet. I’ve still got like 5 shows to listen to…it would be funny if I was the winner.

Nice April fools from Scobble. I’ll admit he had me for about 2 paragraphs. It made the top of memeorandum.

I’m loving using the OPML Editor to blog but I can’t find an easy way to stick pictures in the posts. Maybe I’m just being dumb.

Looks like I didn’t win the golden ticket

Josh Oakhurst has been making good use of Netflix to do some documentary watching. He lists his top 10 great documentaries.

Fox anounce that they are going to make a Simpson’s movie.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Phone and cable company executives contend that they need to be able to charge some companies premium prices if they demand secure networks, virtual private networks or higher speeds for the transfer of movies or other large files. They contend that their pledge not to harm consumer access is enough”. Hollywood wakes up to net neutrality.

According to Joe Barton, who is pushing the Net Neutrality Bill, “We just had eight gentlemen that represent the largest trade groups and the brightest minds in the country, and not one of them gave a concise definition”…”We’re tied up in knots in this bill, potentially over something that we do not yet even have a universally recognized definition of what it is”.

Ha ha so no-one understands it yet. You got to love it. I’ve held my hands up all along saying that I was confused about this topic. I think the penny is starting to drop though. The one thought that I keep coming back to is that I don’t think people understand what the net actually is, today, as in now.

The question people need to answer first is “What is the Web?”. You might think that’s an easy question but I get the feeling that it’s actually a very big rusty can of worms.

The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival opened its doors last Friday and runs until next Sunday. Its just reminded me of how much I am in need of a sunny holiday.

I’ve got a school reunion comming up pretty soon. Scarry stuff. Lots of emails flying around from people that I haven’t seen in a decade. Rumours of husbands or wives and babies and pregnancies. Some I know to be true and others not. Good to see that a decade apart hasn’t stoped the wind ups.

TechCrunch: Amazon launches grid service web storage. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”. Looks like you could store a 2K feature film for around $300 a month (not including the one off transfer fee). Thats pretty reasonable. I bet they have pretty big capacity. It’ll never happen though.

Sponsor a monkey. I happen to know this one and he’s top notch.

Reuters: “Google Book Search would allow publishers to set the prices for their books and make them available through a reader’s Web browser.”

As a school project C.Ronson came up with the ipod hoodie. He’s already received over 15 000 orders and is in talks with various places in China to get them made. At £15 a go thats a nice little earner. I want one.

Reuters: “Movie theater owners are considering asking federal authorities for permission to jam cell phone reception in an attempt to stop annoying conversations during films”. I favour the introdction of a cinema vigilante / neighbourhood watch approach - make it legal for other cinema goers to slap the loud mouths.

New Scary Movie trailer on YouTube. Funny.

Randolph J. May: “Adoption of a broad Net neutrality prohibition will impose monopoly-era public-utility-style regulation on new broadband services in an era characterized by competition”. Randolph takes the other side of the argument believing government net neutrality to be a bad idea in the long run.

Marguerite Reardon: “The broader discussion was what exactly Net neutrality means and whether legislators are discussing a solution to a problem that doesn’t yet exist”. In the same article Blair Levin analyst for Stifel: “I am hopelessly confused about Net neutrality”. At least I’m not the only one.

Nice little piece by Cyndi Greening of Cinematical about blogging in the film industry. She’s at SXSW…it looks like fun.

I’m really enjoying my new style of blogging. It’s really just the start of things at the minute. I’m usually very busy at work during the day and so only really have time to cut and paste a few quotes from things I find interesting in my world and link to them. I’m hoping to also get better at these bits, the bits where I just type and put accross some of my ideas about stuff. You know the more personal bits. I’m not that good at those yet and bound to suck for a while but you can always read somebody else’s blog.

Been thinking about Dave stoping blogging and I think I understand his thinking, in as much as you can understand someone you’ve never met or talked to…hey I’m just a fan.

Thought that I’d mention for future reference that I reserve the right to stop this blog at anytime for whatever reason and without warning (though I’d probably wave).

Tonight was the first class of the documentary course that I’m taking at City Lit. I find that first classes always have a really interesting dynamic to them: people tend to be initially nervous and apprehensive but as soon as group discussions start, a sort of realisation that everybody has similar interests starts to filter through the room. That’s a great moment. It also became apparent that if this class is at all representative, then 75% of the worlds documentary makers are female.

In this first session we looked at the role of the documentary in defining who we are and how we live, how rather than being a window on the world, the documentary in many ways acts more like a mirror, reflecting various viewpoints back at us. We watched extracts from 2 documentaries:

The first was 49 Up directed by Michael Apted, the latest installment of the Up! Series. Started in 1964, the series follows 14 seven year old children as they get older (revisiting them every 7 years) and explores the notion of class. In order to give a feeling of coherence throughout the series which spans many decades, the style is rather conservative. It focuses on personal lives and the subjects tend to fit certain stereotypes. One wonders how much of an influence the documentary itself has had on the people it follows and indeed whether it has simply helped to lead them down the paths set out by their class. Nevertheless a very interesting series which is ongoing and who’s next installment will coincide with the London Olympics in 2012.

The second documentary by Nicholas Barker, Unmade Bed, is set in New York and follows four heterosexual singles. In contrast to the UP series, this is very stylised can be described as a hybrid documentary / film, the director having asked the subjects to replay themselves under his direction in certain parts. Very beautiful shots of New York in a wide aspect ratio, combined with interesting choices of music and a complete absence of voiceover give this a real cinematic look. In a way the subject matter and also the portrayal of the people give this a black comedy feel to it which can leave you with a certain voyeuristic taste in your mouth. Although it did at first seem a bit strange, I really liked the idea of a hybrid as it helped to push the boundaries of what you think a documentary is. I like looking at things in new ways.

Very much looking forward to next weeks installment which will be looking at the categorisation of documentaries. I’ve also arranged to exchange a list of my favorite documentaries with several of the people I met. That sounds like a job for the opml editor. I love Dave Winer’s idea for reading lists…but what I want is a watching list!

I’ve just enrolled on course 5HF002 at City Lit called Re-imagining the documentary: the documentary today in film and television. Thankfully they had some places left as I had kind of left it to the last minute what with all my traveling lately. It starts in two days! The course will last 12 weeks and consists of a two hour class on Wednesday evenings, all for the very reasonable price of £76.

From what I can gather, the course will be led by Gail Cole, a Film Theory Lecturer from Westminster University and Adam Kossoff who is a postgraduate researcher at the Royal College of Art.

Documentary making is something I’ve been interested in for a number of years. For some reason the time just seemed right to do something in the documentary realm now. I’ve got some ideas that I’ve been churning over for a while now. Needless to say they involve the web.