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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.

The goal of the Condor Project is to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources. More of a note for myself but you might find it interesting if you’re interesting in distributed computing and things like render farms. I guess you could say I am.

Getting started with Condor from Linux Journal.

Windows is 21 years old today.

I’ve spent the past while writting what started out as a small piece about some ideas I had over the weekend, it ended up being so long it broke out into an entire article all of it’s own - The Disintermediation of Film Making.

Amanda Congdon does a piece [video] on net neutrality for Rocketboom.

Kevin Marks is interviewed [video] about net neutrality at Supernova. According to Kevin it’s more about net symetry. The idea that the telcos are trying to make us pay for their bad provisioning is interesting.

Tim Berners-Lee: “When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA” [real video of his statement].

Earlier I watched the film “Good Night, and Good Luck“. It stars David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow a pioneering Radio and TV presenter in 1950s America. It tells the true story of how Murrow then a journalist of the CBS network managed to expose Senator Joseph McCArthy over his communist “witch hunt” despite huge pressures from the government and advertisers to drop the story. A brilliant performance by Strathairn.

It is a dangerous thing indeed when any person or organisation of people have control over a powerfull medium of communication. The internet has so far managed to escape this fate, but this film was a reminder that we should keep a close eye on things else we could loose the freedom of things like blogging, vlogging and podcasting, and maybe only some years after they were made possible for all.

Edward R. Murrow from his speech at the RTNDA Convention, 1958:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful”.

Richard Bennet: “When BitTorrent is slowed down by backoff, it simply propagates more paths, creating more and more congestion. In another year, the Internet is going to be just as unstable as it was in 1985″.

Richard at times seems like a pretty angry guy, but sometimes you need an angry guy plus I wanted to find the other side of the argument. You can find all his posts on the subject of net neutrality here [there are lots!].

Slingshot is a new British film company that plans to “use the freedoms afforded by the digital revolution up and down the value chain to make better films and deliver them more efficiently”. They’ve been getting some press coverage in the Guardian and Varierty. They also have a blog and were wondering whether anyone was reading it. Well it looks like some people are.

Feeling sad? Well the Laughter Network might be just what you need!

Where the hell is Matt? I was thinking this just the other day. Funny.

DCinemaToday: “Doremi Cinema has been selected by Deluxe Digital Cinema, Capital FX and EFILM London to provide its DMS-2000 DCI 1.0 JPEG2000 mastering station for encoding movies in 2K and 4K formats. The purchase also includes two Doremi DCP-2000 DCI JPEG2000 digital cinema servers”. I’ve been so busy I totally missed this press release. The Doremi server is in the building and hopefully I shall be able to play with it very soon.

Scott Kirsner: “My working thesis about the visual effects business is that, despite the growing number of big-budget movies relying on computer-generated imagery, the ability of “blue chip” visual effects firms (such as ILM, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Digital Domain, and Rhythm + Hues) to command premium prices will drop”.

Screen Digest: “On the back of the Hollywood studios releasing their technical specification for d-cinema in June 2005, there was explosive growth in the number of d-cinema screens globally during the second half of last year, with numbers doubling in a six month period”. Their report is pretty pricey at $2475 for print and get this, $4950 for an electronic copy.

Great superb article in CNNMoney about John Lasseter: “We have this precious entity that is Pixar. It’s like a living organism, like we had found out a way to grow life on a planet that had never supported it before. We wondered if a deal like this would ruin it all”.

Steve Gibby interviews Jim Jannard founder and chairman of Oakley and RED Digital Cinema about their new digital video camera called simply RED. The camera has been hotly anticipated. It can shoot at 2540p, 4K, 2K, 1080p and 720p.

Mike Curtis gives his thoughts on why this camera exists.

So if you can have a completely digital pipeline from capture to display what’s going to happen to digital intermediate companies? Are they going to have to some up with a new name for what they do?

This evening I’ll be at the CFX Short Film Awards. Looking forward to it.

Kyle MacDonald started out just over a year ago with one red paperclip and set himself the challenge of exchanging it for a house, an island or a house on an island. The series of trades he has made so far makes for very interesting reading. What’s also really interesting is that in each case it seems that both parties get something out of the deal. Is there an ebay for trading stuff? That would be pretty cool though not sure how you would make money out of it. Maybe advertising but then advertising is so 1990 these days and I can’t see it really fitting in with the ethos of a site dedicated to swapping. In french bartering stuff is called Troc. What a great word.

If you’ve ever wanted to run Windows, OSX and Linux on a single machine, now you can with Parralels. What is great with Parralels is that as it’s VMware you can have all three running at one. It has to run on the new Intel macs. I wonder what performance is like? At $40 its pretty resonable too.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak in Forbes: “Like other professional arbiters of taste, movie reviewers just don’t matter quite as much as they used to. Once upon a time, they were the point of origin for popular opinion. In an age of ratings Web sites and consumer-generated content, they are just one voice of many. Maybe a particularly authoritative voice, but no longer the popes they used to be”.

I wrote a few days back about how great it was that both Imperial College and UCL were suporting RSS. I’ve been reading the feeds for a few days now and though they are great what I really need is to be able to subscribe to certain departments as I am mainly interested in computer science and material science. I’ve sent an email to UCL Computer Science Department requesting they offer their news section as an RSS feed. Lets see what happens.

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].

DCinemaToday: “Twentieth Century Fox International, chose Nordisk Film’s digital screens for their first ever international release in JPEG2000. A dubbed and a subtitled master of “Ice Age 2” were prepared and distributed by Deluxe in conjunction with Éclair Digital Cinema. The film opened successfully on 3 digital screens today, including, the Imperial, the largest venue in Scandinavia (1100 seats)”.

More coverage of the same event on Digital Cinema Matters and The Hollywood Reporter.

Cinematical reports that the court cases against The Da Vinci Code might not be entirely finished as religious groups in Korea have filed an injunction against the film’s release there saying that it “may disparage and insult the divinity of Jesus Christ,” and could also lead to confusion if viewers “believe that [the] fictional tale is historical fact”.

BBC News: “Shares in Walt Disney have risen on news the US entertainment group plans to offer some of its most popular TV shows online for free”.

Many on the web react to the news with aprehension as the topic makes the top of memeorandum.

Steve Jobs can’t be too happy about losing out on the sales of these downloads he’s recently been getting. In the words of a certain Disney majority shareholder as he looked at the market “you win some, you lose some”.

Frank Gruber analyses the various services that sell online music on TechCrunch in a two part piece. In this first piece he compares pay-per-download services. The next part will look at all you can eat subscription services. The outlook is heavy DRM and an AAC/WMA format war which is bound to end in tears for us users.

Dave Winer: “Instead of thinking of “user generated content” think of the Internet as an idea processor, and you’ll be much closer to the power of what’s going on”.

I’m always looking for different ways of looking at the internet and I like this one. Depending on who you are and what you do the internet can seem like very different things, and it changes over time.

When I first started going online in the early nineties I was pretty impressed but I soon got bored as I realised that really the internet was just a glorified catalogue. Websites were static and they just tended to show you things. You couldn’t really interact. I’m sure there were interesting things going on in the web then but I just wasn’t aware of them.

The web today is a very different place. People of all walks of life all around the globe are able to interact in so many different ways, share things, create things, do business and more. Its incredible that the web has so far met everyone’s needs. The pace of change is accelerating rapidly and the boundaries of what the web is are being pushed in ever more directions. The whole net neutrality issue is somehow related to this. Will the web continue to evolve as something for everyone? It’s an important question.

The web as storage in the clouds: Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Services.

Great audio interview by Dr Jobbs with Amazon’s Adam Selipsky about the new S3 service. I’m starting to see the big deal with this thing. I’m also starting to get some really good ideas for new projects. When you don’t have to worry about storage things could get a lot more fun for developers.

Looks like the Da Vinci Code will get released after all as Dan Brown wins his case at the High Court in the UK. Any publicity is good publicity.
NYTimes: “The authors of ‘Holy Blood’, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, had failed in their effort to prove that Mr. Brown had stolen their ‘central theme’ because they could not accurately state what that theme was”.

Rushi has compiled a great list of links for AJAX newbies and its kind of geared towards PHP programmers. Just what I was looking for.

Techdirt: Universal Pictures are trying to beat dvd counterfeiters at their own game in Russia by selling “cheap ‘n early” dvds at lower cost and quality.

I missed this post on Cinematical last weekend about the upcomming Shrek spin off “Puss in Boots”. I had wondered what had happened to this idea. While I was working at the Creature Shop last year I had a load of fun doing some motion capture tests for this. Due to the fact that cats have weird back legs that bend the wrong way, the physical department, which built the animatronics, had made a special Puss in Boots exoskeleton that a human wore and to which the motion capture sensors were attached. In this way the motion data that was captured would look like it was from a walking cat.

I ended up doing the initial testing for the exoskeleton as I was about the right size and had to prance about the studio with a pretend sword. When it came down to the actual motion capture shoot they got someone else in but I did get to try on the Honey Monster outfit that day too. Brings back such good memories.

Complete coincidence but I’m going to a reunion lunch of the Creature Shop engineering team tomorrow which should be interesting. Damn it’s such a shame that the place closed down.

BBC News: “Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for new .eu domain name since it became available to the public on Friday”. Damn it some person with my name got the one I wanted. Imposter!

BBC News: “Digital download-to-own is the new holy grail of the film and TV industry as it fights to respond to the twin challenges of piracy and new market entrants”…”However, the consumer must be at the centre of all new strategies and DRM systems that are not sufficiently flexible are doomed to failure”.

Sometimes time sure does fly. I missed out on blogging some real interesting stuff the last couple of days due to an insanely busy work schedule. That really bums me out.

Its been a really interesting week for all things digital. Here in the UK for the first time ever a single has made it to number one based on digital downloads alone. Think about it for a second, they’ve got a number one and they haven’t actually made anything that you can physically hold in your hand. Far out.

BBC News: “US hip-hop duo Gnarls Barkley have become the first act to score a UK number one single on the strength of digital sales alone”

One of the interesting things is a massive shift in how the charts are formed. The charts for the last ten years have, for the most part, been defined by what singles teenagers are buying from the shops. With downloads playing a major role, the demographics of chart influence is moving to the 20-30 year olds. IMHO this can only be a good thing for music. But then I would say that wouldn’t I…

The other major news in the world of digital was the announcement that six major studios are clubbing together to sell movie downloads that you can keep.

NYTimes: “The studios are caught between a rock and a hard place”…”If they don’t make movies available electronically, piracy will get them. But they simultaneously have to take care of their brick-and-mortar customers. If the chain stores became angered”…”they might pull back from their heavy promotion of DVD’s”.

Lots of interesting chatter on the blogosphere about the development as the news makes the top of memeorandum.

Great piece by Scott Kirsner on CinemaTech - thats where I heard about it first. One of the best places for anything d-cinema related.

For the most part people are complaining about how rubbish the service is going to be: expensive and heavily DRMed. What people are missing is that this is really just the first step. The studios are just starting to “get the internet” but are treading very cautiously, and for good reason. The prices will come down, the market will see to that, in the end it’s just way cheaper to not actually have to physically make anything.

With companies like Amazon and Apple trying to secure deals with Hollywood this has the potential to drastically change things: jobs will be lost and companies without internet presence will go under. It’s going to be a roller coaster ride from here on in.

Dave Winer thinks that NPR are figuring out how to make money on the internet. The article of his on the fundamental law to making money on the internet (version 3) that he links to makes for interesting reading.

Damn I love the OPML Editor for blogging but it sucks so hard that when you switch to the normal Wordpress interface then back the the OPML Editor that all the work you did gets deleted. All the picks I uploaded just disapeared. Grrr. Now I have to put them back again.

Where does all the time go? I need a time machine. It’s nearly midnight and I have a few PHP/MySQL tutorials to get through before bed…in the end the master plan will come together it’s just sometimes juggling work, professional exams, personal projects and eating good pizza can leave you a bit thinly spread.

The best pizza in London town is the Furnace and you sure better had the pizza Porchetta its just so great. Mmmm.

I really should change my blogroll. I mean who are these guys? Matt, Donncha, Dougal. I sure don’t know.