dcinput

Dave Winer on the Viacom vs Google business: “It’s a negotiation with users, not a war with Google. Forget Google. The users want something you aren’t providing. So provide it and stop arguing so much.”

That’s pretty much the bottom line.

The uglybooth

Today’s daily self portrait is another photobooth experiment, this time it’s the ugly booth. I did it using the Sony K810i phone, it has some pretty interesting warping features built in to the camera which lead to very amusing photos indeed. There’s something very amusing yet very wrong about seeing your face all distorted.

Ze Frank speaks out on ugly.

By the way if you haven’t been watching Ze Frank this past year, it’s not too late [this is the last week of the show]. Go ahead and watch from the beginning. What he has done this past year is truly remarkable. Not only are his shows great, what’s really outstanding is how he’s manage to engage his audience.

People send in all sorts of bits that he uses in the show, he runs bizarre competitions like dress up your vacuum cleaner or who can create the most ugly MySpace page. There is a massively active forum where members interact and collaborate on projects and there is even an apprenticeship.

The “Messages from the Sportsracers” episode a couple of days ago was extremely long and consisted entirely of clips sent in from people all around the world thanking him for the past year. I watched the whole thing and was really quite touched by it. Ze doesn’t care who you are or what you look like, he’s inspired people from all walks of life and from countries all over the globe to do really important things.

Ze Frank is a real life Ferris Beuler or Van Wilder: the people’s hero.

Remember it’s not about being cool, it’s about being more awesome.

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.

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!

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”.

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”.

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.

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.

Following up on yesterdays NYTimes link, according to the The Hollywood Reporter it seems the first steps have been taken by the National Assembly to force Apple to open the door on its remarkably popular iPod. The music industry won’t be too happy about this, after all they probably only trusted iTunes to sell their music in the first place because of this lock in feature.

What did they expect? If all BMW cars were fitted with a special device that only allowed you to refuel with special BMW made petrol, how long do you think they would last before goverments would start to smell anti-competitiveness over the smell of the fumes?

I’ve mentioned several times over the last few months how impressed I’ve been with YouTube. Judging solely on the uptake with non-techie work collegues and friends I knew this thing was going to cause a big ripple. Interesting to read an article by Andrew Wallenstein who takes a Hollywood perspective.

Andrew Wallenstein: “However, the relationship between this Internet upstart and Hollywood isn’t as adversarial as you might assume. For every corporate lawyer firing off angry letters to YouTube, there are two more executives exploring potential partnership opportunities — maybe even an outright acquisition”

Got a secret? Why not post it?