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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.

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.

Podcastcon UK is later today. I got a last minute ticket so I’ll be there sampling some of the atmosphere. Should be fun!

More on the conference later. A conversation happening on the Yahoo Videoblogging mailing list has caught my attention.

The other Videoblogging Community

Eric Rice: “They might not come from YOUR world, but they are part of the world”. Watch the video on his post before you read on.

I’ve been subscribed to the the mailing list for a few weeks now. I’m no videoblogger but I’m really interested in the space and it was a good way to see what was going on in it.

What Eric was pointing out was that over the past few years different videoblogging communities have developed. Sites such as MySpace and YouTube make it very easy to publish video to the world but because of the way these sites are implemented the new and often thriving communities are kept within a walled garden.

Many of the people on the Yahoo list were among the innovators in the whole videoblogging movement and the question which is arrising seems to be whether the community they have built has infact become a walled garden in itself. You see many of the people on the list seem at times to look down on these other communities for various reasons.

In a seperate thread Andrew Baron of Rocketboom asks “What next?”.

An important part of communites of all types is the bonding that occurs in between all its members. In order for different communities to live in harmoney together another equally important activity is bridging between them.

With so much creativity from all these web video pioneers, surely there must be a way to start conversations between these communities. Imagine the fun that would ensue when videobloggers behind these walled gardens suddenly realised other entire communities were reaching out, trying to talk to them.

What would this do to the companies like YouTube and MySpace? If we lead by example maybe the walls would crumble.

The “Curry Club” UK podcasters meet up on Sunday afternoon at the Bricklayers Arms was lots of fun. It was a pretty packed turn out. Photos have been posted here, here and here. Shout out to Dereck of Sundream Radio, Mini Paul, Kosso and Doctoe of the Blugcast. I also talked to the editors of the new Podcast User Magazine, which touts itseft as “the worlds first magazine dedicated to news, reviews and how-to’s - from newbies to gurus - online and in your hand”. Its available every month as a free pdf download and guess what: you can subscribe to it using RSS. You’d be crazy not to.

BBC News: “BBC executives believe that in the new digital, on-demand world, in which people consume news, sport and entertainment on computers and mobile phones as well as through radio and TV, Grandstand is associated with the past rather than the future”.

It’s a sad day. I’ll be humming the theme tune all day today and remembering all those lazy Sundays I spent watching Grandstand as a student when I really ought to have been studying.

CinemaTech reports on Amazon turning to the world of digital mastering for the masses. They do any format you require and then help you sell it.

Hey it’s Saint Mark’s day today! Cool.

DCinemaToday: “Barco and Silicon Graphics announce that worldwide media company Deluxe Labs has installed a Barco DP100 2K D-CINE PREMIERE projector at its Hollywood facility through SGI Professional Services”.

Its nice to finally see some press releases from Deluxe and EFilm considering their considerable input into digital cinema recently which, especially in Europe, has remained under the raidar. I get the feeling that we’re going to be seing a lot of very interesting things from these guys in the near future. Key word in this press release: worldwide.

I’ve had many dealings with SGI in the last few months and I contiunue to be extremely impressed. Whether it be in times of exteme time pressure or periods of technical planning their engineers continue to produce the goods without fail. Their share price may be low right now but sending investments their way at this time might just make you some money in the next few years.

There’s a UK podcasters meet up with Adam Curry and the podshow massive happening in London this coming Sunday (3pm) at the Bricklayers affectionally entitled Curry Club. Great pub by the way. Sign up on the Wiki if you want to come. I’ll definitely be there…sounds like fun. Beer and darts…how could I possibly pass it up? I’ll see if any of the ICSelect crowd want to come down.

It’s also the London Marathon on Sunday so good luck to my two most excellent buddies Laurie Bantin and Tony Uberschar of (among other things) the fabulous Terra Plana. May the best man win. As much as I’d like to be there with you I’ll be in a far more sensible place: the pub.

Check out these most superb Terra Plana shoes.

LATimes: ” Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood”.

DCinemaToday: “The QuVIS Digital Cinema System™ is part of the QuVIS Digital Cinema Solution, which includes the QuVIS Acuity™ and QuVIS QuStudio™ for post production, mastering, and content management, including encryption, secure distribution and key management. QuVIS QuShow™ provides screen management of content for in-theater scheduling and show playlist management; either standalone, or in conjunction with an existing system”.

I am mainly linking to this article from the New Yorker because I haven’t finished reading it and I want to go back to it later. It’s about possible US plans to attack Iran. Pretty scarry stuff.

It’s great to see that my old University Imperial College supports RSS! One for news and one for events.

Looks like Universty College London, where I did my Masters, has one for news too! It’s a little harder to find but it sure is there.