dcinput

Playing with Amazon Web Services

Spent several hours this evening reading tutorials about and playing around with some of the Amazon web services: S3, EC2 and SQS. I found a great tutorial by Mitch Garnaat explaining how to use all three to build a massively scalable solution to video conversion. At very short notice you can deploy hundreds maybe even thousands of machines to number crunch, pay for what you use, then give them all back. No maintenance headache, no need for massive up front investment.

Mitch has written set of Python libraries called Boto that wrap up some of he Amazon functionality. The tutorials have some good examples and seem pretty straight forward to use. I came across some authentication issues which I hope to resolve in the next few days.

In around a year or two mobile devices that can take great video will be standard. What are all these millions of people going to want to do with their video? That’s the million dollar question.

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.

I’ve just spent an hour writting a great post and just before I was about to post it my XP machine, for no reason at all, just totally hung. The damn thing hasn’t needed a reboot for about a month and when does it decide to act up? Just when I was feeling ok that I stayed back at work late on a Friday to write a post, that’s when.

So in the interest of me getting home quickly some nice Friday links with a little explanation…

Big Love…

Hugh MacLeod has been busy traveling around the UK doing a special Valentine’s day promotion for Stormhoek wine. He’s got a video camera and an editor with him and releasing small shorts as he travels around. I met Hugh a few weeks ago and he’s an awesome guy. If you are only going to read one thing of his read his piece on How to be Creative.

What is the web? Why is it so cool?

It’s weird that when you are so deeply involved in something for a number of years, something you think is great and wonderful, but it’s so big and complex that you don’t really understand entirely why its so cool…you just kind of do.

Then someone makes a video clip like that which takes all the loose ends that have been swishing around in your head all this time and pulls them together, and everything just becomes clear and lucid again.

I love the web and I love moving images.

Another magic video

I got a similar feeling when Toby Harris first showed me this video edit of the first Avit VJ Festival back in 2002. This was when I first started to understand the power of the web. It might take a while to download but its worth waiting for.

Toby (*Spark) is currently involved in some really incredible projects. Watch this space.

Spent this evening having drinks and dinner with Alistair McClymont an old friend who has that rare mix of artist and technologist talents which lie in perfect harmoney. He’s recently been to Rome, exploring the Sistine Chapel and so we exchanged art museum stories and techniques, as well as a fair amount of geeky computer chat.

Alistair has a new exhibition at the Wyer Gallery showing now.

I will probably be attending the MiniBar3 this comming Friday where Michela Ledwidge will be talking about Modfilms, a platform for re-mixable films and interactive story-telling. The theme of discussion for the evening is online video. Rumour has it there will free beer. If you are going drop me an email - dcinput at gmail dot com.

New York Times: “Seeking Executive to Tame Digital Future”.

101 things you don’t want your system administrator to say.

BBC News: “Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result”. I know I watch a whole lot less TV than I did 12 months ago.

Business Week: “Anshe Chung, the virtual land baroness […] has apparently become the first millionaire in Second Life“.

Interesting video of Andrew Baron talking about using Podzinger to make Rocketboom fully searchable. It works by automatically transcribing the audio and then re-rendering the video in flash so that you can link straight to a particular spot in a video file. He also talks about using the online community to create subtitles for foreign viewers. Great idea but not so good if you have a small audience.

BBC News: “Galacticast, a weekly sci-fi comedy shot in a Montreal apartment, is one of the few with enough talent and imagination to be truly funny and watchable”. One of my personal favorites.

BBC News: “Internet video is coming of age, with the best amateur film-makers attracting millions of online viewers”.

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.

Mike Ambs‘ edit of ‘Human Labotomy’ [the first edit of the Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary was by Arin Crumley], is an excellent piece of work. The net neutrality debate has been going for a while, I’ve written about it several times. I find this documentary project important for several reasons.

These two edits do a fantastic job of painting the net neutrality picture. The subject isn’t a trivial matter to understand. I’ve been reading things for many months now and it’s the first time I’ve seen something that fully and simply puts across the message. This is done by looking back at the evolution of previous forms of media intercut with recent interviews with important web figures like Tim Berneres Lee and Lawrence Lessig, all to well chosen background music.

It uses the web a platform for documentary making. Using publicly available media that is available on the web in places like YouTube, Google Video, Podzinger and Delicious and by publishing project files under some form of creative commons license they are enabling others to re-edit and release their own versions. By watching and re-watching you learn more things and see new perspectives.

It helps to spread the word, start conversations and get people involved.

I really like projects that use the web in new ways. I know this isn’t the first open source style film making project but there’s something about one that pushes the boundaries of film making using the web while at the same time trying to save it.

The Times BFI London Film Festival have been doing a video podcast.

Dana Gardner: “Microsoft will partner with Novell to support SuSe Linux as an alternative deployment platform to Windows — and that they announce it on the cusp of the arrival of Windows Vista”. Big news.
More about it on Techmeme.

AdvertisingAge: Mobile version of YouTube by the end of 2007. View from Techcrunch.

BBC Technolgy: “Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said he wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web’s development.”

Richard MacManus: “Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it’s not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - “the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites”. So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.”

In my last year of school, when it came to choosing university courses, I remember how incredibly hard it was. I had a vague idea that it was going to be in the science/engineering field, but I found chossing a particular direction really hard because there were aspects of all the courses that I liked. In the end what attracted me to Materials Science and Engineering was the broadness: physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, economics and more.

After finishing the degree, the problem of finding a particular direction hadn’t gone away, in fact in many ways it had gotten worse since my aquired knowledge was spread across so many disciplines, I had many interests but it was hard to have a focus.

At the time I really didn’t know much about computers, in fact I had never owned one. Luckily the university facilities were very good and so I didn’t really need to actually own one. After a time it started to dawn on me that computing might be the subject that was drawing all the subjects I was interested in together. That’s why I went back to do a Computing degree. It turned out to be one of the best decissions I ever made. I remember on the first day of lectures one of the lecturers told us that at the end of the course we would look at the world in a totally different way, and he was right.

Why am I telling you all this? I wanted to try to explain the background to why I think the new Web Sciences Research Initiative being setup by Tim Berners-Lee is so incredibly important. The web fascinates me on a daily basis. It is an open playing field, full of creativity and it is inherently multidisciplinary but it is also chaotic and complicated. It’s high time we started exploring the web in a scientific but also holistic way, by drawing from the social sciences too. Sure, it’s about technology, but most of all it’s about people.