dcinput

Blog posts have been rather less daily than I would have liked this past week. I am right in the middle of the final stages of a very big project and have been doing 12-16 hour days. Looks set to continue for at least another week.

Good Ze Frank from last Friday about how we’re all learning about this internet thing we’ve built. Ugly.

I’m going to see the new Superman movie in 3D at the Imax on Wednesday. Not so good to hear others that weren’t too impressed.

I heard yesterday that Amanda Congdon the host of Rocketboom was leaving the show splitting from the show’s creator Andrew Baron. I’ve watched the show for well over a year now and in that time it has entertained me immensely but also certainly has changed how I view this thing we call the web. Amanda and Andrew thanks muchos!

Is it bad news for Rocketboom? I think not.

How to find a replacement for Amanda Congdon

Amanda has done a really fantastic job getting the show to where it is today. My honest opinion though is that I had kind of gotten bored of the format. The exagerated head movements, the throwing of the sheets of paper, that weird machine that she uses to start each video clip. Lately I was getting that ’same old, same old’ feeling.

On the other hand I have really been loving some of the new field reporters who each have very different styles of vlogging. I love the variety, you know being able to see things through other peoples eyes. The fact that Andrew and Amanda relinquish complete show control to these guys is fantastic.

My idea is this: have “Guest Presenters”. Instead of the same person week in week out lets mix it up a little by having people we recognise from the web present some shows. Sometimes just one show, maybe they do a whole string of them, maybe they come back at a later date if they were liked. Suddenly the show has no boundaries: you shoot it in a style that fits the personality of the “Guest Presenter”.

Imagine if you tuned in one day and Ze Frank presented a few days and what about a few days with Marc Canter, Dave Winer or Adam Curry? How about those two Chinese students that lypsync to Backstreet Boys tracks in their bedroom? The potential for the internet to find interesting characters is enormous. Sure, currently many of the known faces are the geeks, but it won’t be like that for ever.

How about if Rocketboom helped to bring in the interesting artists, scientists, politicans, fashion designers, journalists, business men etc of our world into this new open way of doing things? Now that really would be great.

Just my two pence.

dcinput vlog #2: The French in Picadily Circus

Ok so the French beat Portugal in the Semi-Final of the World Cup last night. The match was a little dull and my legs were very sore from standing up but the scene at Picadily Circus afterwards was interesting. vlog #2 illustrates why most people don’t use crappy camera phones for taking video.

The Register: “SGI to emerge from bankruptcy cocoon in September”.

SGI CEO McKenna laid out more of SGI’s product plans here.

Great exit interview questions to store away for a rainy day

I read this Scoble piece called You’re exit interview of me a couple of days ago but forgot to link to it. He’s answering questions from his readers about leaving his position at Microsoft. Some really good questions and I found his answers very well thought out. It’s funny I’m finding myself far more interested in his Blog since he resigned. Not sure why exactly. Maybe because he’s jumping into a space which I find very interesting.

Much ado about journalism

Jeff Jarvis: “This isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network”.

One of the things that bothered me about the “citizen journalism” tag was how it felt so lonely. In the back of my head I had a picture of this renegade guy running around the streets with a camcorder trying to track down what was really going on in the world. This film noir vision isn’t what the internet is about at all. Part of its charm is its abilty to bring people together so they can interact and create things. It’s just a big playground.

Crazy bird action on Rocketboom.

Ze Frank: “Since this massively networked world is still in its adolescants, we’re still trying to work out the rules of communication and friendship”.

Unhappy Customer

I had my phone stolen on Saturday night. If I’ve met you in the last month or so then unfortunately there is a good chance you have been deleted as I haven’t backed up in that long. Anoyingly I’ve also lost lots of nice photos I’ve taken recently, the perils off local storage eh.

This afternoon has been spent dealing with the mess that is Carphone Warehouse. When I bought the phone from them, they ‘forgot’ to tell me that I would be paying my bills through them. What this means is that when something goes wrong you have to do everything 5 times as their systems don’t link up properly with Vodafones.

Most excellent laptop customisation.

It looks like the new version of my phone takes video. Once I sync my contacts maybe I’ll try to become vlogger.

dcinput vlog #1

It’s BBQ weather here in London. I highly recommend the portable Smokey Joe Gold from Weber. Perfect for the park. This weird contraption on the right is the Chimney Starter, a geniously simple and highly effective way to get the coals red hot in around 10 minutes. Here is dcinput vlog #1

Happy Birthday Ali Menzies! Why has she stopped blogging?

Looking at my sidebar it’s high time I did some category pruning.

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.

Wimbledon starts today!

This year it seems the officials all have new uniforms. Why do they remind me of Butlins? Also they will be feeding us strawberries with a side order of RSS.

Yesterday’s brunch was fantastic. American pancakes with maple syrup, scrambled eggs with chorizo, eggs benedict and all acompanied by a live piano music. I had the wrong address in yesterday’s post: you will find Aganovich here.

Alistair McClymont is doing nice things with audio and video.

U2 rock the house in second life.

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.

Bre Pettis is officially a Rocketboom correspondant. Bre used to work for the Creature Shop here in London way before I did but we ended up meeting by chance over the interweb after the Shop closed down. When he came to London with his lovely girlfriend we met up with Kosso and Joe Twist whom I had by chance met previously. Bre is such an awesome guy and is one of the best video bloggers out there. I’m really happy for him!

Mark Nelson: “The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging”.

Mark is worried about people developing things around standards such as JPEG-2000. I don’t know enough about what he’s talking about but something to keep an eye on considering the DCI adoption of the format as its standard.

Lots of interesting digital cinema things happening at NAB. I’d love to be posting about them but I’m just too busy at work. Great coverage over at Digital Cinema Matters. Also daily podcasts from fxguide.

fxguide have anounced their fxphd beta, a sort of online university specifically geared towards the visual effects industry. After registration you become a post grad and attend 3 courses a term of which there are 4 a year. There is a background fundamentals which is compulsory and then you can choose from many courses covering a wide variety of subjects: Toxic, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Avid Express etc. You receive one 30 mins training video per week for each course.

“As you work through the video your professor is online to answer questions and guide you. There are practical files to download from real shots and projects- you can then compare your results with the final.
AND running along side fxphd is Creative Jobs Network recuitment - as you develop your reel and portfolio you have direct access to senior post recuiters the world over.”

Another interesting thing about it is that they are distributing the course material using Bit Torrent. It’s great to see some legal uses for this great technology and even better to see people actually trying to make money with it. Another Next Step for Bit Torrent. Class enrollement beguins 1st of May. It may be time to get a new pencil case.

One thing I note is that there do not seem to be any courses covering the more technical/engineering aspects of the industry. The sort of infrastructures that are required to support all the fabulous work that digial artists do are specialist and highly complex. Workflows and their implementation within a company and the management of enormous quantities of data are all very important aspects of the VFX world. It can be hard to find good people with the right skills for these roles.

Digitaler Film has an interesting flash movie thingy of how digital distribution works. It’s in German so no real clue as to what the guy is saying but liking the demo anyway. Here is his site through Google translate.

Avid anounce Avid Interplay: “The world’s first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size”. It looks seriously cool. The real question is how well it integrates with 3rd party software. If you end up getting locked into Avid products it wouldn’t be so good.

Great interview with Dave Winer on Rocketboom with extended bits about advertising, the history of the personal computer, the holiday season, habits online, the ownership of rss and writing style. I used to watch Rocketboom religiously but I’ve found that since I don’t have pc speakers at work or a video ipod I simply don’t have the time anymore. I need to get back into it though, Amanda makes me smile.

The weather forecast is looking nice in London for the next few days with temperatures ranging from 17 to 20 C [BBC, weather.co.uk]. April showers no doubt though.

Happy 80th Birthday to the Queen!

BBC News: “Buckingham Palace said she had received 20,000 cards and 17,000 e-mails”. Maybe I’ll send one. Anyone know her address?

[Update1: BBC TV News reports over 70 000 emails]

[Update2: BBC Radio 1 reports over 17 000 emails. Maybe I miss-heard]
Royal family contact details. Just in case. Email the Queen here. Looks like she doesn’t give out her email address. Clever girl.

A birthday email to the Queen.

Alexa O’Brien interviews Bob Gibbons Director of Marketing and Communications at Kodak Digital Cinema. Kodak came to the office last year to run a training course. It was really interesting but I couldn’t help feeling weird as we were the people who would be stealing their jobs. Good to hear they are taking digital seriously. At the training this didn’t come accross at all.

Movie maker Jen Simmons talks about videoblogging at the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture conference Taking Liberties, as part of its “Cinema in Transmission: New Languages/New Reception” panel. It comes in two parts - part 1 and part 2. Thanks for Cinema Minima for the link.

Check out the orange vlogman icon I found!

Its vlog week this week. More on this later.

The plan was to write some more about videobloggingweek2006 today but after a grueling 14 hour day at the office its time for bed. Still loving the vlogman icon.

Follow the video blogging antics this week around the world at technorati.

Bre Petis and Casey McKinnon, two of my most favoritist vloggers are both participating in the vlogging fun this week.

Bre used to work at Henson’s in London just before I did and we met through our blogs and ended up meeting in London when he was over with his lovely girlfriend. He teaches art in school and I imagine he would be the coolest teacher ever. He’s just full of energy and briliant ideas.

Casey produces and stars in the Kitkast, a vlog aimed at a slightly more mature audience. I’ve found the approach she takes to her shows really interesting. She’s also got a really cool sounding project of a completely different nature that is starting very soon. I’ve been swarn to secrecy but watch this space because I have no doubt it will be fantastic. Much luck Casey!