dcinput

Mashable: “As of tomorrow, you can register your own .tv domain on ChannelMe, but soon they’ll add tools for users to develop that site into a personal TV channel”.

Copyright issues aside, media mashups are just funny: The Big Lebowski - the F#$%@*G Short Version [Language not work safe].

TechCrunch: “AppStore will be the one-stop shopping place for on-demand software, starting in Q1 of 2007. Developers and partners will be able to sell their programs directly through the AppStore and Salesforce will make a referral fee, based on the performance of the product”. Ooh an iTunes for web services. Nice.

Jason Calacanis links to a report looking at a new breed of people turning up in organisations: the out there people. Jason adds some of his thoughts to the discussion. Interesting reading and good food for thought.

I’ve just listening to Richard Bacon on XFM. He’s asking his listeners to upload interesing video they make to YouTube and put the word ‘BacoFilm‘ somewhere in the title so that with a simple search they will all show up. At some stage in the future he will choose the best one who will win some award. Interesting to see MSM using these new technologies in their programming. If you’re a videoblogger might be a good way to get your name out to the wider population.

The ProgrammableWeb is a site that keps track of all the web APIs that are sprouting up all over the place. There’s a blog where they review them as they appear, a mashup section for the best use of them, a mashup matrix, a place to share stuff and a place to learn about how the web is becoming a platform. Really Great Resource.

David Tames: “The qualitative difference in today’s media technology landscape is that innovation is becoming the domain of end-users and is being guided by human needs, creative expression, social activities, and intellectual pursuits; rather than sales goals, quarterly profits, corporate research agendas, and marketing initiatives.”

David Tames’ essay from which the above quote is taken is a good read. He touches on many of the most interestring topics of the day such as walled-gardens, the changing role of the audience, the web’s effect on community and the theory of the long tail all from the perspective of a film maker.

What I’m finding most interesting in all my readings and podcast listening recently is that people of all sorts of different backgrounds and proffesions from all over the world are starting to form ideas and views about the web that are very similar. How interesting the world becomes when people start to have conversations, and to think that only 6 years ago I thought that the web was a glorified sales catalogue.

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.

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!

BBC News: “Police across England and Wales are to begin taking fingerprints while on patrol using mobile electronic devices. The hand-held gadgets - linked to a database of 6.5m prints - will enable officers to identify suspects within minutes“.

I’m pretty big on personal liberties and so I don’t like this sort of thing. Sure it might help them catch some criminals, and sure they might not be recording the finger print info yet, and sure it might very well be voluntary for the moment. Even if it remained voluntary, if it becomes widely used then due to social pressures, refusing to use the system would amount to admitting guilt. Not a good idea.

YouTube is memory lane

I was just listening to old school radio and the Scissor Sisters’s song ‘Take Your Mama’ was on. While I was bopping along to it I remembered that while I was working at the Creature Shop the Physical Department (I was in the Digital Department) had done all the puppets for the stage performance they did at the Brits in 2005. Looked it up on YouTube and they have the video! YouTube totally rocks. To think that even a year ago I probably wouldn’t have been able to do this and share the joy. Watch as the whole stage slowly comes alive, and you just got to love the melons. Classic Jim Henson.

You know, I think if Jim were alive today, I sure he would have gotten this thing we call the internets.

I’ve been busy culling my categories on the right side of the blog. The list is probably half as long as it was. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to aggregate bad categories into more general ones. In the end you just delete them. Still more work to do on this another day.

I’ll be going to see the new James Bond movie tomorrow night. I’m paying a little more money and going to see it on my first commercial d-cinema screen. Pretty excited.

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 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.

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.

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.