We have a student mailing list at ITP, where everyone can post messages to each other to ask for help, trade info on events, whine about being busy, etc. There's been an ongoing, often raging, debate on how the list should be used, what counts as spam, and when someone has just. gone. too. far. The Japanese Room (not me, I'd note) was accused of such in my pComp final for sending a mere 15 emails (a fraction of the 100 or so emails of a normal day), so you can imagine how easily it is to provoke claims that the sky is falling. But this is about something of a completely different nature.

Recently Kunal started sending spoofed emails to the list, which appear to come from other people. This is quite easy to do, and is hard to spot if you can't read email headers. It started as a way for him to post to the list after being banned, but turned into a full-on discussion of digital identity after he posted a link to the web interface he's using, allowing anyone with the link to email the ITP student list as anyone who's subscribed. The page is titled, appropriately, Chaos. (I'm withholding the link because, as you can imagine, there's been enough uproar without having to worry if - gasp! - outsiders were mucking with our identities and list politics. Sorry to ruin your fun.)

Anyway, it tied in nicely with what I've been thinking lately about privacy, security, and identity online. I think 2007 will be the year in which the intersection of those three things hits home for the mainstream users, probably through a major breach of privacy. Hopefully it will be from something like Gmail, and Google will be forced to deal with the (somewhat unfair, I'd say) mounting wariness of all the data they possess on us. That would at least get fixed in a timely manner. I shudder to think of what would happen if it's related to the new RFID passports.

In any case, my response to the discussion is after the jump. Much more on these issues next semester, too. After all, you can't start 2007 with Chaos and expect an uneventful year.

Update: Here's Clay Shirky's article on the ITP student listserv.

Continue reading "2007 launches with Chaos" »

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Nokia N93
Originally uploaded by Prophecy Boy.

[via Gizmodo]

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This Business Week article suggests that Google might be developing their own currency, making an end-run around PayPal (and just about everyone else). This is fascinating when taken together with the economies of MMOGs, especially Second Life, whose Lindens are easily converted to and from real-world currencies. If Google starts "printing" virtual money (I'm 99% sure it would never exist in a physical form, other than plastic), it would jumpstart the concept of virtual economies and help ingrain the globalizing nature of the internet. Nations are becoming less of an organizing idea for anything other than geography; why should currency be tried to geography? I wonder if it would be a step in the direction of a Google-owned virtual world - an MMO marketplace of sorts. If that's what they're after, though, they might do better to just buy Second Life. But I digress -

Two questions:
1) This is fun to think about, but where the hell did BW get this idea? I've heard nothing of this until now. It seems too radical for the Google of recent years, if you ask me.
2) Why? What advantage would Google have to force consumers to convert dollars/yen/pounds/etc. into a Google currency? I don't know enough about economics or currency exchange to say why this would be advantageous to them, other than (possibly) distancing the value of the company from any nation or group of nations. That seems like a plus, in the long term, but, once again, I'm hazy on the concrete benefits.

Posted by Adam at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

UPDATE (1/31/06): Seems like someone else had the same idea - IPac is currently accepting contributions right now. Click the button below to help:

---

The EFF is noting a shift in the Broadcast Flag debate in the Senate. It seems that a well-timed gift has caused the Commerce Committee chairman to swing rapidly from satunch advocate of the Flag to skeptic:

The second revelation, dropped into the later discussion of the RIAA's audio flag, was that Senator Stevens' daughter bought him an iPod. ... And when Stevens asked whether with the audio flag in place he would be able to record from the radio and put the shows onto his iPod: that's when the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol really began to sweat.

With that simple question, the octogenarian Senator encapsulated arguments about place-shifting, interoperability, and fair use that would have taken whole federal dockets to explain a few years ago.

This is brilliant - swaying politicians to our side by turning them into users. There's no surer way to guarantee that Washington won't steamroll over user's rights than by grouping the politicians in danger of being swayed by Hollywood's rhetoric in with the people whom the laws will affect. After all, I suspect many of us DRM-hating, copyfighting creative commies would care much if we weren't already entrenched in the growing political battle over content. Sure, we know the Broadcast Flag will affect everyone in equally bad ways, but the masses won't understand until it's too late and their televisions and iPods are actually broken. And, as we all know, politicians aren't the most tech-saavy. I honestly believe that most of the Broadcast Flag supporters on the Hill are being blinded by fast-talking Hollywood, and don't really understand the implications of this bill, or the dozens of others which threaten to limit consumer choice and media consumption. Politicians aren't bad people, they're just a bit slow.

Well, I have an idea, and I was about to act on it, until I hit a little sanfu. I wanted to start a Fundable campaign to buy every member of the Senate an iPod. (Fundable, if you don't know, is a group fundraising site. People pledge a dollar amount, and if the action falls short of its goal, no one pays a dime. If the goal is reached, the money is accepted and the action carried out. It's a no-risk way for people to support grassroots initiaitives like this.) The goal would be to turn the people making the laws into the same people the laws will effect.

So here's the problem: I proposed to raise $35,603.70 in the next 25 days to purchase one 30GB video iPod for every senator on the hill. (That includes the purchase price, tax, and the 10% Fundable fee - shipping will be free direct from Apple.) But Fundable doesn't support Group Actions for more than $10,000! Any suggestions? DropCash would work, but that transfers money right away - the thing I liked about Fundable is that it's all-or-nothing, which is key for getting strangers organized around something like this, I think. If you've got a suggestion for how to swing this, get in touch.

Technorati Tags: politics, iPod, senate, broadcastflag, Fundable, EFF

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After mulling it continuously for the better part of two years, I finally broke down and decided - a week before the deadline - to apply to NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. It's a two year graduate program in media technology / social technology / art and technology / etc. Basically, all manner of things that I'm interested in and would love to spend two years (and, hopefully everything thereafter) studying, talking about, and creating. There are a number of similar programs out there, but of the ones that I'm qualified for (ie, don't require a CS degree), ITP is the only one the offers a broad range of classes (the prospect of taking a classes in physical computing, toy design, and the politics of code in one day makes my dizzy with anticipation) and to actually produce work that is more than just theoretical or artistically interesting. In my personal statement (in it's entirety after the jump), I described it as "applied futurism". While that suggested something too analytical for Nikki's taste, to me it just implies thinking about what might be in store in the future and then doing it. To me, that's a) important work, and b) the most crazy delicious thing ever! So, I'm excited.

For those of you who may be wondering about ITP, but don't have the gumption to read my 1000 word personal statement or, you know, any words at all Cool Hunting's new video podcast has three 1-2 minute clips from the ITP Winter Show. Cool Hunting, if you don't know, is honestly very cool themselves

Or, for those of you for whom 1000 words isn't enough, check out the syllabus for Clay Shirky's class on Social Facts. Shirky's a major influence in the social software sphere (say that ten times fast - "Shirky's social software sphere"), and one of the reasons I'd be drop-dead lucky to study at ITP.

As I said, I completed the entire application in about a week, from initial epiphany (in the bathroom, of course) to filing. You can read all about that wacky process on my LiveJournal.

Click through for my personal statement.

Continue reading "ITP" »

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I'm working on some web-based software that has to do with online video, and I need help finding a good user interface designer. This means someone who can do both the graphic design and look of the site, as well as writing the code that supports and controls that interface. I've already got a programmer on board specifically to do the heavy lifting with the application and database programming, so the UI designer can really focus on presentation and ease of use. Ideally, he/she would be comfortable with both Ajax and Flash, and know how they can work together. The application itself is very ambitious, and a decidedly different approach to solving the problem of online video, so anyone who's interested in that type of thing would probably have a good time. We're rolling full-speed ahead with this as a startup, and we're open to giving the UI designer an equity stake. (Also, I should note, this has nothing to do with my work at CBS, and isn't a full-time job at this point.)

If you know anyone whom you think would be interested, please email me at adam [at][the name of this website]. Thanks!

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developments, it's ever more important that this site get refreshed to something...finished. As you'll none of you remember, I was caught with my CSS down around my ankles setting up the new version of the site when SixApart bought LiveJournal on the eve of my virgin MT install. And I recently borked things further trying to implement the new MT stylesheets, leaving the archives looking like a war zone.

Not to worry, help is on the way. I'm just trying to figure out the best way to pull in media from my ever-expanding list of sites. I building a personal aggregator of sorts, something which I've been lusting after for quite some time.

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O'Reilly Radar has a roundup of some very smart people (including Tim O'Reilly, as a publisher) debating the issues surrounding Google Print and the notion of whether it's fair use or not, and whether the Interweb has really become lawless or not, and how publishing is quickly following the music and film industries into making their products unaccountably difficult for people to enjoy.

I wish this debate could be reframed outside of a specific format, so we can debate the inevitability of it all (which is far more interesting) or simply begin to figure out what to do with an index of all human knowledge (which is far more productive). I have an increasing suspicion that my generation's legacy will be exactly that: establishing a new social model based on instantaneous access to anything ever known from anywhere on the planet. I don't see this being more than 10-20 years out, and yet we're so busy fighting each other over whether it will happen that I fear we'll be totally unprepared when it does happen. Not that that should be any surprise - I find we're often unprepared for the blatantly obvious.

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I had been thinking a lot about robotics even before yesterday's announcement that iRobot (makers of the Roomba) is going public. But now that the biggest manufacturer of consumer robots will get the cash to rapidly expand their offerings, I think we may be on the verge of a big wave of robotic innovation. Maybe one day, if the IPO goes well, and others follow, we'll all be talking about the big robot bubble of the late aughts.

(There are also a whole lotta other things ready to explode - including digital media, my other big interest as of late - but for now I'm just talking about robotics.)

For the past few months, I've noticed a lot of hacktivity surrounding simple robots, and I myself have felt an increasing urge to polish off my solder iron and melt some metal. There seems to be a lot of activity in the robotics area recently, of the sort that only true geeks will appreciate. I may be young, but I remember what using a computer was like back in the days of DOS and BBSes, and I have to say that robotics looks a lot like that right now. More importantly, homebrew robotics feels like the old frontier of the internet.

We all know coding has become a commodity, but knowing how to build a light-sensitive bot or an etch-a-sketch interface for your computer? That's interesting. And it really appeals to my art/tech creativity. With all this puppet building that's going on, I'm getting excited about building physical things again. And physical things that can eat my code and do something with it? Even better! I throw my hands up at new programming languages until they can control my vacuum.

As soon as my show opens and I have more than a minute or two to spare, I'm going to sit down and learn me to build some robots.

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Is it just me, or is the next version of Windows, now Windows Vista, way too text-heavy? I'm guessing that people going to the Control Panel don't really want to read a novella, they just want to fix their system. I noticed this in the last preview photos, and it hasn't gotten any better. Text everywhere, and way more information floating around on the screen. Microsoft seems to not understand that most people don't ever need to know that their hard drive is FAT32, that you can communicate a file type better by icon than by a text description, and that a scrollbar on the Start menu just looks cluttered. This is their answer to Tiger?

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Google Earth is so two weeks ago - check out http://moon.google.com. Yes, really.

Now zoom all the way in.

They're also hiring.

And, best of all, this was Google's birthday present to a few employees.

With all the talk about Googlezon and privacy fears surrounding Google's ever-expanding information about our lives, it's comforting to realize that they have a sense of humor. Their company motto is, after all, "Do no evil," and sometimes it serves them well to remind the rest of the world that they're still just big geeks at heart.

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After nine months, podcasting is set to explode into the general population in the next two weeks.

Ev William's ODEO is launching right now - it's only a matter of time before all those invitations are sent out. ODEO looks like it will be the thing that levels the production playing field: in-browser recording and production capabilities, using the Flash com server for the forces of good. (I get anti-Flash sometimes, but things like this remind me just how useful it can be.) I'm not sure how ODEO will have an effect on the audience side - it looks like a clean interface, but there's a bigger player on the horizon...

From what Leo Laporte said on this weeks' TWiT, I'm guessing that iTunes 4.9, with podcasting support integrated into the Music Store, will roll out next week. TWit rapidly became a top-10 podcast, and they're participating in some big launch next week, which I'd say with 90% certainty is iTunes. From an audience perspective, iTunes is what podcasting needs to really attract mainstream users. Many people already know the Music Store, and even for those who don't, it finally gets it down to a one-click subscription model. Rumors abound that some content will end up being "premium," for-pay, but that could be a good thing if you could finally subscribe to This American Life. (Or what about aubscribing to your favorite artists? has anyone floated that idea?) It was something Apple should have obviously been doing a year ago.

The downside of iTunes (and possibly ODEO, I'm not sure how their subscription system works) is that it moves podcasts off of blogs and into a separate, closed system, which could make things like tracking listeners across the entire podosphere difficult. Likely, as more people get into podcasting through services like iTunes and ODEO, stand-alone podcast feeds on blogs will become less relevant. While this may be good for listeners, what does that do to podcast producers? Are we sitting idly by as the next great boon in independent media is being swallowed up by the big boys? Or is this just like the consolidation of blogging software into the hands of a few big players (which, IMHO, didn't negatively impact blogging in any noteworthy way)?

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Wired has an interview with Will Wright on his forthcoming game Spore, which I'm eagerly anticipating. How can I resist when the demos make me really believe Wright when he talks about things like this:

One of my goals for this whole thing has been to give somebody an awe-inspiring global view of reality, almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer. The kind of, "Oh, man, what if we were a molecule inside of a galaxy?" type thing. Can we transfer that experience -- that, I don't want to say drug-induced, but I guess it is, or almost theological meaning-of-life-type experience -- into an interactive computer game?

Can a computer game bring you to theological discussions, or philosophy, but at the same time remain eminently whimsical and playful and approachable? That's an interesting balance to strike. I like the idea of an extremely whimsical toy that has deep philosophical implications.

Games as art. It's been a long time coming.

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I have seen at least 5 posts/links in the past 1/2 hour about the new Google (unnamed?) Google product - the customized Google homepage, ie MyGoogle/iGoogle/fusion, depending on who you ask (and none of the above, according to the site itself). Most of them are just pointing to it, so I feel compelled to give you my first impressions.

Aside from the Ajaxing of the interface (which is very nice, to be sure), I'm not that impressed. It clutters up something that was uncluttered. Maybe if I used my Gmail account as my primary, or GoogleNews as my primary, I would care. It will be nice when it gets universal RSS support, as promised. But in general, I don't care. MyYahoo! is actually more customizable - I use it now mostly as a reference to store all my movie times, because you can have many on one page. Google will only give you 5. Also, notice the conspicuous lack of Blogger integration. (Blogger still appears to be an awkward stepchild to the rest of the Google product family.)

So, I shrug my shoulders at it. (Note, however, that I often shrug something off at first, only to see it's significance in due time. This is just an initial shrug, which may be retracted without notice.)

I'm far more excited about Google Earth (Google Travel?), the forthcoming integration of new, more detailed Keyhole data into Google Maps. Also, O'Reilly Radar suggests that the new customizable Google home page (whatever the heck it's called) is the "first of the 'fusion' products." I'm much more interested in what their mobile Fusion product and Blogger-centric fusion products will be.

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File in the "speculation and from E3" file:

Nintendo has demonstrated DSpeak, which is VOIP on the DS. It apparently works flawlessly, but is only a demo at this point. I can't imagine them not launching it, though, as it would give them a significant leg-up over the PSP with the geek crowd, and might have a side effect of forwarding the VOIP movement to the luddites. Now if only they could get it running on a Gameboy Micro, they'd have the sexiest VOIP phone ever. [via Waxy]

Nintendo seems to be hinting that the Revolution will allow small, independent game producers to create content for it:

Freedom of design: A dynamic development architecture equally accommodates both big-budget, high-profile game "masterpieces" as well as indie games conceived by individual developers equipped with only a big idea.

The more I hear about the Revolution, the more convinced I am that it will be revolutionary; not in the big, showy way that Sony would do it, or the celeb-fest at Microsoft, but in a slow-burn kind of way. Nintendo could be changing the playing field for years to come. These features don't make you gasp, but they have long-range implications - they're exploding the video game market, and that could take an entire console generation (5 years) to show it's effect.
[via BoingBoing]

Add both of those together (along with my other E3 post) and you'll see another trend: Nintendo is aiming squarely at geeks, hackers, and DIY'ers. Retro gaming, homebrew games, and VOIP all appeal to a specific marketing segment which just happens to drive much of the market. MS is chasing the mainstream; Sony is acting like they've already won. Nintendo is going after people who actually like games - the audience they built in the 80's. I'm not sure if it's enough to sustain them, but it certainly appeals to me, and a lot of the people I know.

Update:
Damn! Gizmodo, having been at the press conference, is probably right when they shoot down hopes of Nintendo exploding the video game market. Oh well. That was a fun fantasy for a few hours.

Posted by Adam at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

I'm still not exactly sure why the just-announced Nintendo Revolution is so revolutionary (okay, it's tiny and very connected, but I doubt it's smallness will save it from the big honkin' PS3), but I am glad to hear this:

It is the gaming experience that will most separate Revolution from its competitors.” This is huge! It will have built in emulation for NES, SNES, N64, as well as being able to read and play GameCube games! This completely trumps Sony’s two-gen backwards compatitibility in the PS3.

That's a brilliant move on Nintendo's part. They're the only surviving console manufacturer who can claim two decades in the industry. They've got an enormous back catalog, which is quite popularly emulated on every device with a screen (even the PSP). If they make the entire Nintendo cannon (yes, it's a cannon) available as downloads direct to the Revolution, and sell them for less than $10 a piece, I think they'll strike a decent blow to MS and Sony. Maybe not a fatal one, but perhaps a near-guarantee that every serious gamer will have a Revolution in his arsenal.

Gameboy Micro is cute. I kinda want one. It'd better be cheap, tho. If it's less than $60, it will keep the GBA platform alive.

Also, The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess sounds dark and intense. And Link turns into a werewolf? Cool!

And, because I can't ignore them, despite my undying love for Nintendo:
I don't like the look of the PS3, and I might have to throw up on it's controller. Sure, it wins the power race, but it also looks HUGE compared to the other consoles. Most of you know I hate how Sony deals with the video game industry: it's all bigger, faster, clobbering all semblance of art or passion to make more money and be "the best" on paper. The PS3 looks to continue that. Tho, really, 7 wireless controllers was a smart move - that seems to be approaching the limit of the number of people you could have crowded around one TV.

The Xbox360 looks decent enough to me. I think it's kinda pretty, actually, and has respectable specs. It looks like Microsoft will continue to do quite well in the online arena. Though nothing makes me jump up and down about this Xbox.

And, hey, all three next-gen consoles can sit on their sides. Is this going to chnage the tried-and-true configuration of our entertainment centers? Of course, it also appears that, despite their best efforts to stop it, you'll be able to stack your concave Xbox360 on top of your convex PS3. Of course, I might have to own both just for that irony.

Posted by Adam at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

In case there was any question that AJAX is the new geek hotness, today comes word that Flickr is moving from Flash to AJAX. (Oh, and Jason Kottoke is getting AJAX'ed, too. He's hot, so it rubs off a bit on the AJAX.)

Derek Powazek provides a little explanation for non-geeks, if you're coming late to the game:

You know how the web works, right? You click a link in a browser and your computer says, "hey server, send me this page." And the server says, "sure, here ya go." And you see the page. Click, rinse, repeat.

Ajax, and the pile of techniques and technologies that get lumped in with it, are all about breaking that page-by-page web experience into smaller chunks. If the traditional web was letter writing, Ajax is instant messaging.
...
Stop thinking about the web in terms of pages that go from a server to a browser, and instead think of pages as collections of chunks that can each go to and from a server as needed.

Choice bit on user expectations from the Ajax Summit, which just happened:
Eric Costello, who does UI for Flickr says: "Ajax is too fast, and too easy, which breaks what they are used too on the web."

Then David HH of Rails/37Signals starts a discussion about how "users have different expectations on the web, versus desktop applications."

So, so true. Flickr already has this problem, even with Flash. I've shown it to non-techie folks who don't grok it because they're so used to managing photos online with checkboxes and radio buttons and page reloads. The first few times they drag and drop something on a webpage, it feels foreign to them. It seems backwards, because the web is becoming as usable as the rest of a computer now, but we just spent the past decade reeducating people on how to use technology, and as soon as they think they've got it, we're changing the rules again. Sure, it's simpler, by all accounts, but people who don't naturally grok towards computers are the same people who don't adapt to change quickly. (If they weren't, they'd have understood it all along.) It's interesting to think that the web may remain a bit backwards and awkward for longer than it needs to simply to satisfy lagging user understanding of the newly intuitive methods.

Derek mentions this as well: "how will a user react to a form with no save button?"

Expect widespread panic and chaos in the streets. But they'll adapt, just like they did before, and our internet and our computers will be all the better for it.

More Ajax Summit thoughts from Scott Andrew and Lane Becker.

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Dodgeball, the SMS-based friend locator thingy (ie, buddy list IRL), was just acquired by Google.

Just thinking aloud here, but...

Dodgeball (they know your friends & where you are) + Google Local (they know what you're doing) + Blogger Mobile (they have pictures and of where you are) = ...? Some crazy mashup of locative media. I'm not sure exactly the best application of all these things, and (of course), acquiring Dodgeball might just be a preemptive measure, but it's fun to think of what it all might mean. Google's big on mobile access lately, so it wouldn't surprise me if Dodgeball and Blogger Mobile turned into some kind of always on locative buddy list.

...Later:

Oh, and the other reason I was so interested in this, and why I decided to fire up the blog in the first place, was finding out that Dodgeball's creators both graduated from ITP. In case you didn't know, I kinda want to go to ITP. If I ever get over my "should-I-or-shouldn't-I" grad school dilemma, they'll be my first application.

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Everyone's been crowing about Tiger since last Friday, while my copy is strapped to the back of a drunken turtle, lost somewhere in the Mohave Desert. The longer I wait, the more I want to make a Dashboard Widget. I didn't even know that Quartz Composer existed last week, and now I feel that if I can not play with it in the next 24 hours I may go into shock. Not to mention all those little value-added tweaks that make using a computer a nice experience.

So, in the midst of all this, Microsoft has been trying to hold on to a shred of press interest by showing off Longhorn, due sometime before the End Times. Seriously, though, Longhorn is at least a year away, possibly two. I think this is going to be a big problem for Microsoft.

From the pictures, I can say that this (prototype) version of Windows has been hit with a big ugly stick. The UI is cluttered, with toolbars and other things flowing together in confusing ways. There seems to be waaaay too much information immediately present for every item on the screen - do I need to know the file system a disc uses on my way to opening a file? Way too much text, not enough visual representation.

Beyond aesthetics, Microsoft seems to be banking entirely on desktop search, a feature which is already available from Google, and which will be a full generation behind Apple's Spotlight. Now, a lot of people have said that Spotlight is not up to par, but before Microsoft releases their first iteration, we'll likely be at Mac OS 10.5, which will give Apple ample time to rework and optimize their search engine. I don't see how Apple could lose that round.

Longhorn is a six-year project for Microsoft. Though we haven't yet seen what the shipping version will look like, thus far our expectations were actually lowered from initial projections because certain key technologies will not be ready for prime-time in 2006. Their stagnant development process is killing them. Despite slow-downs, Apple is still set to release a new operating system every 1.5-2 years, making it easier for them to both innovate and refine. Dan Gillmor says that the competition will get MS's butts in gear; I hope it does - he's right in saying that the competition between Microsoft and Apple is what drives innovation on the desktop. But in the meantime, I also hope MS loses some marketshare to Apple. They're not innovating, and not moving quickly, and they deserve to take a hit.

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I really like the first From the Shadows, a new geek tech video show. The skydiving bit was awesome! I can't wait to see what they come up with next. This is exactly the kind of video content I want to be involved with producing. And, since I'm in LA, if you Shodows folks see this, you should get in touch.

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While doing research for a course I'm pitching, something hit me: I have so many frickin' blogs!

With the influx of money in social software and the term "blog" now resting comfortably on the lips of your local soccer moms, sites are unexpectedly throwing free blogs at me like nickels at a Carnivale cooch show. Granted, I'm certainly not helping the matter, what with launching a new group blog and signing up for a few others, but it's somewhat disconcerting to me that I now have a Friendster blog. Welcome to the age of the personal YAB (yet another blog). No wonder so many of the millions of blogs are abandoned. Most of them were probably born unwanted in the first place.

But it's not just Friendster. It's also services I like. Services I use. Services who I feel I'm letting down by not fulfilling my service-specific blogging potential. Let's pause for a quick run-down of all the blogs or blog-like things I own or can contribute to, in decreasing order of my attention:

my ProphecyBoy blog
my LiveJournal
my Flickr photostream
my del.icio.us link list
the Son of Semele Ensemble site
Yahoo 360
my 43 Things blog
my Friendster blog
(I've staunchly avoided having a MySpace account, and YAB, by forcing other people to use it for me. Sorry, MySpace, you're just too close kin to Friendster for me.)

I know, some of these things (del.icio.us, for example) are technically not blogs. But I use them in conjunction with the blogs, and they certainly are blog-adjacent, and you could have a very nice link blog with del.icio.us or photoblog with Flickr without using any other service (though I resisted the urge to list everything I participate in which produces an RSS feed - that would be insanity). I'm also leaving out the work stuff, mind you, and I'm not currently contributing to any pro blogs at the moment, so that list is sometimes longer.

Finally, the point of all this: that's a hell of a lot of output to produce, if I really want to keep up with all of them, and a hell of a lot of browsing someone would have to do if they really wanted to stalk me. Do I really deserve a folder of eight feeds in my stalker's copy of Net News Wire? Well, maybe my stalker's, but certainly not anyone else's. And, like I said, I feel guilty for ignoring, say 43 Things, because I really do like the service and want to write about my goals, I'm torn over whether I should put them there, where people who are looking for them will see them, or here, where people looking for me will see them. Or some aggregated version of both, using every combination of REST and iframes under the sun.

Yesterday, while I was tooling around on Yahoo 360, I think I hit on a solution. Actually, Yahoo hit on a solution, and I decided to steal it and make it mine. The advantage of 360 over other blogging solutions is that it's nicely integrated with all of Yahoo's services. That means that, like Friendster, I have a friends list that, like LiveJournal, can control who has access to what information. Information that can come be a blog post, photos, music, announcements (the really cool Blast feature) and even reviews of restaurants and movies. But here's the kicker: soon, "You'll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°." Aha! Veeeery clever, Yahoo. They're providing a place where I can aggregate all my content into one place. If it's executed well, I'll be able to pull all that data from the list above into one page (and - dare I hope - one RSS feed), where I have easy-to-use controls over who has access to what. That means I'll be free to keep link lists on del.icio.us, my photos on Flickr (which will, probably, be integrated eventually), my media on ourmedia, and my writing on my own site, but they will all be accessible on my Yahoo 360 page. It will be a personal aggregator, constantly pulling new content that I post anywhere, and making it easy for others (hell, even me) to keep track of what I'm doing. And because 360 blends the user-groups of LJ with the degree-permissions of Friendster, it will be easy to make sure my boss doesn't see the pictures from the last Backyard Drag Show, and that my friends don't miss my latest rant on cheese.

Yahoo hasn't taken the wraps off the RSS syndication features of 360, so I don't know it will work quite that seamlessly. Nonetheless, they're certainly moving toward the idea of a Personal Aggregator, which makes 360 not YAB, but something I'll actually use.

Posted by Adam at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2) | post to del.icio.us

I had a whole long blog entry planned about my thrilling weekend, plus a little roadmap of all the projects I'm working on. Of course, as tends to happen, one of the projects stormed the gates and took over my day. However, I'm happy to announce that after many a false start, we've finally recorded the first episode of "Lapse", my radio drama podcast!

...Okay, so it's recorded, but still needs to be edited. It's complicated stuff, this "Lapse", full of music and sound effects. And, of course, I have to find something to cover up the helicopters which were terrorizing my apartment tonight. Recording was fun, but I had almost as much fun turning my apartment into recording central.

Here's a picture of my studio apartment magically transformed into a podcasting studio.

And here's the gang in action. It's early yet, hence the perkiness. Oh, and no one's dead yet. In fact, we just looked at baby pictures. (Nick's soon-to-be-adopted son is adorable!) And I gave them booze. How better to convince people to work their butts off for free?

So, this recording session has been a long time in coming, and I can't wait to edit it and send it out. We've got big plans for this little show. Details as they develop.

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Further proof that Larry Lessig is cooler than you: he's now a character on the West Wing, being played by Christopher Lloyd. Damn.
(Via Boing Boing)

INdTV, part-time purveyor of exploded media, has re-launched their website (now with 20% more spif!) and is accepting submissions for possible broadcasting. Fun! Still no word on the official launch of the network. I'm eager to see how they end up using these submitted videos, and how long they can sustain input from their audience.

Both official news, and an unofficial developer site from PVRBlog on the TiVo HME software, currently in development. As previously noted, it's excellent that the software will support RSS and other web technologies.

An interesting discussion of epicenters - places where the smart and creative gather to hang out, and usually the forging ground for revolutionary ideas. Anyone have any suggestions for Los Angeles epicenters, outside of Hollywood circles? I nominated various coffee shops on the east side.
(Via Unmediated)

Sony is paying $25k/month to splash themselves all over Lifehacker. I'm not sure how effective that advertising will be. On the other hand, Gawker's blogs are getting pretty overloaded with other random ads recently, so putting the Sony logo on the masthead is much preferable.
(Via Dan Gillmore)

John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, explains why the Napster math is faulty. Everyone I've spoken to immediately cringes when they hear that your music disappears the moment you stop paying. John points out that it's more profitable to charge by subscription, but I suspect it's also a matter of not being able to compete on the same turf as Apple - they're trying to do an end-run around the business model.

A rather surprising article on Salon (doing some handy investigative journalism), noting that 43 Things is tied to Amazon. It's a little unclear at this point if Amazon owns them, or merely 0wnz them by being the largest investor. Either way, it's a mite suspicious. I'd much rather use a nice goal-setting app from someone like 37Signals.

And if you haven't read the horror stories behind the development of the movie version of Alone in the Dark (does anyone else fondly remember those games?), and it's insane director, Uwe Boll, please do check it out.

|Update|
The Robot Co-Op, makers of 43 Things, explain the background of the company and how Amazon came to be involved. Just reading that simple little description makes me like them more and trust them more. It doesn't hurt that they're also tied (unofficially) to 37Signals, whom I just referenced as someone I would trust with my hopes and dreams. Funny, I got almost exactly what I asked for!

Posted by Adam at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

The new Google Maps is beautiful - the simple feat of scrolling seamlessly just makes me want to cuddle it to death. That and the shadowed speech bubbles for addresses. It really looks like map software from the future. Oh, and of course it's blazingly fast. (I love how there's a new Google produce every week in these post-IPO days. I hope they keep it up!)

Okay, but what's the really significant thing here? Well, Google also owns Keyhole, which includes aereal and satellite photography of the entire globe (well, most of it). It's no great leap to think that Google would integrate Keyhole into the rest of it's software. Google Maps + Keyhole = mapping software that can show you, from above, what the place you're going to looks like. Fun.

But what about the other recent search announcement, A9's block view? (Which I've been remiss in mentioning, especially considering that I applied for a job on it.) Add a similar Google service to the mix (or a nice licensing agreement) and we've got both top-down and eye-level photographic data linked to a searchable location database. If you hook it together with all the right software, such a database could produce a 3D model of any location it contains - ie, a searchable visual database of the entire planet. Big stuff.

But back to A9 for a moment. People are already proposing innovative ideas to use the service, but what interests me is the notion that, well, there are people in some of those photos! Yes, it's virtually impossible to get all this image data without also capturing the lives of us pesky humans. As this (suddenly omnipresent) mission to document every square inch of the globe continues, we'll be seeing more and more of our lives popping up in search engines.

I wonder how long it will take for personal images (from cameraphones, personal cameras), media images (from pro photographers, news reels), civic images (from security and traffic cams), and data images (from A9 and Keyhole) start to overlap and exchange data. For all the magic of the internet, there are still too many databases not talking to each other. Amazon, which is great at leveraging their customers, has to be planning something like this for A9, since building out the entire country (let alone the world) with roving trucks would be very costly. It seems like it could be a simple matter of a special Flickr tag.

Posted by Adam at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

So as of late Monday night, we now have Google Video, as well as Yahoo! Video Search, two similarly named products that do completely different things. As you probably know by now, Yahoo! Video Search indexes video clips online, where you can click through to view them.

Google Video actually has nothing to do with video, and everything to do with television: it indexes the closed-captioning of televised content to help you find what you're searching for. This would be great if you could then click through to view the video, but you can't - it's transcript-only, with a small concession that will tell you when the program is next airing. Huh? How is this "video" search? How is this even useful, here on my computer, sitting a whole seven feet from my television? It sounds like something that would be more useful built-in to my TiVo, with an auto-record option, if you ask me. A Keyword Wishlist that searched all the content, not just the titles and descriptions. That would be lovely. Or, obviously, the ability to click and view right in Google. Oh wait, copyright laws might make that illegal.

For once I think Google took a bit of a misstep. Though this type of video searching could prove useful as part of a larger product, when the content itself is immediately available, unhindered by copyright intimidation, releasing it in its present state seems half-baked. Perhaps adding this feature on top of something like Yahoo! Video Search would be nice - see what the net and broadcast have to offer side-by-side; watch some now, record some later. I'm sure I'll find some use for it, someday, but for the time being I'll go back to searching for "video" that's actually video.

Posted by Adam at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) | post to del.icio.us

Robert Cringley recently posted an article vetting the notion that the Mac mini is designed to quickly morph into an HD movie download appliance when Tiger ships later this year. While I expressed similar thoughts here, he points out the enormous advantage Apple would have if they deployed this system now, giving them a huge jump on any physical-media-based HD distribution:

Now about that HD video content, Jobs was careful in his speech to point out more than once that there are two competing standards for High Definition DVDs -- Blu-Ray and HD-DVD -- but that H.264 is a constant on both systems. With movie studios divided between the two standards, this promises to be another VHS versus Betamax competition which means it will take two to three years for one standard to dominate, and in that interim devices will cost more than they ought to and will be coming later to market. Enter Apple and the Mac Mini, supporting every part of HD except a DVD standard, because one isn't needed. The Mini will download its HD video over broadband Internet connections so no optical component is required. The result is that Apple once again gets to market early and has a chance to become the de facto standard, just like iTunes did. Blockbuster can't compete with Apple until there are HD DVDs, and even digital cable doesn't have enough channel capacity to offer as many pay-per-view HD movies as Apple will be able to offer on the first day of service.

Rather than showing up to the game a little late, like the iTunes Music Store did, Apple could literally be the driving force in the market by the time either version of HD DVD is chosen. And at that point, it would hardly matter - keeping your movies as files (rather than disc images) makes it simple to shuffle them around from place to place. I can authorize 3 computers for iTunes, so I could (logically) do the same for movies. Even if this happened tomorrow, with nary a video iPod in sight, I doubt it would be long before Apple allowed me to at least use my iPod as a device to carry my movies to a friend's house. If this does indeed come to pass in the near future, Apple could put another nail in the coffin of physical media. Would you rather carry a 250GB iPod, with all your movies on it (even if they're unusable until it's docked), or a stack of fragile discs, each containing only 1 movie?

Posted by Adam at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

Last night I saw Flicker at Redcat, amid a veritable melange of theater folks I know from Son of Semele Ensemble and UCLA.

They call Flicker "real time film" (RTF), and it's a performance piece where you're watching both the shooting of a film and the on-camera result happening simultaneously, live. It's an interesting concept, and mostly works in performance. Some things could have been cleaner (and apparently were in New York, according to Sue-Ellen), but overall it was successful. I would like to have seen the New York production, which also used projected backgrounds (as opposed to last night's simple backdrops), and allowed us to see more of the performers' bodies. Really, though, the troubling part of the evening was that the piece didn't seem to want to go further than to prove that RTF could be done, and was interested to watch. The script was interesting when it stuck to the slasher-movie plot, but the subplot involving masochism and a love triangle was uninspired. I think sticking to horror (or any type of genre film, really) would have served the piece better as the experiment it wanted to be.

At the end of the night, though, I was left asking where this left us. It worked, fabulous. But it still felt like an experiement, a proof of concept. What now? Was this applicable to actual production? Where do we go from here? Quickly, the answer became obvious: the next step was to incorporate these techniques into a fully realized stage production; RTF could be one element in a larger piece that has greater ambitions than just examining the relationship between film and perception. For instance, what happens if you have some actors interacting with the screen-versions of the RTF actors? How would this work in a production? What production would this possibly be relevant to? My friend and I quickly decided on City of Angels and The Rocky Horror Show as two pieces which deal with the relationship between film and real life, and which would be appropriate vehicles for RTF in production. City of Angels, with it's characters distinctly marked as "film" and "real", would make for a hard line between who's onscreen and who's off. Rocky Horror (a mainstay for my thoughts about technology and live performance) would allow some great flexibility - Brad and Janet could start offscreen, with Frank's gang onscreen; eventually Brad and Janet wind up sucked in, of course, only to be left behind when the RTF setup "castle" returns to Transylvania in the finale. (The sticking point became the Narrator, who I insisted should be neither RTF nor live, but maybe a puppet, or masked, or something else entirely.) If we had real-time motion graphics running along with the rear projectors, some very exciting special effects could be created.

So I'm eager to explore how this technology might be used. I'm currently looking for directing projects, so if anyone wants to pursue either of the above-mentioned projects, or just play with the concept of RTF in general, get in touch.

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Somebody finally picked up on the significance of a 2-3% market share increase for Apple, which could be a result of initiatives like the Mac mini: While a nice 5-6% total share of the market sound small, it could quickly snowball into something much, much larger. Even with 3% of the market, Apple is awash in cash. If they doubled their profits, they could easily afford to push even higher-profile marketing, faster R&D, and ::gasp:: earn smaller margins on a product or two in order to increase their domain. In fact, that is the very strategy behind the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle: they're making less than 20% profit on them in order to dominate. Sneaky, Jobs, sneaky.
Link [via MacMinute]

Posted by Adam at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

Seth Godin notes that it only takes 25,000 sales of a single to be #1 in the UK. "That's because the market is wider and flatter than in any time in history. In other words, the bestselling book, song, beer and car is "other."" The Long Tail is already in full swing, it seems...

...But Steve Rosenbaum has some interesting thoughts about how Long Tail video might work different than long tail audio: "a missing sense that I can trust video to be knowledge rather than entertainment, means that there’s a slow build as the demand for long-tail motion media builds."

Duncan Riley seems spot on to me about why video blogging won't take off in 2005. What no one seems to be talking about is that audio blogging / podcasting hasn't even really caught on. It's growing rapidly, but I think we're about to hit a ceiling where everyone who can be bothered with all the technical details will be podcasting and listening, but we'll need some more innovation and simplification before it goes mainstream. It's nigh on impossible to argue Duncan's "evolution of the internet" theory, which implies that we need to master one form of communication before progressing to another - now that blogging is simple and becoming mainstream, we can move to podcasting. Maybe in another year or so the mainstream can move to vlogging. Awareness of these things is good, putting them in the spotlight before they (or we) are ready is not productive.

Steve Gillmor recontextualizes the Macworld Expo announcements as passively promoting podcasting, or at least providing a solid platform for it, in sharp contrast to Microsoft's latest offerings. "Keynote, Pages, and iMovie are morphing into a podcast-to-video porting environment. Use Automator consoles to load in podcast segments and annotate them with links, iPhoto transitions, and attention-influenced intelligent caching of related pod- and Mini-casts, and you’re well on your way to a read/write version of the RSS-powered multimedia Web."

Paul Nixon's superb graphic on the marketing ideas behind the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle really do make it seem like the whole thing, from the original iMac forward, was one big, masterminded plan to take over the world. It makes a great story, and I'd really, really like to believe that, but I can't imagine even Apple knew the iPod would take off like it did. Still, looking at that graphic makes you wonder long and hard about what 2006 might bring.

After reading about how horrifically slow TiVoToGo is, I'm rather glad that I didn't ditch my ancient, Series 1 box just for that feature.

And finally, a personal account from my friend Steven about HGTV's homophobic show policies: "It seems it is HGTV's policy to never show, support or even indicate that gay people have sex."

Posted by Adam at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

MacHTPC rounds up a bunch of rumors which make a little too much sense to dismiss. I've been thinking a lot about all the litigation over the Asteroid box, rumored to be a firewire breakout box for musicians to hook into GarageBand. While this would certainly sell well from Apple, it seems like overkill to anger your user base with lawsuits over something that is, essentially, widely available from third parties. The notion that Asteroid would, instead, also deal in video, along the lines of the Elgato EyeTV, makes much more sense as a major product announcement. A single peripheral that allows your Mac to control the audio and video for your home would be a major breakthrough, and more in line with 2005 being "the year of HD video," as Jobs noted at Macworld SF. And who wants to bet it will stack nicely on top of the Mac mini? I do find it suspicious that Asteroid is still MIA. If it is indeed video-capable, then it could be released with Tiger at WWDC in order to take advantage of the great new Quicktime codecs. No one seems to be adding up the math on that one: Tiger = new Quicktime = necessary for all this next-gen video we're talking about. The idea that iFlicks has suddenly disappeared does not logically follow to mean that Apple has snapped them up for a video-download service, though. It's long past time that Apple release an iApp that manages video, and such a program would be necessary to bundle with the Asteroid, but VOD would likely be available in a future iteration, rather than immediately, I think, and possibly with the release of a video iPod. That makes sense to me, and yet also puts the release for VOD more than a year out, in my estimation. The smart move would be to release Asteroid and Tiger, get people upgraded and used to the notion that a Mac mini + Asteroid = HTMac, and then swoop in with the VOD and iPod video, say, six months later.

Posted by Adam at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

At a party last weekend, I asked my friend to upload and share the pictures she was taking, and mentioned Flickr. She asked if it was like Snapfish. I said, yes, but it's much easier to use and lets you do so much more with your photos. Like all my other friends to whom I've been advocating Flickr, she must have been unimpressed, because I just received her e-mail from Snapfish. After jumping on the Flickr bandwagon, the entire experience of services like Snapfish, which haven't significantly improved over the last five years, seems archaic and clunky - like using Windows 3.1 after living with OS X. Flickr will, sooner or later, win many more converts than it already has. Why? Because it stays out of the way and lets us use and share photos how we want to, rather than forcing us into outdated paradigms.

I hate registering for things. I probably had a Snapfish account once upon a time, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what my login was. So just to view these pictures, I had to login. Why? Was there confidential information being kept secret? Probably not. On Flickr, you can restrict who can view/comment on photos, but most people choose not to. Do I really care if a stranger wants to oogle the party guests from last weekend? No. would it be simpler to just cut and paste a user-readable link than a long string generated by a login script? Yes. All of my Flickr photos are viewable at http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamsimon/ and always will be, whether public or private. Simple. I can send that link to anyone, and they'll probably remember it.

Why does Snapfish not let me download multiple photos at once? Beyond viewing the archaic "album", which conceptually is becoming so obsolete that even the new iPhoto is phasing it out, there's no way to view other photos by my friend, or easily do anything other than download one photo at a time. (Or, of course, make prints. Flickr doesn't traffic in this business, which I think is wise - the rise of digital photography is killing the practicality of making hard copies of all but the most precious photos.) In Flickr, I could have just subscribed to her photostream, and instantly received all the pics in my RSS reader. Not to mention that I'd know the next time she uploaded, without needing so much as an e-mail to alert me.

I also question the tedious process of uploading to Snapfish. I hope she didn't spend more than five minutes doing that. I have a lovely iPhoto plugin that lets me send pictures to Flickr. It takes awhile, but since the organization is done when I imported to iPhoto from the camera, I can just hit "upload" and walk away. I can also upload via e-mail from my camera phone, and quickly post blog entries with any photo from my Flickr stream, or put a banner on my site which rotates pictures on every refresh. And let's not even get into the whole Flickr tags feature. As evidenced by the latest Technorati developments, tags are the future of search, and Flickr makes sure that people can find your photos if they're looking in the right place.

It all boils down to this: Flickr does its job and gets out of the way. It lets us share photos quickly and simply and is an open system which allows other people (such as the guy who wrote the iPhoto plugin) to make the software even better. Snapfish is a remnant of the Web 1.0 era, where closed systems compelled users to spend money to get anything useful. Flickr is a prime Web 2.0 service: freely extensible, so it's always cutting-edge, and you only have to pay for it if you use it a lot. It's fair in a whole lot of ways, and people love it for that. They're still in early-adopter-ville at the moment, but word of mouth is powerful, and people like me sharing photos via Flickr is a great way to attract new converts.

in the end, I spent the time to register for Snapfish, and looked at the photos. I felt compelled to download a couple. I will likely never look at the album again, and those other photos, locked behind the Snapfish garden wall, may as well have not existed for me. The Snapfish album is static, and therefore not worth revisiting. My Flickr photostream is dynamic and alive, updating with every snap of the shutter, and able to be re-organized on the fly.

Flickr is changing the rules for photos at a time when digital cameras are exploding. Soon, similar things will happen for audio (check out Last.FM - not a perfect implementation, but on the right track), and video (something I'm working on). It's just another example of the new rules of the game. Flickr will come out on top.

||Update||

What with that and all the talk about dark fiber today, it looks like we're seeing the next steps in the rise of Googlezon.

|Update|

||Update||

Posted by Adam at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2) | post to del.icio.us

Apparently NPR had some swanky time-shifting technology all the way back in the 80's - it relied on signals sent over the airwaves to activate special tape recorders that were programmed to recognize the signals that accompanied requested shows and record them, allowing you to play them back later. Brilliant! Why did it take this long for this tech to catch up and catch on? (via Scripting News)

Posted by Adam at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

Serious Magic has just announced a video production tool called Vlog It, specifically designed to aid in the production and uploading of vlog posts. It looks very simple and streamlined from the site. Sadly for me (and a lot of other folks already on this bandwagon), it's Windows-only. Strange move, I think, since so much creative content production happens on Macs, but maybe they're hoping to fill that gap for Win-folk. Once again, a great place for Apple to step up and offer an all-in-one solution. Apple, are you listening? I'm not expecting any blog-tech announcemetns for .Mac an iLife at Macworld tomorrow, though wouldn't that be lovely? And such a smart move!

(via BuzzMachine)

Posted by Adam at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

New Voices has just launched a grant program to help support citizen's media projects. Despite that fact that it only provides seed money ($12k for the first year), it's fabulous that funding for CM is becoming available. Besides, any CM project should be able to do a hell of a lot with $12k, in terms of buying webspace, cameras, computers, etc. Keep in mind that wouldn't produce one episode of most sitcoms. Once established, they'd likely have to turn to either larger grantors or advertising.

Very exciting times we live in. Unfortunately for us lonely visionaries, we're still unfundable - non-profits only. I understand the reasoning, but that smacks of all sorts of badness - do you know how difficult (and often expensive) becoming a non-profit is? And since there aren't many news-based NP's out there, I bet the market for startups (with the possibility to go NP) is much larger.

It seems we have a chicken, and an egg, and they're both looking at each other, a bit confused.

(via Dan Gillmor)

Posted by Adam at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

A slew of exciting developments recently in ways to fund, produce, and distribute video over the internet (what I like to call bitcasting):

First, and most exciting to me, comes the (unofficial, thus far) news that TiVo will be opening up to third party developers. In what amounts to a strategy both integrated with their CES push for TV-IP and as a response to their stagnating subscription growth, TiVo will provide tools to developers which allow them to offer content through the TiVo interface to subscribers. A TiVo Video Publisher application will allow direct publishing of video to the TiVo service, making it available for subscribers to watch or purchase. Even better, there will be a Java-based API that will support video and audio with RSS and XML formatting to be delivered straight to subscribers. All products uploaded by providers using these will be available for purchase or subscription using the remote control (ie, no computer necessary).

This. Is. Marvelous. If the system works as described, TiVo will be simplifying the mass-adoption of podcasting and bitcasting by providing a seamless interface for the consumer. A TiVo-totin' grandma could be watching my bitcast show without having any idea of who I am or where the show came from. The problem for bitcasting thus far has been a limited audience for watching video on their computers, and a limited attention span even amongst that audience. Suddenly, exploded TV will be able to compete on the same footing as broadcast TV, with a very similar user experience. With an open API, developers may be able to utilize TiVo's recommendation engine to push users down the long tail. Or possibly establish an LJ-like "friends list" of TiVos - a private group to whom you could publish things like vacation videos, etc.

Note that you can force users to pay for your content. One word: porn. I predict a rapid rise in home-brew video porn being produced for the new TiVo platform. Porn always leads the pack in innovation, as we know, so I take this as a good sign. Then again, does anyone want to see their neighbors screwing? I sure don't.
(via umediated)

Posted by Adam at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

Posted by Adam at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us

Cheers to paradigm shifts! It seems like most of the big players at CES are talking up delivering video over the net rather than the tightly controlled/FCC regulated triumvirate of broadcast/cable/satellite. I think a lot of this has to do with (fully justified) consumer panic over the impending broadcast flag, and tech companies actually understanding that a lot of people don't want Hollywood DRMing all their toys to death.

Sending video over the internet (for now) allows us to circumvent that nasty little bit of legislation. Interestingly, it could also have the side effect of pushing consumers further down the long tail of media to less-established online content providers more quickly than might otherwise happen. If you're getting your video content online, I could probably make my experience 90% as polished as polished as, say, Comedy Central, for about 10% of the cost. The broadcast flag could well be hastening the decentralization of video content in the same way the blogs decentralized the print world.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But there's a lot of things changing much more quickly than I expected they would. I wouldn't be surprised to be receiving the majority of my video content online in less than five years.

More CES details below the fold.

Continue reading "Moving Pictures" »

Posted by Adam at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | post to del.icio.us