Searching for TV ads

John Battelle notes Tivo is planning to let you search for Ads and has an elaborate scenario mapped out.
Tim Oren wonders about the effect on production values:

Such adverts probably don't look like today's. Years of battling the remote and now the DVR have turned commercials into attention grabbing eye candy. And it works, to some extent. The Tundra smacked by a meteor and the SUV carrying singing New Guinea tribesmen are funny, a few times. But if you're searching, not leaning back on the couch during halftime, is that what you want to find? The factual nuggets in those productions are pretty much limited to the brand name and vehicle style.

Optimizing to inform and motivate a potential customer is likely to produce quite different form and content. If search via TiVo, or Google, becomes a substantial fraction of the useful exposure time to customers, we're looking at a bifurcation in video production styles.

What both of them have missed is the already-existing business that has this solved already, which is QVC. They have the programs set up to explain the products and they have the web/TV integration that Battelle dreams about. They just need to segment and add the metadata to their productions, so they can show up as feeds and get past the LIVE TV mentality they use to drive sales on TV by having fixed quantities that sell out.
TV ads as artforms, on the other hand, may have a future, as Jonathan Sanderson points out regarding the Sony bouncy balls ad.

the Implacable logic of DRM

When I posted my 5 short arguments against DRM:

1. Computer Users: DRM turns your computer against you
2. Computer Scientists: DRM will fail through emulation
3. Corporations: DRM has to be undone to be used
4. Lawyers: DRM makes machines judge, jury and executioner
5. Media Companies: DRM destroys value

I got some responses that said these looked contradictory. In fact, the DRM industry seems to see the implications. The logic of point 2 — that a general purpose computer can emulate any digital, and many analog devices — for them means that outlawing general purpose computers makes sense, and that is what they are trying to do, thereby fulfilling points 1 and 4.

At the same time as they are demanding that law enforcement hand over our phone, email and web browsing histories to them, they are continuing to install hacking software on our computers.

This isn't even new behaviour - they tried to amend the USA PATRIOT act to let them hack people's computers with impunity.

Howevr, they do need to remember point 5. How much has the recall of their malevolent code-carrying CDs cost Sony so far this Christmas?

Technorati Tags: digital rights, DRM, music

Podcasting & Video-Blogging: The Best Thing to Happen to Streaming Media

Here's my video podcast for this session:

Download Podcasting vs Streaming here.
Download iPod version of Podcasting vs Streaming here.

November 15, 2005 11.15am - 12:15am

Podcasting & Video-Blogging: The Best Thing to Happen to Streaming Media

at Streaming Media West, San Jose Convention Centre, San Jose, CA

Speakers

• Moderator: Damien Stolarz, CEO, Robotarmy, Corp. & Author, Mastering Internet Video
• Eric Rice, Founder, Audioblog.com
• Kevin Marks, Principal Engineer, Technorati
• Mark Larkin, Executive Producer, CNET Broadband and Webcasting, CNET Networks Inc.
• Nicholas Ascheim, Product Manager, NYTimes.com

How am I speaking in Boston and San Jose simultaneously? A video podcast, and a live link via Skype.

PS: Tom Coates reacts

Technorati Tags: meme, podcasting, QuickTime, streaming

Symposium on Social Architecture

I'm speaking here today:

November 15, 2005 11am - 11:45am

Engines of Meaning: How Will We Scale Our Understanding? Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder

at Austin Hall at The Harvard Law School, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning." – Bruce Sterling

How will we keep up with the "dark, expanding ocean of data we spew"? Algorithms? Social filters? Faster memex-like gadgets? Do we need open algorithms in future search, so that each person can tweak their own preferences? Will we become dependent on social networks to filter the world for us, and if so, are the current representations of social relations too coarse? Will we be spending more and more time creating explicit metadata, like tags, in order to help channel the "expanding ocean"? What does it mean to be smart, today?

Technorati Tags: CoranteSSA, Harvard, meme, microformats, politics, rhetoric

Microsoft should fix the vector too

According to eWeek, Microsoft's antivirus tools will delete Sony's DRM 'Rootkit'. A good start, but how about the infection vector? Microsoft should disable autorunning of programs on CD Insert, as Apple did years ago. As Windows runs such things with the full privileges of the logged-in user, and most users have admin privileges, this is an open door.

Poppy Day

For Remembrance Day this year, Siegfried Sassoon reading Attack! from The Spoken Word: Poets:

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Tories urged to be the Linux to Labour's Microsoft

The ideas expressed are nothing new to anyone following the years old Emergent Democracy debate; the surprise is seeing them urged on the Conservative Party in the Daily Telegraph.

Not consumers or users, but amateurs

Mary takes Intelliseek to task for calling the writers of the web 'consumers', but her suggestion of 'users' is equally infelicitous - even Scoble winces every time he says 'user generated content'.

We already have a word for people who create for the love of it, rather than being paid to, and it is 'amateurs'. As with many other pleasures, when we seek out opinions, we prefer those that flow from passion rather than from payment.

Now it may be argued that, given the decline in the teaching of Latin and French, the loving root of 'amateur' is no longer perceived, so those who write pour l'amour ou pour le sport may see 'amateur' as a slight. In which case lets retranslate it to english and call it 'lovingly created media'.

Technorati Tags: blogs, meme, rhetoric

Riots, blogs and speech

Joi's blogsitter and Xeni find it notable that some Paris rioters have blogs.

This brings to mind again Douglas Adams' wise words from 1999:

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Read the whole thing, annually.

DVD sales 'dip' is really growth

Chris Anderson's list of faltering mainstream media includes under 'mixed':

DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.

Hang on a second there, that isn't a fall, it's a dip in the 2nd derivative - if it grew 29% last year and ~ 10% this year, it's still doing well. Notice also that the linked article mentions that studios have been shortening the wait between cinematic and DVD release. Think about the impact that has - it moves DVD sales earlier, thus giving an artificial short-term boost that will eventually even out.

Of Policy and Polity

Ewan told me over lunch that the UK Govt had been defeated in the Commons over an extension of detention without trial, which strikes me as encouraging for the ORG agenda (there's still time to be one of the thousand founding patrons, if you hurry).

This made me think about the difficulty of defending an existing, working organisation like the House of Lords or ICANN against a putative more democratic one. The EU argument to the WSIS that internet routing being controlled by a corporation under US Govt laws is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed is difficult to counter in theoretical terms, but it is a pragmatic fact that ICANN, like Wikipedia or eBay or microformats, works better than you might expect.

Just as the House of Lords often does a better job in revising legislation than the Commons, because of both the lifetime tenure, and varied expertise of the specialists appointed to it, ICANN, as Lessig says 'have developed an internal norm about making as light a regulatory footprint as they can'.

Susan Crawford, whose nomination to ICANN is another good sign, says:

Not every change in the world needs to be addressed by a regulatory strategy, and there’s a very high risk that those who are comfortable with the regulatory world will use levers that are easily available to them to make life uncomfortable for their upstart competitors.

We so easily slide into the notion that the internet is “bad” and needs to be regulated.  We’re cutting off the best of ourselves this way; we should be encouraging it to have a life of its own, to catalyze new ways of living and doing business, and only getting in the way when market control leads to an absence of choices and inappropriately high prices.

If only the US equivalent of the House of Lords, the Supreme Court, could get lawyers like Lessig and Crawford appointed, with their scepticism of purely legislative solutions.

PS - Armando Iannucci perfectly satirises Blair's bogus arguments.

PPS - Le Monde makes an argument against ICANN based on the British Empire's theoretical hegemony or something like that.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, law, microformats, ORG, politics, scotus, Supreme Court

DRM's power grab gets more naked

I think this week may be when the supposed middle ground of DRM vanishes. Walt Mossberg and Chris Anderson have both spoken against harsh protection, but stopped short of condemning DRM outright, unlike David Berlind.
This week we have had Sony/BMG adopting the techniques of virus writers to wrest control of your PC from you, and the MPAA proposing legislation to cripple all our video cameras and computers unless we are "professionals".

This is the first of my 5 points: DRM Turns your computer against you.
Sony will feel a backlash due to the value destruction they inflict on their customers (point 5), and their sales will fall. Microsoft should disable the CD Autorun feature used as an infection vector by Sony, as Apple did 7 years ago.

The MPAA attempt, though is serious. They managed to pass a similar law in 1998 that mandated Macrovision video signal corruption, and faulty AGC circuitry for non-professional video recorders. This is why you can't run your DVD player signal through your VCR, and why dubbing copies of your home videos is so awkward.

I worked long and hard at Apple for 5 years making the digitisation of video work easily and seamlessly, so we could all edit video, so my children could create and share with the world, and this stupid law will deliberately undo our work and break our computers and cameras on purpose.
It goes without saying that it will do nothing to prevent large scale commercial copying of movies, as this is done with professional equipment, and is already illegal and subject to huge fines. All it will do is yet again invert the legal presumption of innocence (point 4), and assume that my boys' videos, and your own recordings are copyright violations, and stop them from being digitised.

The 'Analog Holes' they want to stop up are our eyes, ears and mouths.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, DRM, law, meme, politics, video

six things that seemed amusing to me this week but probably aren't if I have to explain the context

1. I keep seeing things that aren't so much 'Web 2.0' as 'me 2.0'
2. I had that Emma Bovary in the back of the cab once...
3. If you buy a Sony CD it saves you the 15 minute wait to get rooted
4. I now realise that Our Island Story was an extended set up for 1066 and All That
   
5. Was the Master jealous of the Doctor in Dr Who because he never finished his PhD?
6. That much Halloween candy is bound to bring on apocolocyntosis

Inspired by the latest 5ive, which is much funnier.

Technorati Tags: 5ive, apocolocyntosis, DRM, sony, tagcamp, web 2.0