HDTV disappointments

I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation. It sounds like Pip Coburn's warning in The Change Function - that flat panel TV's are a no-brainer, but HDTV complexity could mess things up with extra perceived pain of adoption - was more accurate than Mark Cuban's 'HDTV beats the net' rant.

I also had a look round the Apple store yesterday, and saw excellent HD quality on a $2000 HD iMac, and a $999 23" Cinema display (not to mention the $2000 30" display which is way beyond 1080p in size). Where did I get the HD content? Over the net - The Harry Potter 5 trailer and Rocketboom's HD edition. The problem of connecting computers to HD screens is a mess, but it is one of the media industries' own creation, as they insisted on a new connector with DRM in the cables. Another friend of mine is working on some interesting new projection systems that may mean that all the computers will need is a white wall to point at.

Technorati Tags: DRM, HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

Happy New Year...

...to the Line Islands of Kiribati.

Technorati Tags: 2007, New Year

AT&T;'s bait and switch

Susan Crawford explains the fraudulent concession to neutrality from AT&T; in an attempt to get their merger approved before the year-end. The small print excludes their 'IPTV' service from neutrality, which was the point at issue. I have already covered the underlying flaw in their special pleading; what we see is a bizarre coalition of legacy TV and legacy networking to sacrifice the low-latency traffic paths we need for gaming, two-way conversations and other communication servcies for the goal of replicating the 'you have to watch it right now' TV experience we are rejecting in droves now we have a choice.
Update: The FCC approved it anyway, and watered down the neutrality commitment further:

AT&T; made a series of voluntary commitments that are enforceable by the Commission and attached as an Appendix. These conditions are voluntary, enforceable commitments by AT&T; but are not general statements of Commission policy and do not alter Commission precedent or bind future Commission policy or rules.

Commissioner Adelstein seemed to think there was a new policy here:

Most significantly, the Commission takes a long-awaited and momentous step in this Order by requiring the applicants to maintain neutral network and neutral routing in the provision of their wireline broadband Internet access service. This provision was critical for my support of this merger and will serve as a “5th principle,” ensuring that the combined company does not privilege, degrade, or prioritize the traffic of Internet content, applications or service providers, including their own affiliates. Given the increase in concentration presented by this transaction – particularly set against the backdrop of a market in which telephone and cable operators control nearly 98 percent of the market, with many consumers lacking any meaningful choice of providers – it was critical that the Commission add a principle to address incentives for anti-competitive discrimination. Defining the exact parameters of any neutrality provision is, almost by definition, complex and difficult. The precise contours, scope, and exclusions in this provision reflect compromise and a predictive judgment about how, in the words of Prof. Tim Wu, “to preserve the most attractive features of the Internet as it now exists.” The work is not done, however. It is critical that we remain vigilant and continue to explore comprehensive approaches to this issue; but I expect this significant step will inform the debate in the coming months and years. I appreciate the efforts of the many diverse groups and individuals who have contributed to this effort and, in particular, I want to thank Commissioner Copps for his leadership on this issue and for his commitment to the effort to devise a carefully-crafted condition.

Looks like he got bait and switched too.

Starship Troupers

John Scalzi and Brad DeLong have kicked off a serious debate about the different interpretations of Starship Troopers by Heinlein and Verhoeven. However, I think they are both neglecting the important critical interpretation by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip .

One reason Torchwood has been disappointing is that it's "Dr Who with shagging" premise isn't really enough to sustain it. Camp and sexist as it was, the original Star Trek did try to grapple with moral and societal dilemmas. A big part of the enormous power of the revived Dr Who series is that the Doctor lives by a moral code and stands by Rose without yielding to his temptations. They have you feeling the unrequited love of Madame de Pompadour and sympathy with a wounded Dalek. Torchwood's aimless bed-hopping is more like Katy Manning posing with a dalek.

Technorati Tags: Dr Who, Starship Troopers, television, Torchwood

James Brown memorialised in video

The death of James Brown yesterday has shown up in a surge of blog interest - he dominates the Technorati popular videos chart today, and is the top search and James Brown is a top tag (and there are lots of videos tagged James Brown too). Kevin Burton's tool is showing some Brown videos too, though he is indexing a smaller pool of bloggers; I'd look at the Megite one too if it were public.

Technorati Tags: blogs, tags, video, YouTube

Video WTF

Whenever digital video engineers gather together, there is a mutual camaraderie based on the woes of supporting the NTSC standard. I suspect with a few drinks in them they'd form a mob and string up whomever came up with the frame rate of 30000/1001 and drop-frame timecode. However, the sins of our video forefathers pale into insignificance compared to what is going on with DRM video in Windows Vista.

Technorati Tags: DRM, microsoft, video

Podcasts by Royal Appointment

Last week at a bloggers gathering in London I was commenting that Private Eye had 3 cartoons about podcasts in, including one about listening to the Queen's podcast on Christmas Day, so clearly the stuff we were doing is becoming mainstream. Then today Dave Winer points out that the Queen does have a podcast. Here's the feed link. It's come a long way since Bloggercon 2003. And even longer since I got to line up the Nagra tape recorders for the recording of the 1988 Queens Speech while I was at the BBC.

Technorati Tags: Christmas, meme, podcasting, Queen

Pachelbel - the backlash begins

Rob Paravonian rants about the ubiquity of Canon in D. That reminded me of Dudley Moore's Beethoven parody using the Colonel Bogey theme. I do love that such things are findable online...
Update: bonus link - Clive Thompson on the joys of guitar wanking on YouTube

Technorati Tags: canon, Pachelbel, video, YouTube

iTunes store - because of, not with

The NYT repeats a familiar incredulity about iTunes store sales but misses the point about Apple. Apple is a hardware company — it makes its money from selling good hardware with good margins. The iTunes Store has always been pretty close to revenue neutral for Apple - the vast bulk of its sales revenue goes through to the Record Labels or TV companies. With Apple absorbing hosting, payment processing and customer support too, I'd be surpised if it makes enough to cover the iPod's advertising budget.
This has an interesting beneficial effect - because Apple cares more about the iPod than the Store, they have embraced Podcasting (equally revenue neutral, and a good way to fill iPods) and kept the iTunes Application's CD-ripping abilities (while its ability to sync to non-Apple mp3 players has withered away). What is becoming clear is that DRM, even Apple's DRM with circumvention built-in, does destroy value for customers. The labels are realising that they inadvertently handed the keys to their music to Apple, and so are moving towards selling non-DRM'd files instead.
Apple's hardware sales model is going to be put to the test with the iTV set-top video playback box due next year. Other companies are bundling such boxes with cable TV, in return for a subscription. BT Vision is trying a different tactic - a set-top PVR that uses free over-the-air TV along with the ability to purchase Video too, but bundled with their broadband internet service.
The question for both of these is how well they will enable the playback of amateur media, which can be indistinguishable from 'bootlegs', as well as video from the big media content the companies have partnerships with.
Watching my boys play videos with their friends the other night, they didn't make hard distinctions between the Harry Potter 5 trailer, silly internet flash animations, Pachelbel's Canon in D played on guitar, and their own home-made videos. All were media to share with each other and talk about.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iTunes, Live TV is Dead, long tail, marksbrothers, video

Petitio Post Mortem

Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension:

If you read the list, you’ll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire.

I’m not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they’ve died, then why can’t they produce new recordings fifty year ago?

Meanwhile, the Open Rights Group is running a Release The Music campaign, with a petition you can sign. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods.

Are my readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?

Technorati Tags: copyright, law, music, Open Rights Group, ORG

How to solve Sudoku

Just login as root and type 'ku'.

Hint for the less geeky.

Explanation for the non-geeky.

How to really solve Sudoku.

Technorati Tags: geeky, Python, sudoku

Gowers' biased rhetoric

The Gowers Review of Intellectual property released a final report today. The Open Rights Group has a good response on the overall impact, but I noticed some rhetorical bias. Paragraph 1.9 of the report says:

1.9 Achieving this balance is made more difficult by the vocabulary used to discuss IP policy and practice. Copyright infringement through unauthorised copying and distribution of music and video across the Internet is likened to stealing by some, and to sharing by others. Those who seek to prevent others from using a patented invention without permission are branded ‘trolls’*. Those who copy and distribute material illegally are called ‘pirates’. And the problem of ‘orphan’ works, which arises where copyright owners are untraceable, perhaps provokes an easy sympathy.

Having made this point though, the rest of the review uses 'piracy' throughout in phrases like 'strengthening enforcement of IP rights, whether through clamping down on piracy or trade in counterfeit goods', and does not mention patent trolling at all. Down in the glossary at the end, the report defines:

Piracy: Unauthorised duplication of goods protected by IP law

By using this rhetorical trick, Gowers continually makes an equivalence between commercial counterfeiting of CDs on a large scale with the copying inherent and necessary in any use of digital media. Gowers also makes some bizarre leaps of logic:

1.4 Ideas are expensive to produce but cheap to copy. The fixed costs of producing knowledge are high. Hollywood blockbusters can costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make[...]

How much knowledge does a Hollywood blockbuster contain, compared to, say, the Wikipedia page on intellectual property? The fixed costs there are remarkably low. The costs of production are continually plummeting, thanks to digital technologies, and that enables commons-based peer production, like Wikipedia. Some of Gowers recommendations are good, but it looks like he didn't engage with Benkler's Wealth of Networks thesis on new kinds of knowledge creation.

*Patent trolling is when a patent is used to prevent innovation by blackmailing companies with a patent, often second-hand. I've written on patent trolls before.

At Internet Identity Workshop

December 4th — 6th, 2006 Internet Identity Workshop— at Computer History Museum

I'm at the Internet Identity Workshop today, talking about Microformats.

Paradise regained?

Nick Carr characteristically sees doom in Second Life's copybot, via Alex Krotoski:

Krotoski saw, in the reaction of the new merchant class, that something more than his little laboratory had disappeared from the virtual world:

And so, once again, the real world comes crashing in. Sooner or later, most online communities reach this crisis point because the ideals of the founders are replaced by regulations demanded by the different types of people who interact in them. We shouldn't be surprised; what we do when we interact online is replicate the social practices we are familiar with offline. Inspired by this milestone, I'm going to add a wing to my new lab. And inside will be a shrine to CopyBot, the little hack that transformed Second Life into a real world.

Lay a virtual rose on the shrine for me, Aleks.

Now, I've quoted Macaulay on this before, but his clarity of thought is hard to resist on Milton:

If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,—my honourable and learned friend will be surprised,—I should select the case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's works? But, Sir, will my honourable and learned friend tell me that this event, which he has so often and so pathetically described, was caused by the shortness of the term of copyright? Why, at that time, the duration of copyright was longer than even he, at present, proposes to make it. The monopoly lasted, not sixty years, but for ever. At the time at which Milton's granddaughter asked charity, Milton's works were the exclusive property of a bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's shop, and at Tonson's price. Whoever attempts to undersell Tonson is harassed with legal proceedings. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment. And what, in the meantime, is the situation of the only person for whom we can suppose that the author, protected at such a cost to the public, was at all interested? She is reduced to utter destitution. Milton's works are under a monopoly. Milton's granddaughter is starving. The reader is pillaged; but the writer's family is not enriched. Society is taxed doubly. It has to give an exorbitant price for the poems; and it has at the same time to give alms to the only surviving descendant of the poet.

we can change society's rules, and we do it by experimenting near the edges

Technorati Tags: copyright

Thanksgiving meat

Bill explains how to turn Turkeys into meat. But then, aren't we all made out of meat?

Update: OMG turkeys!

Technorati Tags: meat, thanksgiving, turkey

AI pipedreams now called Web 3.0

John Markoff's Web 3.0 piece was an odd conflation of various kinds of "if only the world were a simpler place" AI dreams, actually triggering a full 10⁶ microLenats on the bogometer. I wouldn't have commented on this, except that my copy of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream came today, and I read this passage that summed it up well:

In the end, however, it was not capability that limited the potential of artificial intelligence, it was hubris. Intelligence programmers almost by definition have a God complex, which means they don't like following anyone else's work, including that of nature. In conversation, intelligence programmers will speak warmly about the giants of the field that have come before them and express reverential awe regarding the evolutionary processes that time and again have spawned intelligence from non-sentience. In their heads, however, they regard the earlier programmers as hacks who went after low-hanging fruit and evolution as the long way of going about things.

It is exactly this tendency, as observed in ourselves and others, that led to the observe, document, simplify, then converge approach set out in the Microformats process.

Technorati Tags: bogosity, meme, microformat, microformats, web 2.0

My blog's fifth birthday

I saw danah's call for help with her timeline of social software, and remembered Chris Locke talking about sixdegrees.com on his EGR mailing list. There, I saw the email from Chris that started me blogging, 5 years ago today.

Looks like I posted 4 times that day, on memetic engineering, Geoffrey Nunberg distorting Samuel Johnson by selective quoting, Chris Locke on Johnson, and tracing over pictures.

I saw Denise Howell at the Web 2.0 summit yesterday, and she reminded me we both responded to the same call.

Blair's Modern World

In the Telegraph, Tony Blair writes about the 'need' for ID cards

The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world [...] I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don't think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.

I think I've heard this before - The Jam, in 1977

This is the modern world that I've learnt about
This is the modern world, we don't need no one
To tell us what's right or wrong -
Say what you like cause I don't care
I know where I am and going too
It's somewhere I won't preview
Don't have to explain myself to you
I don't give two fucks about your review

If Blair is explictly pitting modernity against liberty, Evelyn Waugh's closing of Scott-Kings' Modern Europe seems apposite: "I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."

Technorati Tags: Blair, liberty, modern, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, UK, Waugh

Mike Ford's Occasional Works at Making Light

The Making Light blog is collecting Mike Ford's comments there as a series:

De vermis.

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

This modern commonplace book is continually inspiring and amusing. I never met Mike Ford, but read enough of his words at Making Light to miss him now.

Technorati Tags: auctorial, philosophy, words, writing

Hollywood, software and the net

JP made an analogy between software development and film-making:

Only successful scripts should get financed

That’s what angels want first and foremost. Good scripts. Because they know that they can get good producers, good directors, good actors, good everything. But good scripts are harder to come by.

BTW, have you ever wondered why angel investors exist in only two investment genres, filmmaking and software development? Now you know.

Now JP does mention development hell, which was best described by Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman:

Whedon: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

Gaiman: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

Tonight at the Vloggies, Jerry Zucker (who built his career on satirising movie clich?s) spoke of the opportunity to avoid the mess of Hollywood:

We were just experimenting, we were playing, we were having fun with this whole new field... We had to build a theatre with 150 seats to bring people in to watch it. What you have today is the possibility to take this stuff and send it around the world, for nothing. It is going to change the way we view entertainment. The studios in Hollywood are already a mess - this is going to change entertainment, and you are all at the beginning of it, so good luck and god bless

I think JP and JZ are both thinking about the same thing as I spoke about last week, where the internet undoes the need to pitch a story to fiscal gatekeepers, instead enabling anyone to speak in public, and for us all to decide who to listen to. This brought to mind a stanza from the Faithless song 'Not Enuff Love':

Whoever asks my name
Or where I came from
People fear contamination
If they tarry too long
I carry a strong
Sin of despair
It's in the air
I'm broken and hard to repair
I may mistaken be
But I patiently wait
On the path to humanity
I sit at the gates

Here's to forcing open the gates, and keeping them wide open.

Technorati Tags: Hollywood, software, podcasting, VC, Venture Capital, video, vloggies

Don't use Wells Fargo as your bank

Their online banking seems attractive, but it has a fatal flaw.

It doesn't show a running balance with each transaction, just a mythical 'available balance', and a long list of 'pending' transactions. The trouble is, the pending transactions become actual at different times. In particular, any debits become actual before any credits. So, if you have a large pending deposit of, say, your salary, a few small transactions that come through first can take you overdrawn. Wells Fargo will then charge you $33 per transaction for these overdraft transactions. The $33 doesn't pend at all, it just disappears from your account into their profits, along with all the interest they are earning on 'pending' your deposits.

As I said, avoid Wells Fargo banking.

Technorati Tags: banking, ethics, extortion, Wells Fargo

Microformats for Halloween

Microformat logo pumpkin
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

I was wondering what to carve into the pumpkin, and a vision of orange came to me. The orange Microformats logo, as seen on Pingerati.

Technorati Tags: halloween, logo, microformat, microformats, pumpkin, web 2.0

Truth in Comedy

Armando Iannucci explains that comedy is making the serious points in politics:

I still want comedy to matter a great deal. I want it to tackle big subjects. The idea that we are making someone laugh about something does not mean we don't take it seriously. Sometimes, we can take something so seriously that the only practical way to release the tension is to make a joke. Sometimes, we can be so appalled by someone's behaviour that the only effective way to run it again in our heads is as farce. Luckily, we do not live under tyranny, but those who do so know the creative freedom the joke gives them. You can ban writing, but you can't stop people finding things funny.

Bill Amend illustrates the point:

Technorati Tags: cartoon, comedy, funny, politics, voting

Vote for Andrew and Christopher in the vloggies

My boys' blog is up for voting in the vloggies in the "children's" category. To encourage you to vote we have put up a video they made about 5 years ago called Christopher's Buttons, when Christopher invented some magic buttons, and they started working.

Here's the full, Director's Cut edition, and here's a short version on YouTube:

Do please vote for the boys.

Technorati Tags: button, funny, magic, marksbrothers, podcasting, video, vloggies, YouTube

Made with more love than money

Reading Ev's post about buying back Odeo from the VC's and refocusing on smaller faster development, along with Aaron's on how Google could decentralise I see several trends converging.

Software startups used to need lots of VC cash and time because of the old packaged software cycle, where you had big, annual releases that you sold for hundreds of dollars apiece. On the web, we have daily releases, adapting to customers and other changes in the environment, and new tools mean that an 18-year-old with an idea can get it up and running fast, then worry about scale.

Talking to various friends working in the field I am starting to see a pattern. With the trend of startup funding and team size shrinking so much, we'll end up with several startups each - a kind of personal portfolio theory - lots of small ideas, made because we can, some of which will blossom.

Update: Fred Wilson calls this being a Parallel Entrepreneur. That makes some sense, after all 'entrepreneur' means 'carrier between' - it's all about connecting ideas.

Technorati Tags: economics, emergence, power law, software, VC, Venture Capital, web 2.0, Web 2.0℠

Interesting stats on programming languages

Ohloh has done some year-on-year comparisons of programming language use.

From this chart they conclude that 'The web is being built with PHP':

However, if you combine it with this chart:

The conclusion looks more like 'PHP programmers write lots of extra lines of code compared to programmers using other languages'.

This fits in with my experience - the PHP version of the XOXO code ended up much longer than the Python one. Also, PHP's 'inline in HTML' structure does tend to lead to 'copy and paste inheritance' rather then writing library functions.

Link via Brad Feld.

Technorati Tags: code, PHP, programming, Python, statistics

Legislating net video

The European Union's plan to regulate the net as if it were TV - Television Without Frontiers - picked up a lot of attention in blogs this week, after the Times covered it. The basic idea is flawed - TV involves handing a monopoly over spectrum to organisations, so regulating how they use it makes some sense, but there is no spectrum scarcity online, all you need is a webserver. So the EU limits on local content, advertising intervals and content labelling don't fit at all.

I spoke about this on the Technorati videoblog last week, and the BBC's Pods and Blogs show last night. You can hear me about 30 minutes into this show recording (shame the BBC hasn't made it a podcast yet).

Technorati Tags: BBC, law, Open Rights Group, ORG, podcasting, politics, television, YouTube

How could Flash video stop being crappy?

John Dowdell graciously responded to my attack on Flash video, asking for more solid points, which is fair enough - I did rather assume that Flash video's flaws are self-evident. This post is adapted from our conversation in his comments.

First of all, let me say that Flash gets one big thing right, which is unobtrusive ubiquity. Tom Green's history is spot on about the stupidly self-destructive things that Real, QuickTime and Microsoft have done to get in your way when you want to watch video, from DRM to pop-up ads to pointless upgrade messages that don't upgrade anything. Flash started with a ubiquitous vector graphics player, and added audio as mp3, and video too, without inserting noxious upgrade messages in the way.

I'm not saying making computers play video is easy — I've lost enough nights and weekends to synchronisation and graphical representation bugs to know — but there are some egregious things wrong with FLV:

Flash frequently drops sync

In particular, if I switch focus away from the browser on my Mac, the video framerate drops to a crawl, then plays catch-up when I click back.

Dowdell puts this down to browser issues, but QuickTime handles these through a shared process on Windows - it is fixable, though takes some work.

Native video integration is weak

Scaling video always looks pixellated, and the black/white points and gamma mapping is off so it often looks washed out. (Yes, this is tricky, but it is a known problem too - here's some QuickTime notes from 2000).

Proprietary old codecs

FLV uses proprietary codecs that are well behind the state of the art, giving a bottleneck of encoding choices. Most Flash Video is encoded to the old Sorenson Spark codec (which is effectively H263 - a standard but a ten-year-old one).

Macromedia considered H264, but likely rejected it on legacy support as it is CPU intensive. The big mistake was adopting ON2 VP6 instead of MPEG4 main profile. MPEG4 has benefited from multiple encoding tools and playback clients, their codec requires proprietary encoders. If Macromedia/Adobe can adopt MPEG4 main profile in the next Flash release, great. H264 would be even better, but staying a generation behind is arguably reasonable, given CPU requirements.

Lack of editability

QuickTime was always designed with editing in mind. Apple have foolishly buried this feature, but it is there, and one advantage of MPEG4 video is that you can bring it into QuickTime, edit it, and flatten it out again without recompression. Getting video out of Flash again is a pain (some tools do it, generally with recompression).

I don't think QuickTime is the ultimate answer either, and I don't want this to become a pissing contest over individual platforms. What I want is some open standards support.

Dowdell worries about commoditization, but that is exactly what I want. If MPEG4 video playback can become a commodity, as MP3 audio is, the market can move on to compete on other grounds. Look how many Flash-based mp3 players there are out there.

Technorati Tags: Flash, QuickTime, video

Music in speech from 2 angles

Mark Liberman at Language Log turn pitch in speech into pictures.
Radiolab discovers that repeated speech becomes music. Listen to it in this mp3, it's amazing.

Technorati Tags: music

Self-evolving systems - threat or promise?

The Lifeboat foundation is thinking about future threats. I was struck by this one:

A system that evolves freely is potentially very adaptable and creative. It could also become nearly anything, with consequences ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. It is likely unlimited self-evolution will need to be contained carefully even as we mine it for truly new inventions. The arrows nicely hint at a chaos-star as well as replication.

Somehow this reminded me of danah's exasperation with politics, business, academia and media. The disappointing elites she describes would see self-evolving systems as a threat. I prefer to see them as a promise of something better to come.

Technorati Tags: economics, emergence, future, politics

This American Life becomes a podcast

This American Life is the best radio documentary series I know of (Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson agree). I heard on the radio today that it is officially becoming a podcast, and their website confirms it. Free for a week, old episodes for 99¢ each.

Subscribe on iTunes or in your feed reader, you won't regret it.

Technorati Tags: interactive radio, iTunes, podcasting

BBC and insurgents

The BBC terminology guide, 2006:

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. [...] We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunmen", "kidnapper", "insurgent" or "militant."

George Orwell, As I Please, 2nd June 1944

Nearly all human beings feel that a thing becomes different if you call it by a different name. Thus when the Spanish civil war broke out the B.B.C. produced the name "Insurgents" for Franco's followers. This covered the fact that they were rebels while making the rebellion sound respectable.

Technorati Tags: BBC, words

Valley geeks on the YouTube acquisition

Foxtrot is way ahead of Dilbert these days.

Technorati Tags: Google, long tail, puppy, RSS, video, web 2.0, YouTube

Doing more good

Creative Commons are having a fundraiser:


ORG is looking for members:

and recruiting a full-time Executive Director to build on the great work Suw Charman has been doing there bootstrapping ORG.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, digital rights, Open Rights Group, ORG

A five point plan to save us from crappy Flash video

Now YouTube has Google backing, they can stop making us watch Flash video. Everyone who cares about video quality, from Hollywood, to the BitTorrent-using TV bootleggers use mpeg4. Everyone who doesn't uses Flash.

I've pointed out before how Apple screwed things up, but it is still fixable. Heres my 5 point plan.

1. Apple, drop the tacky upgrade ads. Seriously, they make you look like the Giselle wannabee here. You don't need the money from the upgrades, you give away better editing tools on the Mac, and you're just pissing people off needlessly.


2. GooTube, write a detection script, and give us MPEG4 quality if we have QT or another player installed. Google Video has nice MPEG4 versions, but they force you to download them completely and play later. Stop that.


3. Apple, make QT play DiVX AVIs and the other MPEG4 variants. You have the codecs, you have the parsing, you have the engineers. You should have done this 5 years ago. Heck, just bundle Perian and port it to Windows.


4. Google, drop your client, adopt Democracy Player and promote it.


5. Everyone: forget DRM.

After all we deserve better than having to put up with Flash video.

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, formats, Google, iPod, Live TV is Dead, movie, pirate, podcasting, QuickTime, video, YouTube

An Omenous conjunction?

Neil Gaiman writes:

An interview with Terry Gilliam about Good Omens (really, if someone would just give Terry $65,000,000 he could get going. Do you have $65,000,000 you don't need? Check your pockets. Maybe it's in a drawer somewhere. No? Look harder.).

Google buys YouTube, meaning a couple more chaps may suddenly have that much money lying around.
PS - Terry Gilliam's first usenet post (I watched him make it in our office's stock room).

Technorati Tags: bubble, movie, YouTube

Vendor management and personal data

Doc wrote about Vendor Management Systems to counter Customer Management Sytems.

One technique I picked up from Stuart is to register a domain (preferably your own name), and forward any email to it to your inbox. Then, when you need to give a vendor an email address, give them their name at yours, eg godaddy@kevinmarks.com. That way, if the subsequently get spam, or unexpected mail, you know who it was. This can confuse people on the phone though - "what's your email?" "earthlink@kevinmarks.com" "Don't you mean kevinmarks@earthlink.com ?" "Nope".

Dave wants a way to keep his movie reviews where he controls his own data. We have a way to do this with hReview - post the reviews on your blog, then get the vendors to read them. The smarter review sites, like Yahoo Tech are already doing this.

Technorati Tags: hReview, microformats, web 2.0

Geolocation and privacy

As our gadgets come to know where we are, we need to think about who should be able to find this out.
A metaphor that came to mind is that we need be building the Weasley's clock, not the Marauder's map.
Update: Jorge points out that Microsoft Researchers in Cambridge have built a prototype.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, ethics, geo

Foxtrot gets Web 2.0 spot on

.
Any comment is superfluous.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

Warhol codename flashback

Microsoft's new video sharing site, Soapbox, was codenamed 'Warhol'. As 'Warhol' was the original codename for QuickTime, back in 1990, I found this rather amusing.
Does the iTunes store's support for video podcasts count as Apple's video sharing competitor?

Technorati Tags: microsoft, QuickTime, video

iTunes store hobbled by DRM

The Beeb misses the point a bit:

On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

The report warned against simple characterisations of the music-buying public that divide people into those that pay and those that pirate.

The glaring omission in that report is of course podcasts, which have shown huge growth, and have been part of the iPod and iTunes experience for over a year now.

Even though I got $250 of credit on the iTunes Music store from ValleyWag, we have been reluctant to spend it, compared to buying CDs from Amazon. The need to burn your own CDs after purchase (to be sure that the tracks don't vaporize next time you have disk trouble) is a significant extra burden, driven by the DRM. Apple's sync-back from iPods to computers in the new iTunes is a step in the right direction, but a more sensible policy towards failed or deleted downloads is long overdue - failed TV show downloads, and purchases lost through disk failure meet with shrugs from Apple.

From Apple's point of view, the iTunes store is a small part of their business - the bulk of the money passing through it goes straight to the rights-holders or in payment processing or bandwidth costs, while they make far more revenue and profit on the iPods themselves. Overall this is a good thing - if Apple were really beholden to the labels and studios for significant revenue, then online culture would be in worse trouble. As it is, Apple's neutrality means that they are happy to encourage podcasters to show up in their listings, as more media means more iPod sales.

Technorati Tags: audio, iPod, iTunes, podcasting, video

In Memoriam Rob (lilo) Levin

Rob Levin, the leading spirit behind the freenode IRC network, died yesterday from injuries sustained by being hit by a car while cycling.
I never met Rob in person, but his indefatigable work in keeping freenode running supported hundreds of conversations I have had with people around the world, many becoming friends, colleagues or collaborators, and I counted him as a friend. I was hired at Technorati through a conversation on freenode, and the #microformats, #technorati, #wordpress, #wikinews and of course #joiito channels are a key part of my online life.
When setting up transient channels for conference backchannels, Rob was always helpful and courteous. I am sad to hear of his death, and the best memorial would be to keep freenode and the PDPC going as he did so well.
Lilo's accounts are still logged in at freenode, and every so often jibot reminds us:

lilo is the executive director of Peer-Directed Projects Center in Houston, Texas & he's another boring cooperativist propertarian Peircean pragmatist anarchist & he runs freenode (http://freenode.net/) & certainly hasn't been getting more sleep lately & is working on freenode-registry in Ruby & blogs on http://spinhome.org/ & http://bloggage.org/ & also uses the nick 'somegeek' & passed away Sep 16th, 2006 (RIP)

Update: Rob spent his days in a constant battle to keep freenode as a place for civil discourse, fighting off trolls, spammers and other net parasites. He did this with grace and good humour, imposing as few rules as possible, and generally inspiring people to behave well by trusting them to. Sadly, the self-described deletionists who infest Wikipedia (summed up well as people who remove what they find unsuitable, while giving little "awards" to each other for removing things) have decided to delete Lilo again. Please help explain to them why this is mistaken, pettifogging, and in appalling taste.

Technorati Tags: freenode, lilo, RIP, Rob Levin, Wikipedia

Douglas Adams' Hyperland

I got a surprise birthday present today. 17 years ago, when I was at the BBC, my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior put together this amazing drama-documentary with Douglas Adams on the future of media. Using 8-bit animated icons keyed over video, they predicted the future of digital media in ways that are only now coming true.
There is a version up on Google Video, but I also cached it on the server I use in case the BBC's 'no-one outside the UK' policy whisks it away from us again. Download Hyperland here, and join me in remembering Douglas Adams.

Technorati Tags: BBC, culture, Douglas Adams, Hyperland, hyperlinks, Live TV is Dead, movie, video

Apple's announcements - unanswered questions

Reading Paul Boutin's coverage of Apple's video announcements today, There are several questions that come to mind (and I know Jobs prefers not to answer questions).

• Songs bought from iTunes can be burned to CD and play anywhere. Why can't movies and TV shows bought from iTunes be burned to DVD?
• Could this explain why they have sold over a billion songs but only 45 million TV shows?
• Jobs talked about 640x480 movies. The Apple screenshot shows Pirates of the Caribbean filling the screen. Does this mean they are selling pan-and-scan versions, not widescreen? (checking with the iTunes Store, Pirates is widescreen, which makes sense)
• Apple's pre-announced iTV box has an HDMI output, but looks like it is running Mac OS - does it implement HDCP-style downrezzing?
• In other words, will it play HD content made by independents cleanly, or will it require broadcast flag handshakes?

What this does illustrate is that the telco's coveting of the Cableco's TV revenues may be irrelevant. As I have pointed out, their model of delivering TV by real-time streaming, requiring massive upgrades to their aging networks, can be completely short-circuited by downloading movies and TV over current broadband, scaling from slower than real time to faster than realtime depending on connection speed and congestion.
Bittorrent users have been doing this for a while. Apple is making it more convenient and much easier to use than most cable set-top boxes, let alone whatever the telcos are likely to come up with. It all adds to the alternatives.
The real revolution is hinted at by Jobs showing Rocketboom in his set-top box demo. Chatting to Andrew and Joanne this weekend in Boston, it is clear that they and others are growing their audiences and ready to short-circuit the existing broadcast or Hollywood commissioning treadmill.

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, HD, PodCamp, podcasting, Rocketboom, Showtime, video

Apple Switzerland jumps the gun

The Swiss QuickTime page is already showing links to 'Vidéos iTunes', though clicking through gets you to the It's Showtime - The iTunes Store is being updated page.
I still think Apple has an opportunity to do an end-run around all the HD complexity by selling an integrated system that avoids the nonsense of HDMI, but I think they may burden us further with their DRM instead, and miss a lot of it. Lets wait until the rumours are dispelled.

Technorati Tags: Apple, HD, iTunes, showtime, video

PodCamping today

I'm giving a couple of talks at Podcamp today - one on looking back 3 years to Bloggercon when Podcasting started to take off, and one on live webcasting to make instant videoblogs.
If you're at Podcamp, and want to talk about Technorati or Microfromats or anything, come and find me, I'm in a bright orange shirt.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BloggerCon, microformats, PodCamp, podcasting, technorati, video

Streaming is dead

Vint Cerf agrees:

IPTV is interesting not because of streaming, but because of on-demand possibilities a la iPod

IPTV is interesting because of interpretations of packets v. dumb raster display

Technorati Tags: podcasting, streaming, video

Talking about Technorati

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman dropped by Technorati last week and had a chat with some of us about blogs and indexing and things.
Here's the video.

Technorati Tags: blogs, podcasting, tags, technorati, video

Apple's HD Future

With another Steve Jobs keynote about to kick off, I'm going to indulge in a little speculation. Apple will greatly embrace HD. This shouldn't be a big surprise -after all back when I was there, the high-end uncompressed HD editing in Final Cut took off, but at the time uncompressed was needed as a way to keep the slow CPU out of the way of the fast disk and screen. Since then, Moore's Law has meant that computers are now almost fast enough to decode HD across the range, so HD Movie Trailers and iMovie HD are both widespread.
With Apple about to refresh their high end range, I expect a big emphasis on HD, and Blue-Ray storage. The more interesting aspect is that Apple is well-placed to do and end-run around HDCP/HDMI and all that nonsense, as they sell the screens as well as the computers. The iTunes store has been selling low-res TV shows for $2 each, so they have the makings of an entire distribution chain for content.

Technorati Tags: Apple, video, WWDC

Blogher - a peer group and a stiff drink

I didn't attend Blogher, but many of my friends and colleagues did, and mostly got lots out of it. I did pick up an undercurrent of discomfort from my female geek friends at what they saw as the low tech content of the conference, and even 'all these women in high heels giggling together'. Melinda Casino, Shelley Powers and Tara Hunt express various concerns with tone and with intrusive sponsorship.

The problems of sponsorship and product pitches always intrude into conferences - with the BarCamp model they get minimised by the low budget ethos and emphasis on emergent scheduling, but having watched several friends put together big conferences that involve taking over hotels for a few days, the need to raise significant sponsorship money does lead to editorial pressure on the schedule, and it difficult to walk the line between Jane Jacobs' Commercial and Guardian modes.

However, reading some of the posts by non-techie Blogher attendees, like IzzyMom and tastetheworld, what I see is the sheer pleasure at meeting people you have only known through their online writing, and making the personal connection with them. I recognise the experience I had when I crashed O'Reilly's eTech in 2003, and was able to pick up conversations with people based on what we'd been writing about, and overcome my previous inability to make smalltalk in big groups. The continual growth of blogging means that there are now many more interest groups out there beyond my techie clan. Lisa, Jory, Elise and the other Blogher organisers enabled lots of women with different interests to get together and have these personal epiphanies, and resolve Ford Prefect's quest for 'a peer group and a stiff drink' - well done.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Blogher, blogs, conference, emergence, etech

Congress bans MySpace and blogs in Schools and Libraries

This law is like outlawing restaurants and bars in DC because Congressmen get bribed in them. DOPA is an example of the 'poison gas' view of the internet cloud - it contains odd legislative language like:

The Congress finds that--
(3)with the explosive growth of trendy chat rooms and social networking websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to monitor and protect minors from those with devious intentions

It then defers definition of 'social network websites', but implies that it could include all blogging platforms, webmail and Wikipedia:

In determining the definition of a social networking website, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a website--
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.'

Note that this is using the corrupt Universal Service Fund as a way to circumvent the First Amendment.

More from danah, TechCrunch, ZDNET and Technorati.

Technorati Tags: blogs, digital rights, DOPA, law, net neutrality, politics, rhetoric, USF

Heads or Tails? No, Heads and Tails

I'm seeing a lot of debate over power law distributions in the wake of Chris Anderson's Long Tail book, most recently debated by Lee Gomes in the WSJ. Chris's rebuttal is on point, but there are more subtleties here; Chris is primarily addressing retailers in his book, so even the longer tails of books and music he discusses are choked off by the original publishers. If you include the lovingly created media from amateur creators, such as we see in the weblog world, the tails extend still further. (The chart dates back to February 2004.)

At dinner after AlwaysOn tonight, I was chatting to Nik Cubrilovic of Omnidrive and Peter Pham of PhotoBucket. They both have businesses hosting data online, for individuals. These are pure Long Tail businesses - as I said in my Symmetry argument, we are moving to a world where we upload as much as we download. As JP discussed, and Peter confirmed, having lots of photos and videos viewed once or zero times makes caching near the client useless.

However, that doesn't mean there aren't still some big hits, and if you have a power law relationship that extends over a few orders of magnitude you do need to cope with both ends of it, often with very different mechanisms. Desiging for an average case fials in a long tail world. Satellite broadcast is the ultimate big head method, blanketing whole continents with identical signals, with broadcast TV a close second. Building out networks with only emulating this model in mind will fail.

As I said before:

The net extends the range of the power law distribution.

If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power law curve that goes all the way down smoothly, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single link.

If you look at popularity in the publishing world - movies, chart music or books - the curve starts out with a power law, but soon drops like a stone. That's because in order to get a movie made, a recording contract or a book published, you have to convince somebody that you're going to sell a million tickets, a hundred thousand CDs or tens of thousands of books.

You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.

So what are the long tail businesses? You can be a commodity business catering to the tail (commodities are good - they mean people will pay you a known price). You can be fashion business, joining the zero-sum game for top place. Or you can create with love, and see if you can get paid for it over time.

Technorati Tags: long tail

Calling off the Search, continued

A couple of years ago I wrote:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.

The continuity of viewpoint within a blog is key - you can see more about them than just the one comment, and you can keep discovering and growing with them.

Blogs are about people. The Technorati redesign unveiled yesterday makes the people behind the blogs much more visible, and draws together the connections they make amongst themselves. One thing that has been noted is that we link blog names to profile pages on Technorati, (like this one for my blog), instead of to the blog home page. As always, the search result links go directly to the blog posts, but profile pages give an overview of the blog as we see it, and give more context to the favorite this link featured there.

As well as featuring bloggers' faces more prominently on the homepage, they are brought in many other places too - if you look at a tag results page, like technoratifeedback, or a blog tag like San Jose you'll see the faces of people who use that tag on their blogs, helping to create the community consensus the tag represents.

You can also see who has listed your blog amongst their favorites, again helping you find more people joining in the conversation, or to add to your own favorites reading list.

All these interconnected conversations give us much more to discover, so we don't have to search so hard.

Technorati Tags: blogs, favorite, tags, technorati, web 2.0

Inspired mashups - Star Trek/Python and more

While exploring the latest things my spiders have uncovered - often an interesting journey through the collective cosnsciousness - I found my way to a collection of inspired mashups. These artists have taken songs with a cultural resonance, and mixed them with video from another genre entirely to create something new and striking, but that partakes of both.

OK, that sounds pompous, especially when I'm talking about Star Trek characters acting the Camelot song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (also seen in a lower quality YouTube version), but there is a deeper point here. In Lessig's Free Culture, Chapter 8 Transformers, he writes:

In February 2003, DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers, the comic genius of /Saturday Night Live/ and Austin Powers. According to the announcement, Myers and DreamWorks would work together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under the agreement, DreamWorks "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture hits and classics, write new storylines and--with the use of state-of-the-art digital technology--insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby creating an entirely new piece of entertainment." The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and allow audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been doing this for years with music and now we are able to take that same concept and apply it to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If anyone can create a way to bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike." Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you don't think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It is Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom to build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and famous--and presumably rich. This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to create. That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers--again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the few.

After all, what is the impact of these amateur (in the true sense of lovingly made) remixes? I want to share them with people. I showed it to Andrew, and realised that though he knows Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he hasn't seen the original Star Trek, so guess what's on my Netflix list now.

I hope the Pythons and Paramount (or whoever owns Star Trek these days), are smart enough to turn a blind eye to this kind of cherishing of cultural icons.

I just finished reading Don Quixote. Not only was it a moving and subtle work, but I was amazed at the playfulness with unreliable narrators, and the way the characters meet people who've read the first book in the second one. Cervantes, 400 years ago, played the kind of games with storytelling that Charlie Kaufman does now. Our culture is truly built on interlocking references to itself, and we need ot encourage them.

Technorati Tags: art , auctorial, copyright, creative commons, culture, digital rights, mashup, meme, remix, rhetoric, video