Diablog April2004

Brin about GMail

eWEEK’s Steve Gillmor has interviewed Google co-founder Sergey Brin about Gmail, Google’s new Web-based e-mail service.

Video conversion

Åsmund found this one: ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the “hyper fast video and audio encoder”. Looks promising!

Remediation and Mediology

I guess I should be a litte embarrassed admitting that I´m reading parts of Bolter & Grusins Remediation for the first time (the book is almost two years old). Their ”proposed genealogy is defined by formal relations within and among media as well as by relations of cultural power and prestige” (page 21). What puzzles me is that there are no references to Regis Debray and ”Mediology“: ”The mediologists are interested in the effects of the cultural structuring of a technical innovation (writing, printing, digital technology, but also the telegraph, the bicycle, or photography), or, in the opposite direction, in the technical bases of a social or cultural development (science, religion, or movement of ideas)”. Seems to be a relevant approach to “remediation", as long at it (mediology) seeks to understand praxis [practice, material history] in relation to techné [systematic knowledge] within media an society at large.

Debary continues: The modes of transmission for symbolic systems in the modern era are not separable from the modes of physical transport, whose conjunction configures a technically determined “mediasphere” (namely, a certain configuration in space and time). The mediological view endeavors to embrace locomotive machines and symbolic machines. For example, the coupling of telegraph and railroad after 1840, and now, telephone-car, radio-plane, television-satellites, etc.”.
Writing an essay about the historical impact of media on epistemology I will have to look into both “mediology” and “remediation”. Maybe ”A Theory Map for Mediology” is a good place to start.

A9

A9.com, which is Amazons beta-version of a search-service looks really promising. If they manage to come close to Google in terms of relevance the combination of search in print books will make this one a potential winner.

New Media Conference in Bergen

I did almost forget this one. Looks interesting, and the conference is open for everybody and there is no fee!!

Communications for Tomorrow

This study definitely sounds interesting: ”Communication networks and digital media that incorporate open source, peer-to-peer grids, Wi-Fi, streaming video, MP3s, multi-player gaming, and wireless networks /../ The first term of this course examines the concetural underpinnings of these technologies from a world perspective; the secrond term explores new services including interactive entertainment, information services, electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and social activism.”
There are also a number of articles, one for each lecture. Most of them seems to give a good summary of the field.

The truth might be out there …

This can probably not be said too often: ”…turn people loose on a large enough collection of books, and will they have any better luck separating out the ludicrous and the outdated? Doubt it. These are the same people who believe whatever gets said on TV, you know? But if you ask them if they can evaluate sources, they’ll tell you yes.
The problem isn’t the web. The problem is evaluating authority, and that’s a far larger and more complex problem.”
Morals: Do never trust media, always double and triple check the information you get. You might trust people you know, but it never hurt checking their information either :-) What´s nice having the web is the ability to check information fast, as long as you are aware of that the truth probably turns out to be more complex than you´re told at Google News.

Moblogs and camera phones

Popular moblogs like TextAmerica , Buzznet , and Ploggle ”seems to be driven by a desire to assign importance to everyday experiences. By sharing these images with others, people affirm a kind of common experience”. According to this article moblogging is also reminiscent of the work of a group of artists known as the New Topographers of the late 1970´s. “New Topography” allowed the viewer to uncover unexpected clues embedded in everyday events. Lewis Baltz´s pictures might serve as an example.

TV Turnoff 2004

TV Turnoff 2004: ”Fewer and fewer people control the media that shapes our worldview. And nowhere does this play out worse than on our televisions, where the corporate agenda reigns supreme.”
The campaign wants you to ask: When I reach for the remote, who is really in control?

Learning how audio-visual media work

In his new book Free Culture (which I do recommend), Lawrence Lessig refers to an interview with Elizabeth Daley about the importance of learning how audio-visual media work: ”From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.” (page 37) Lessing follows up: ”“Read-only.” Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century. The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write.”
(Daley and Lessing makes an important point which seems very relevant to my work on ”videoblogs as collective documentary“). Lessing also goes on writng about blogs, citing Dave Winer: “I think you have to take the conflict of interest out of journalism. /../ An amateur journalist simply doesn’t have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way.” Something which is relevant to documentary, and highly relevant to television news.

Proposal accepted

Seems like I´m going to Vienna in the beginning of July :-)

Situated Software

Related to my PhD I’m working on a project funded by ITU called Digital Learning Arenas (summary in norwegian). A major part of our project (a blog in norwegian) is to develop a web-application to be used in schools. The idea is to explore the advantages of personal publishing, making a system which is possible to customize for a lot of different users. The approach sounds quite similar to what Clay Shirky describes in ”Situated Software“: ”We’ve been killing conversations about software with “That won’t scale” for so long we’ve forgotten that scaling problems aren’t inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large” and ”We constantly rely on the cognitive capabilities of individuals in software design /../ We rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time”. A “must read” this one….