Diablog July2004

P2P Video Journalism

Smart Mobs points to a story by Drazen Pantic about how to become a video-journalist.

Real-Time Perspective

According to this press release ”The traditional campaign press corps will face some youthful, wireless competition in covering this year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions. A team of graduate and undergraduate college journalism students will serve as “digital reporters” utilizing the latest in wireless technology to provide a unique, real-time youth perspective on the conventions and campaigns /../ The Wireless Election Connection moblog will combine the scope of print journalism with the immediacy of electronic journalism and illustrate the possibilities and the future of news. ”.

Portable Camera Hysteria - 1888 & 2004

”boingboing picks up on an amazing PBS story, tracing the history of the reaction to the portable camera – eerily familiar to the reaction today to the phonecam”. (via picturephoning)

Man with the Mobile Camera

Some ideas noted when I´m on vacation.

Discussing the possible future of videoblogs I find the networked version of the “found footage"-tradition to be really interesting. As soon as video-material are shared (posted with a CC-license) among a large number of videobloggers we might come close to the computer-age´s version of Dziga Vertov saying: ”…free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I´ve recorded them”. Where Vertov was talking about his freedom to use film-material in any order, we might be able to extend this freedom by using the material which others come up with, potentially using material recorded at the same time, but in different parts of the world, freeing recording from the constraints of physical space.

In “Found Footage and Questions of Representation,” (printed in Found Footage Film) William Wees discusses three general ways in which found footage is most often used:

1. Compilation : Film where the editor cuts together pieces of footage in order to illustrate a point. The images are intended to represent “reality” and is typical in television documentaries.

2. Collage : Film which use found footage to create metaphors, provoke self-consciousness and encourage critical viewing. The viewer is able to read images critically with attention to the metaphors.

3. Appropriation : Film where images are reused in order to be decorative. Representation is about surface, rather than creation of secondary meanings. Wees relates this to postmodernism and to the loss of the film-material´s historical meaning.

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Factual Back-Up

Michael Moore’s notes on Fahrenheit 9/11 with references to his sources.

“Open source kills jobs”

According to Asia Computer Weekly ”Microsoft’s chairman warned governments and companies that open source software is not the way to go if they are in the business of creating jobs and intellectual property”.
“Creating jobs", guess that depends on what kind of jobs you are talking about. The “intellectual property"-part sounds strange. There is no contradiction between open-source and intellectual property.

Guess the discussion on Slashdot might be worth following.

SMIL

For those interested in the use of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) :

• Apple´s documentation on Quicktime SMIL implementation
• RealNetworks Production Guide
• Creating Multimedia with SMIL - Boston University
• W3C Audio / Video
• Synchronized Multimedia On The Web
• Learn SMIL with a SMIL

Are Blogs Ready for Prime-Time?

A Blogads survey claims that blog readers are more mature and affluent than expected and more prone to click on ads and buy online.

Content publishing and sharing

A recent review of BBC Online includes Future market trends. Trying to look five years ahead the report foresee a range of new tools and applications are allowing consumers to publish and share their content with others:

• Weblogging.
• Dedicated content sharing sites, such as ‘Sony Screenblast’.
• File sharing networks and viral email distribution.
• Amateur content creators can use free online registries to license their content.

Conclusion: ”Together, these developments are allowing the creation and consumption of user-generated content to play a growing role in the lives of consumers, with new online communities developing each week, based around consumer-created content. The table below summarises this section by illustrating some of the ways in which these trends are likely to be manifested, in terms of user behaviour, into in 5 years time”.
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Anycasting

Sony is coming out with Anycast, a switcher, audio mixer, camera controller and character generator, all in a single briefcase. It also has an on-board Real video encoder to send out a live stream. At $20,000, weighs 15 lbs, and available in August. (via lostremote)
$20,000 is of course a lot, but compared to what you would have had to pay for the equivalent some years ago this is close to nothing. And the only shure thing is that it is going to be even cheaper …..

10.07.04: Talkning about “anycasting", this article gives an introduction to the technical aspects of the term.
A more throughoutful introduction :

”From a practical perspective, the major difference between anycasting and multicasting is that anycasting is a special use of unicast addressing while multicasting requires more sophisticated routing support. The important observation is that multiple routes to an anycast address appear to a router as multiple routes to a unicast destination, and the router can use standard algorithms to choose to the best route”.

Mobile television

On my way home from BlogTalk I picked up tuesdays issue of Berlingske Tidende which writes about television on cellphones (”Om et år ser vi TV på mobiltelefonen“). Kind of funny: The day before I spoke about the importance of “media literacy” focusing on the productive possibilities of moblie technology. I guess I should have mentioned these consuming aspects too.
I was already aware that NRK (the norwegian broadcasting coorporation) is testing video on mobiles. What I did not know was that YLE in Finland is doing a similar project together with Nokia (using a test-version of a phone called 7700). The big difference is that when NRK uses yesterdays technology, YLE uses DVB-H which doesn´t use the ordinary GSM-network. Nokia has a similar project in Berlin together with Philips, Vodafone og Universal Studios Networks Deutschland GmBH.
IP-datacast promises to deliver 25-80 channels and are going to be a much cheaper transmission-technology than GPRS and UMTS. The idea is that the users only pay a flat fee (like 10¤ a month) in order to get unlimited access.

11.07.04: BBC cover this as well.

Into the Blogosphere

”Into the Blogosphere” is an edited collection of essays exploring discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

BlogTalk Summary

The BlogTalk Vienna Notes in the BlogTalk wiki seems to be the best place for those who want to know what they missed :-)

Deep linking in video

Not beeing a lawyer this feels a litte tricky, but my talk about videoblogs ends up with :”An ideal system would be open, making it possible to incorporate material on different servers, facilitating citation of stored material from archives and “television” news. This requires deep linking into the video-material, which is possible using SMIL, but involving a number of legal questions”.
So I´ll do my best in order to explain whar the problem might be:

I´m not sure about the law in other countries, but in Europe one of the major “legal questions” will be the originator´s ”moral rights” (”ideelle rettigheter” in norwegian) to his work, which is something quite different from economic rights. These include the obvious right to be identified as the originator, but moral rights also include the right to be cited in a proper way. What is going to be considered “proper” is hard to tell when it comes to video and images.

If you only link to a video there are hardly any problems at all, but if you only link to a part of it the answer is far from obvious. If you link to parts of several different movies the problem of moral rights is substantial. An example would be to make a SMIL-document linking to two pornographic video and placing parts of a third, “serious", video in the middle, presenting the whole as one movie. Any of the filmmakers might claim that the integrity of their work is threatened.

The problem is that this part of copyright law is difficult to handle, even from a stricktly legal perspective. Economic rights are pretty easy to define. “Moral rights” are on the other hand to a larger extent an issue which can´t be answered with simple rules. What it means to be cited in a proper way changes with media technology.

The right to cite is probably one of the most important rights we´ve got in a democratic society, it should be used often, but not abused. The best advice is probably to keep on citing, even if it is video, but be honest: Always make it clear who has the rights to the material you are citing.

Videoblogs as Collective Documentary

Complete paper.

Presentation given at BlogTalk 2.0:

Intro
I´m going to give a brief introduction to why I believe videoblogs are going to be important, I will describe the current videoblog-genres and how they might be related to documentary filmmaking. Finally I will show you some ideas for a prototype, built on existing technology. This includes collaborative possibilities, which might foster what I call collective documentaries.
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New Uses for Camera Phones

Depending on visual tags and Bluetooth Intel study new methodologies for camera phones : ”… camera phones are being used as pointing devices, authentication devices, and storage devices. Intel researchers have also shown how camera phones can provide user interfaces for systems that, because of cost and/or form factor, aren’t able to accommodate a display of their own” (via Picturephoning)

BlogTalk Presentation

Even though my mac failed me for a moment this presentation finally came through (Best viewed in Opera in full screen).

Mapping BlogTalk 2.0

Going to Vienna and BlogTalk this looks really helpful: Mikel Maron and Johannes Gruber has set up an interactive map of Vienna using WorldKit. (via Thomas Burg)

This looks interesting: Using worldKit with WordPress.