Diablog June2004

Automatic video editing

muvee autoProducer does not quite sound as my idea of an ideal video-editing application: ”Artistic Intelligence automatically selects the best scenes from your video, and cuts them to your chosen music with cool effects and transitions synchronized to the beat”. According to this article muvee allows phone users to easily convert long video clips in short, fun video clips suitable for sending via MMS. The software identifies “highlights” in raw video and edits clips accordingly to predefined styles.
The examples does not convince me that this is for the best. On the other hand, it´s quick, and even if it´s dirty I guess there is some potential here.

You can read a little more about the concept of automatic video-editing in this article.

Approaches to studying blogs

Liz Lawley lists five approaches to the study of blogs :

1. Study of the form itself, including definitional and descriptive approaches.
2. Study of interactions between blogs and blog authors, and the clusters (or communities) that are forming in this context.
3. Ethnographic studies done in those clusters and communities that we’re able to identify.
4. Analysis of the content and style used in weblogs.
5. Study of the use of weblogs as tools in specificorganizational contexts.

Collin Brooke wrote a summary of panel on “Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication” at the Media Ecology Association conference, which Lawley is reffering to. Brooke also got a follow-up to the posting about blog research. Lots to read in other words…

NYT Link Generator

New York Times can only be accessed by obtaining a password, which makes it pretty awkward to link to their articles. Now this is history thanks to this nice little bookmarklet. Clicking it when you’re on an NYT page get you the weblog-safe link. Nice, they even provided the source code.

Blogs, academia and journalism

Cori Dauber, Alex Halavais, Kaye Trammell and Jill Walker gather at Online Journalism Review´s virtual roundtable to discuss how blogs are changing academia, politics and traditional journalism. They see them as being important, but school is still out on whether they are journalism.

DRM talk

Cory Doctorow´s talk to Microsoft’s Research Group about Digital Rights Management: ”Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver’s compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses”.

Making wikivideo in a videowiki

I´m thinking about a system for editing individual videoclips, from videoblogs, into sequences which then can be stored as SMIL-documents in the editors blog. Afterwards the sequence might re-edited and stored as new versions by others without changing the original sequence or the video-clips. From now on I will refer to this concept as ”wikivideo”. Actually I´ll probably end up writing about the wiki-like part of the system more than about the blogging part.

Anyway, wikivideo it is: Beeing “fast” and “collaborative” videomaking, but still crediting individual effort.

An investment in your future

This interview with Jorn Barger ”The Human Behind Robot Wisdom” contains a passage which I really enjoyed:

”Why is web surfing important to you? How is it an investment in your future?

First, it’s an urgent investment for _anyone’s_ future, because it’s an extremely complex activity to do well, yet trillions of dollars are being spent on it, at this point quite blindly.

At the simplest level, pointing and clicking is something a chimp can do, and basic HTML is something a schoolchild can do.

But mastering the Web even as a surfer is vastly complex– what are the best sources, when do they publish, how can you track them, how can you minimize the inefficiencies of badly designed sites, how can you manage your growing list of bookmarks?

And mastering the Web as a publisher is a topic no one has scratched the surface of yet– new strategies are discovered daily and if you’re not running as fast as you can, you’re already falling far behind”.

Videoblog wiki

There is a videoblog wiki over at me-tv.org which looks promising. Since I´m writing on a paper about videoblogs the ”videoblog timeline” is particularly interesting, even though it does not mention Steve Mann who is an innovator when it comes to the use og moblogs.

Videoblogging email list

This email list is set up in order to facilitate discussion about videoblogs. Only a few days old it seems to be worth following.

Open-source SMIL authoring application

LimSee2 is a SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 authoring application featuring a powerfull graphical user interface, designed to ease the manipulation of time-based scenarios in SMIL multimedia presentations.
LimSee2 is a software project conducted by the WAM team (Web Adaptation Multimedia) at the Inria research institute, Grenoble, France.

TiVo get networked

According to Wired TiVo is expanding its service to allow subscribers to download and record movies and music from the Internet. The basic TiVo Series2 DVR can be connected to a home network and share content between TiVo boxes in the same household, schedule recordings using the Internet, play music and view digital photos.
I guess the next step will have to be sharing content between TiVo boxes through the Internet.

BBC Creative Archive licensing to be based on Creative Commons

OK, this is almost a month old, but I need it for futher reference: BBC´s Creative Archive, originally announced by Greg Dyke in 2003, plans to offer the British public free access to some of the BBC’s audio and video programming. BBC’s decision that it will base the Creative Archive usage licence on the Creative Commons (CC) model.

Digital Deception

”The art of trick photography is almost as old as the technology itself. Early on, inventive people learned about double exposures, perspective tricks, cut-and-paste and other ways of altering photographs. This page contains some classic examples. (via Torill M.)

Teenagers weblogs

BBC tells that teenage boys and girls are using blogs, easily publishable online diaries, in many more similar ways than has been predicted, according to David Huffakers master thesis ”Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”.

Matters of Fact Revised

Via Jesper Juul I read an article by Bruno Latour in Critical Inquiry ("Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? - From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern"). Concerned about the issue of global warming Latour refers to lobbyists who try to make lack of scientific certainty a primary issue. Lator writes: ”I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the “lack of scientific certainty” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “primary issue.” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?”.

Maybe nothing has changed in respect of “scientific certainty”. Juul writes: ”Latour has been working in the field for more than twenty years and apparently it has never crossed his mind that the scepticism towards science he has championed can not only be used for dismissing things he doesn’t believe but also … for dismissing things he does believe”.

Digital camera prices

I´m thinking about buying a better digital camera. Not that I´m not satisfied with my current one, but things happens fast in this area. One of my favorites is the Minolta A2, which is kind of a “all in one"-camera with lot of manual features. I would prefer to buy it in Norway, the cheapest deal seems to be this one at 8675 NOK (about US $1300). On the other hand, A&M Photoworld sells the same camera at US $505. Seems far too cheap, but the store seems serious enough. Well the previous model (A1) has a higher price (US $549 vs US$ 930 in Norway) so there is definitely something wrong.

G5 Sneak Preview - Not!

I was looking forward to have a look at the new G5, but this is not what I expected.
This will have to do for a while.

Strange patent

I do know this is serious, but from time to time US patents puzzles me. Wired reports: ”In its patent application, Microsoft said the purpose of the now-patented technology is to make it easier for users to launch applications by either double-clicking a button or holding one down. Ok, it is a patent ment for handhelds, it should not be even close to patentable as far as I´m concerned. But then again, I´m not a lawyer…

Online: Public Attitudes

”When asked to rank the importance of the Internet as a source for information from 1 (not important) to 5 (extremely important), more than a third, almost 38 percent, of online news users gave it a 5, indicating how essential the medium has come to be seen. Another third gave it a 4 ranking. Less than 1 percent said it was not important at all. Among heavy Internet news users, the importance was even higher, with 42 percent ranking it as extremely important. (The State of the News Media 2004)

Broadcatching, the future of “broadband television”

Television viewing are declining when Europeans get broadband at home. According to this report ”TV programmers and service providers can deal with this trend by continuing to emphasise iTV services and products like Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), which can offer viewers the same kind of interactivity and personalisation associated with the Internet”.
You can read more about this development in Ofcom review of public service television broadcasting: ”PVR users watch far less live television, opting instead to watch time-shifted content off the hard-disk. Early US adopters have been found to devote half of their total viewing to time-shifted programming, and UK research with Sky+ users suggests that the ratio of PVR to VCR time-shifted viewing can be as great as ten to one. News, sport and daytime television have a tendency to be watched live or skipped altogether, whilst soaps, drama, films and established ‘appointment to view’ programmes have a high propensity to be recorded. PVR users tend to be more programme-loyal, with fast-forwarding replacing channelswitching.

Anyway, something seems to be happening already: Jon Udell writesabout an interesting experiment: a playlist of daily news clips, which can be subscribed in RSS Webjay’s creator Lucas Gonze uses the term broadcatching to describe this phenomenon. ” Given the relatively slow start for personal video recorders, it could take quite a while for this second-order phenomenon to catch on. If the PVR numbers that In-Stat/MDR has made up are even in the ballpark /../ the RSS-ification of TV news can fly under the radar for at least a few years while CBS et al. absorb the impact of TiVo.”.

‘Moblogging’ camera phone

Nokias 7610 phone seems to be able to capture, edit, store, print and send pictures and videos. It comes with a Kodak application which let users upload pictures to a web-based photo album. The 7610 can handle videos up to 10 minutes (174 x 144 pixels), which can be edited. Music and text can be added too, without connecting the phone to a computer.

Free Culture Wiki

Lawrence Lessing released his latest book Free Culture as a pdf with a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. Now there is a large number of versions available, but the most innovative one seens to be the wiki-version including comments, revisions and translations.