Diablog October2004

Spammed

Comments are disabled until I figure out how to handle this. Guess I´ll have to upgrade Wordpress, which I should have done quite some time ago. Still this is a pain…

The last man

”How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Watch the video at internetvetsfortruth.org.

Update from the Digital World

Morgan Stanley´s latest report covers Weblogs, RSS and Yahoo: ”In our experience, if there is value in something that is also easy / friendly to use, people will use it. /../ The simplification of blogging tools, such as those offered by Blogger.com, has allowed anyone with an opinion and an Internet connection to become a publisher, journalist, and editor (our humble definition of a blogger). /../ Despite all the noise and random content in blogs, many bloggers have become sources for breaking news, fresh ideas, and expert commentary….” (via Dienstraum)

See also John Battelle’s Searchblog: Meeker on Digital World: Blogs, Yahoo Are Winners

Plazes.beta

”Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.”
I hardly believe this is what I would be looking for when it comes to my social life, but there may of course be some other reasons why this application could be interesting.

Photo mosaics

This article explains how to make a photo mosaic, one large image made out of tiny images from your personal stash, from google images or even frames from a movie. Some applications that do this for free: Andrea Mosaic (PC) and MacOSaiX (mac). (via Jill)
Expect mosaics from me in the near future….

BuddySpace

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists:

1. it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard ‘buddy lists’
2. it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others
3. it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform
4. it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available.

But BuddySpace is about more than just ‘messaging’.

How to Videoblog with Blogger

Together with Svein Høier I´ve written a tutorial which explains in detail how you can use Blogger as a tool for easy videoblogging. Topics covered are:

• Editing the template
  • 1. Unique poster frames, playing video within the webbrowser
  • 2. General poster frames, playing video in the Quicktime player
• Workflow
• How to compress the video with QT Pro
• General tips about compression
• How to make a general poster frame with QT Pro
• How to make a unique poster movie with QT Pro
• How to upload the files and create a posting in the videoblog
• How to use some PHP and Javascript to launch a dynamic popup window

Happy videoblogging!

Lawrence Lessig about Free Culture

You should of course read the book ”Free Culture” or one of its remixes, but this lecture by Lawrence Lessig, given at the founding of freeculture.org, is a excellent introduction:

Firefox campaign

According to this article “… the browser wars will officially begin again”. The Mozilla Foundation arrange an online collection to buy a full page ad in the New York Times in order to tell the world about an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Maybe advertising is the way to go. I´ve been quite surprised at several occasions learning that friends of mine, even some working with computers almost all the time, were not aware of Firefox at all. Spread the word, or even better: Make sure your friends do the installation.

Audiotext

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it, and Kevin Marks combined the two into a QuickTime movie. Kevin notes that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords.

The Future Media Economy

Interesting article in Wired:

”Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.”

The Evolution of Social Software

After having a look at Christopher Allen´s ”Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” I continued reading his blog finding a couple of interesting posts: The first one is about wikis, the other one concerns the work of architect Christopher Alexander and the concept of Intimacy Gradient. I had the pleasure of reading Alexander´s ”The Origins of Pattern Theory, the Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World” the other day and Allen´s post contains several links for further reference.
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Public Displays of Connections

”Why do people display their social connections in everyday life, and why do they do so in these networking sites? What do people learn about another’s identity through the signal of network display? How does this display facilitate connections, and how does it change the costs and benefits of making and brokering such connections compared to traditional means?”
This paper - ”Public Displays of Connections” - by Judith Donath and danah boyd includes several design recommendations for future networking sites.

Jules Verne Short Story “The Camera-Phone”

Literary scholars announced that they have found a (NB! nonexistent) Jules Verne Short Story called ‘The Camera-Phone’, a 33-page handwritten manuscript believed to have been written in 1874 by the man often considered to be the originator of modern science fiction.

Looping

The three latest posts in the videoblog are made of loops. Two running forward-backwards (like this), the last one running forward endlessly. In a funny way I find them quite relaxing and started to wonder how loops relates to cinematoraphy.

The loop is in an interesting feature made possible by digital video. Well, come to think of it I actually have something called “Instant Movie Projector” in the bookshelf behind me, a device made for Super-8. Unfortunatelly I havn´t got the cassettes which is needed to play a short film with it. Perhaps I´m wrong about this, but I believe the point was that the Instant Movie Projector was able to play films in loops (?) What´s certain is that they were widely used in norwegian schools, like 30-35 years ago.

Anyway, digital video makes looping much easier, but as Lev Manovich writes ”all nineteenth century pre-cinematic visual devices also relied on loops. Throughout the nineteenth century, these loops kept getting longer and longer - eventually turning into a feature narrative…”. He continues reffering to todays artists who sample short segments of music, feature films and TV shows, arranging them as loops, and presenting the results as “video installations.”

I remember writing in an email that I was hoping to post short videos as regularly as I post photographs. Manovich also cover the realtionship between photograps and loops: ”The loop replaces the still photograph as the new index of the real: since everybody knows that a still photography can be digitally manipulated, a short moving sequence arranged in a loop becomes a better way to represent reality - for the time being”.
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Laptrap

Have to get one of these as soon as they become avialable over here.

Testing

I´m slow when it comes to making changes concerning the technical part of my blogs. This is perhaps the first step migrating the videoblog into Wordpress.

Google Print

”Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results.” This sounds pretty much like Amazon´s A9, but Google´s offer to publishers goes some steps further: ”We’ll scan them and add them to our index. Clicking on one of your titles in the Google search results will lead users to the page from the book on which the search terms appear, as well as publisher info and links leading to online booksellers.”

Slide Show System

I´ve been using Opera for presentations for three semesters, partly because I want to give the students a concrete example which show the advantages of CSS, but most of all because I write most of my texts in HTML anyway (using NVU).
It seems like S⁵: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System will provide similar capabilities for other browsers, like Firefox, being compatible with Opera Show Format 1.0. Nice!

Have a look at Eric Meyer´s introduction to S⁵ (via Ynnesdal).

Universal Multimedia Access

For those of you reading norwegian: Check out Svein Høiers paper ”Universal Multimedia Access. Quite a lot of interesting information when it comes to the use of video over IP.

Those who understand next to zero of norwegian, check this one instead. This is a presentation given by Andrew Perkis a few years ago, but most of the problems adressed here are still relevant.

Tivo-killer

Sony’s Vaio ‘Type X’ will be shipped with 1GB DDR and 1TB of storage standard. Whow!! This makes the unit capable of recording of up to seven programs simultaneously. And, perhaps evne more interesting: The Type X comes bundled with Adobe Premiere!! In other words: Sony means business when it comes to individual editing capabilities.