Wired News: CyberQuest Disavows Porn Blogs: “A series of blogs used in a cross-linking strategy to boost the Google page ranking of three porn sites run by adult site operator CyberQuest was the unauthorized creation of an affiliate, the company said Wednesday.”
(Via Gizmodo)
This was a surprise for me: “I am so excited about the idea of videoblogs being utilized by a deaf community. As a child I had several deaf or hearing impaired friends …sign language is visual (it is extremely expressive and can be poetic like dance) and there’s meaning conveyed in the physicality of this language - just like a verbal one- that cannot be conveyed in text.”
Follow up: it turns out some deaf people, even though they can see and read, find written language somewhat hard because they lack auditor memory. So for deaf people videoblogging, if easy enough, could be huge.
As you might know, there’s a genocide going on in Sudan. If you’re rich by international standards (hint: if you live in the US you probably are), here you can donate some $$ that might make some difference. 20$. Go on.
When Mica goes to work or visits friends in Manhattan, she takes a small digital videocamera, and shoots video of anything that captures her attention. At night, she makes little movies and puts them on her Typepad blog. Mica is a videoblogger.
Videoblogging isn’t made easy for Mica though. After lots of practice it still takes her a while to post an entry. Most videobloggers use 3 or 4 different programs to create a post. There are bandwidth concerns, and discussions about people linking to video. Because it’s complex, not many people post regular videoblog entries. Videoblogging prety much stands where the web was in 1996, despite the fact that the basic technical capabilities have been available for years.
When a lot of different elements interlock in complex way to form a system, a useful way of untangling the complexities of the system is to think of it as an ecology. In an ecology, elements depend on each other. The ecology of videoblogging is a complex one, and there are many, interlocked reasons why videoblogging hasn’t taken off in a big way yet. Bandwidth limits videoblogging as much or more as the lack of simple tools does. The lack of an audience is a problem, as is the lack of examples and easy viewing tools.
Bandwidth, authoring tools, audience, viewing tools, specialized hosting services, language and the lack of standards are all parts of the videoblogging ecology. The challenge is to stimulate the development of the crucial parts of the ecology, after which the other parts will fall in place. This is called a tipping point - videoblogging will not become popular slowly, it will become popular suddenly. As a comparison, on Plasticbag.org there was a good writeup recently of the audioblogging ecology. The videoblogging ecology is still in an even earlier stage. But things are happening.
Linking is a crucial part of videoblogging. Videos suck up attention (although less so than audio - the images seem to make it easier to watch while thinking about something else, bringing back your attention when needed). It’s hard to skip parts you’re not interested in. It’s hard to scan (although fast forward kinda works). Its hard to discuss a specific part of a video if you can’t link.
The technology of linking into video has been around for years, but was always neglected. For a while now, Jon Udell, realizing the importance of linking to stimulate conversations, has been reverse-engineering linking into video and audio. He’s had some success: now, if you’re listening to audio at the Gilmore Gang, there is a little tool that makes it easy to link to a certain point within the audio, so you can comment on it. Example: "Jon continues to explain the need for random-access players and supporting URLs [clip] and standards and why he thinks players will ultimately become authoring tools." Even better: you don’t need a streaming server to provide this functionality: a simple HTTP server can do this. Linking to a point within a video stream is a bit more complex (with the different formats and all), but it can be done. Here’s a technical writeup, and here’s an experimental web-based tool that lets you link to a point within a Realplayer video.
Bandwidth is a major challenge. Videofiles are large, so bandwidth can become a problem. Getting hit with bandwidth charges (most hosts charge about US$1 per additional Gig) is no fun. Video on the web will never scale the way television scales: with TV, it doesn’t matter how big the audience is. That’s a constraint, but constraints are not necessarily bad. We just have to stop thinking of videoblogging as a copy of what movies or television is doing. We can’t copy them, and we shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, we still need to be able to control bandwidth. It shouldn’t be too hard, but just as linking within a media stream, no easy open source product seems to exist. I’ve been thinking about using Apache logs to log bandwidth usage, and then using PHP (or your favourite language) to dynamically serve a different size videofiles (using SMIL) depending on how much bandwidth is left. Ideas are welcome. Maybe Apache’s mod_throttle is another part of the solution?
Once we get the bandwidht managing problem under control, pretty much any old host can be used. We don’t really need streaming servers and all that.
Peer to peer is another partial solution for the bandwidth problem. It lets you share large files without eating up your server bandwidth. BitTorrent is a P2P system that lets you distribute small files that, when a user clicks on a link, download movies from other people - not from your server. So you don’t get charged for bandwidth. BitTorrent is still a geeks game though. Luckily a new project called BattleTorrent is trying to change that.
RSS enclosures are a part of RSS that lets you embed bittorrent files in your newsfeed. This means that someone can subscribe to your newsfeed and, if they want, automatically start downloading video overnight so it’s ready for them in the morning. Adam Curry has been experimenting with this a lot. Personal TV channels, a term coined by David Winer.
Video formats and players are a confusing mess as well (Real, Quicktime and Windows Media, and the open source folks), but the reality is: we can all see most of the stuff out there, if we have broadband. For me, this is less of an issue, and certainly not an element of the ecology that can be easily fixed.
The first person I ever heard actually utter the words "participatory journalism" was Drazen Pantic ("Politics happens on the couch"). I actually have it on video. I met Drazen Pantic for the first time in a gallery in Soho while talking about videoblogging. The dream is this: if people all over the world have a media outlet, they can share a lot of political information. Drazen is working on a project to do just that, called Open4all.info. The possibilities of videoblogging to make a social and political difference are there. Stuart Hughes is a BBC journalist, and his videoblog gives a whole new perspective to the news. Steve Garfield videoblogged the DNC convention. Talk to US invites people from all over the world to send in 30 second video messages to talk to the people in the US. Remember the revolution will not be televised? It might be videoblogged. If you like books, check out Joe Trippi ’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Be the media!
The co-construction of users and technology.
Here’s the point I’m trying to make with this article. When Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, he didn’t just solve the problem of getting a steam engine to propel his boat. The technical pieces of the puzzle had been around for a while. He also solved a legal problem by negotiating with the New York state legislature as to what speed was required for his steamboat. He knew that his low-pressure boat would have limited speed, so he convinced the legislature to modify the terms under which he would be awarded a monopoly for transportation on the Hudson River. (p. 176 Shaping Technology, Building Society.)
The videoblogging challenge is both technical and social. Not separately technical and social, the two are intimately connected. You cannot develop the technology without developing the community.
Here’s what’s important: the dream of IP video and audio empowering users doesn’t have to happen. It’s not a technologically necessecary outcome. That’s the mistake many of us geeks make - believing that technology drives history. Every little experiment we do is a small step on the co-creation of users and technology, and the values we put in those experiments will continue to reverberate for years. Empowering people. Simple technology. No high production values. Back and forth community video. Moments and conversations. Getting to know each other.
When Joho the Blog blogged a video reply to Charles Cooper’s article at CNET, as an experiment, not everyone agreed on the effectiveness of that approach. Clearly, we’re still figuring out the language of videoblogging. This is a time of experimenting, of pioneers. Here they are: Mica Scalin (posts a LOT), Steve Garfield (quickly becoming the poster boy for videoblogging), Steve’s mom, The Dane, Charlene, Jay Dedman (pushing videoblogging into the mainstream - here’s a long videointerview with him), Shannon, Adrian Miles (MIT experiments), Tim Hall, Eric Rice, Peter Van Dijck, Chris (the human dog), Juston Johnson (started and runs vidblogs.com, a collection of videoblogs ), Stuart Hughes (a BBC journalist and videoblogger), Olsen (proving the very real connection between videoblogging and karaoke), Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen (giving an academic perspective), Daily Experience (trying to be a daily videoblog), video-link (a Japanese videoblog), disinfotainment (streaming videoblog by Charles Eicher with commentary on Japanese and US media), videoblog.tv. Then there are collective video blogs: Tropism (an arty collective in the Nederlanths), vidblogs.com. I am forgetting some here… You also may want to check out unmediated.org, an excellent collective blog tracking the tools that decentralize the media, http://demandmedia.net, found video from all over the web, Videoblogging.info, a new site that wants to aggregate videoblogs. I probably forgot a few. Videoblogging is getting lots of attention in the press as well. If you’d rather read a (free) book: Dan Gillmor ’s We the Media is a good start, or buy Joe Trippi ’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Finally, How users matter is a great (social science) book relevant to the title of this article - the co-construction of users and technology. A must read.
(And then I haven’t even mentioned moblogging video with cellphones.)
I’m listening to some audio, and suddenly I get Jon’s obsession with quoting segments. A conference generates, say, 100 hours of audio. If you can’t navigate that easily, can’t link to pieces of it, it’s not as useful and it won’t support conversations as much.
I am playing around with a way to dynamically serve higher optimized (ie. smaller) video files if I get close to my bandwidth limit, so that I won’t get hit with extra bandwidth charges. All this to make videoblogging more feasible.
Now, I can generate SMIL from PHP - SMIL is just an XML text file. The SMIL points to the movie file. I can save SMIL as a .mov file, which just gets picked up by Quicktime as a normal .mov file. So that lets me (PHP) decide which movie file to show (of, say, 3 versions I have stored, from small to large), IF PHP knows how much bandwidth the files have been using.
In come Apache server logs. With code like this in my httpd.conf file:
LogFormat "%U %B" video
CustomLog logs/videosize video
I can generate a logfile like this, which can then be parsed (by PHP or something else) for size of served movie files:
/video/davewinerwiener.mov 0
/video/davewinerwiener.mov 444802
The first line is when I access a movie file in the browser that’s locally cached. The second line shows the size of the movie file served. Bingo.
Still, the logfile would grow very large very quickly. It would be nice to ONLY show .mov files, or only show files from a certain directory, instead of all the files accessed on our server. Scales better. I couldn’t find a way of doing that though. There doesn’t seem to be an appropriate setting in Apache’s mod_log_config, although you can do conditionals with it, so there’s some hope. Any ideas would be very welcome!
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Forget the bloggers, it’s the vloggers showing the way on the internet: “He slipped into the now ubiquitous - even, he says, in Peruvian one-horse towns - internet cafe, got out his digital video camera and began uploading the tales of his travels on to his website back in the Netherlands. Then, each week, the rest of the world was free to watch his travel diary.”
For some reason, videoblogging seems to speak to the imagination of the journos. Good stories, somehow. Or maybe it’s just summer. Cool anyway.
Prime Time Hpermedia, te first new column for OReilly by John Udell. A must read for videobloggers.
If you go travel for any serious amount of time, and take a lot of digital pictures, you need to figure out a way to store all that goodness. Uploading to a site is not a practical option (too much data, and you don’t want to spend your days sitting in an internet cafe waiting for the upload to finish). You basically have 3 options: a portable harddrive, a portable CD burner, or buying lots of memory cards.
When I went for two weeks to Colombia, I took my 256M memory card, and that was fine. I put the settings to make medium size pictures, and didn’t make too many movies. This time I’m planning on spending 6 weeks in India, so I need another solution. I want to feel as if I can take as many pictures and movies a day as I like. Memory cards do drop in price - a 256M SD card is now less than US$50 - but the approach doesn’t scale if you plan to travel a lot.
This Thorntree thread discusses most options. DPReview.com has a list of options.
Portable CD recorders.
Many of these double as DVD players and such, but I’m not interested in those features. The biggest problem seems to be availability in the US.
The Nixvue Vizor (straight out of Startrek) looks, um, interesting, but doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere.
(Yes, they’re bulky, these portable CD burners. But less bulky than, say, a guidebook.)
The EZDigiMagic is for sale for US$300 but out of stock, oh wait, seems to be available for US$259. Gets good reviews (scroll down). Seems like a decent option.
The most recommended portable CD writer seems to be the JOBO CP 200 Apacer Disc Steno, currentl at US$250. Here’s a good, real life traveling review. The writer recommends having 2 storage options while travelling (not a bad idea but expensive) - he carried a CD burner AND a portable harddrive.
The Carry Fotobar stands out because it burns to DVD as well as to CD, but again, seems hard to find in the US. Here: “It can be found at 3C outlets, where the device is sold in the US$249 to US$269 range.” Carry’s site.
Harddrives.
Harddrives are less of a contender for me because the harddrives they use are pretty much laptop harddrives and these often give problems. A CD with pictures won’t lock up on you as a harddrive might, loosing you everything (it might break but you can just send a copy home). So I haven’t listed many options here.
The coolest option, if you have one of the newer iPods, is the Belkin iPod Media Reader. It’s about US$80, and lets you save data from your media cards on your iPod. Funky, but be careful traveling with iPods. They’re very stealable. Also, reviews seem to indicate the transfers are so slow that your iPods battery might run out before you’ve transferred all your pictures.
The FlashTrack is US$700 for 80 Gigs, US$400 for 20 Gigs seems one of the typical dodgy options. You need to buy an adaptor if you want to use anything else than Flash memory cards.
The big boys seem to be entering the playing field as well. Nikon has the Nikon Coolwalker is a bit expensive at US$500. Sorry for the large picture.
Not yet available.
There are also some promising options that aren’t yet available.
Sony has a promising 40Gigs portable harddrive (supposed to be available in Japan now) and a portable CD writer, the Sony MCS1 PhotoVault Mini CD-R Station at US$199 at Amazon (not yet available) - it burns photos to mini CD-R (which only hold 200M) instead of the standard writable CD’s.
Finally, the Delkin USB Bridge, at US$70, means you don’t need a computer to get data out of your camera, but you still need storage, like a normal (not standalone) CD writer (they’re cheap these days at US$75 or less). Some experimentation required, but may well be a great option.
What’s your experience? Real life stories very welcome!
I’ve been using Knowspam.net for about 4 months now, and I like it muchly. I moved to Mozilla Thunderbird for my email today, and was having a problem sending email through Knowspam. A question, a speedy and correct reply (even though the problem was unusual) that fixed it. Excellent. Well worth the small yearly charge. And: I get almost no spam these days.
The system challenges people to prove they’re humans before it lets email pass through to you. Most people never have to do that though (people already in your contacts, or people YOU send email to don’t have to), and the others only have to do it once. Sure, one or two emails will get lost now and then, but very few. And it has stopped the thousands of spam messages I was receiving a day. Highly recommended.
I’m skimming through the free, online version of We the Media. Not bad. One thing bothers me though: the book repeatedly states that technology is the driving force behind change. I think Dan Gilmor (like many techies) underestimates the social factor in the construction of technology.
Technology doesn’t evolve by itself. Blogs didn’t happen because they were a logical technology that was bound to happen. They happened in an interwined dance between users and technology, in which both shaped each other. Yes, I’ve been reading social science books again…
Russell Beattie Notebook - LifeBlogger!: “how I had just downloaded the Lifeblog beta from Nokia’s site and how it seemed incredibly hackable. The images are all stored in your My Documents\NokiaLifeblog folder, the text messages are stored as plain text and the repository for all the meta data was labeled “NokiaLifeblogDatabase.db” which when opened in a text editor says quite helpfully “This file contains an SQLite 2.1 database.”
Via Smart Mobs: “Jake Barton’s City of Memory uses a map structure to locate stories about life in New York City.”
Here’s a question in the ongoing quest of starting my own company. I’m a pretty bad sysadmin, so I’d like to work together with someone good for some projects I have planned.
Have you worked together with a sysadmin on an irregular basis? I don’t imagine paying someone every week - my ideas won’t bring in enough $ for that. Apart from becoming one myself, what are my options? I just need someone to set up a server (nothing too complex, I could do it myself but it would take me two weeks where it would take a pro a few hours, plus I want it done properly.), and to check it now and then (hopefully rarely).
Is hoping for a working arrangement for a situation like this naive? Have others done it? Should I learn ALL skills needed to run the web based services I am working on? Any tips or experiences welcome!
Battle Torrent is a combination of PHP and a script that can be installed that tries to make it really easy to upload and download BitTorrent files. Cool work.
One of the nice things about life without a job (where you work on your own projects or consulting), is that you can take your time to learn. When I worked for companies, things always had to be done now, and I didn’t feel I could spend a day doing research on something.
Now, I’ll spend a day or two on research - it’s an investment. It’s also lots of fun.
Here’s a question: is it possible, given a bunch of videofiles on your server, to keep track of bandwidth usage with PHP (+ Apache, Linux)? Maybe something like mod_throttle/3.1.2 can help?
I am thinking through different ways of dynamically generating different SMIL files (with PHP) based on how much bandwidth you’ve used already. The idea is that I can have movie files of different sizes on my server, and if they suddenly become popular, dynamically start serving smaller (more optimized) files, or even just some (SMIL) text saying “sorry, I’m out of bandwidth for movies this month, try again next month”.
Ideas for approaches, code, examples or pointers, it’s all appreciated. I’m just a beginner here, mucking around with techie stuff I should really leave well alone, trying to make videoblogging easier. Making sure you don’t get hit with bandwidth costs is a big part of that.
Joho the Blog blogged a video reply to Charles Cooper’s article at CNET, as an experiment.
After I finally found the time to fix my Wordpress login problem (How I solve login problems after installation with version 1.2 ?) (being on a broadband connection at my brothers’ place helped), I’m posting again. Lotsa videoblogging going on, Jay’s site is a good place to check for regular links.
My Mom’s Blog by Thoroughly Modern Millie: brilliant videoblog entry about usability of a coffeebox lid. Check it.