phil's blog

Democracy player is an open sourcei cross platformi video player.  It's produced by an organisation called Participatory Culture Foundation of which they say "We are the organization that makes the Democracy Internet TV platform. Democracy is a free and open way to watch, share, and broadcast video on the internet.'

The organisation's director has written an interesting essay about the future of video on the Internet and the important part certain technology decisions can play in preventing the monopolisation of Internet video by one or two very large companies.  The essay was originally aimed at Mike Hudack, of blip.tv, itself a video hosting site which is trying to bring a different angle to the whole area.  Mike Hudack published a reply on his blog, which is worth reading, however one simple comment he made really struck me,

For those with aren't bothered about the certificate but would like to get their hands on a large range of online learning materials:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.html

Some respected names in there, e.g.:
MIT
Open University

An interesting experiment from the OU encouraging people to remix and reshare materials.

http://www.steakzombies.com/fruitmachine/
'Fashion research - rare and well done' apparently.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/balamory/plum/misfits/misfits.shtml

Who said the BBC wasn't cutting edge?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/02/microsoft_marketing/

The Economist's CIO Andrew Rashbass had good fun at Microsoft's marketing bash in Las Vegas cooling some of the hype somewhat.

Digg, one of the poster children of Web 2.0 brigade, has found itself embroiled in the ongoing debate about digitali rights management (DRM).  When the organisation which enforces digital controls on high definition DVDs started issuing legal threats to websites displaying an encryption key that can be used for circumventing the controls, many sites, including Digg, removed the offending links.  Digg users, however resented what was seen as censorship and repeatedly reposted the links until Digg's servers were nearly overwhelmed.  Digg's management have now decided to bow to useri pressure and stop deleting the links.  A couple of different takes on the story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/13/second_life_airline/

Now, wait for it, you can take a virtuali flight on a virtual airline within a virtual world where the virtual people already have the power of (virtual) flight.

Is this inanity as an art form?

The main point is a (relatively) technical article on the up and coming metadata standard for images, XMP, and projects to support it in FOSS software:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/23/1926259

However, before your eyes glaze over I should point out that most of the article is actually a useful introductory discussion on the problems of managing large collections of images:

'In media management applications, the importance of good metadata handling outweighs good data handling, because the metadata are how we locate and track the data files with which we work. The audio player marketplace learned that lesson years ago, which is why you would be hard-pressed to find an audio player today that doesn't understand ID3 tags and let users interface with files through them. Users decide which track to listen to based on metadata: artist, song, album, genre, and so on. Imagine how painful it would be if the only way to browse through your music collection were by file name alone -- or, worse yet, by listening to a five-second clip from every track, with no access to the meta-information directly. How easily could you find what you wanted?'

and

'For one thing, tags work only when they are used in bulk, and work best when they harness the collective intelligence of large groups, not individuals. Read Tim Spalding's excellent essay at LibraryThing on why taggingi works for LibraryThing but doesn't work for Amazon.com. In order for tagging your photos to prove useful, you have to tagi every single one of them, on every factor of interest.

Another problem: tags have no context. Does a photo tagged with "mom" and "birthday" mean a photo of your mom on her birthday, or the photo of your birthday that your mom emailed to you? Both meanings are semantically valid, as is every other variation. Without a real context, the meanings of tags flatten out to least-common-denominator of metadata: the amorphous "subject." '

An impressive bit of work by the United States Holocaust Memorial Musem teaming up with Google Earth to shine a bright light on events in Darfur.  Some further comment and overview at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6543185.stm and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/crisis_in_darfur/

It's effective in being able to demonstrate both the scale of the problems, whilst also allowing people to interact with the subject at a personal level through photos, testimony etc.

Mobloggingi, instant sharing of content, free video streaming, protection for the anonymous poster, it's all good stuff for empowering the people, unless the people have something somewhat darker in mind.  Of course we've always got to be on the look out for latest media backlash, just as a we need to try and cut through the latest hype, but a couple of related stories from the BBC serve to remind that the technology can be used as a pretty blunt instrument as well:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6539989.stm

For a while the terms and conditions for voice over IPi (VoIPi) and video conferencingi programs (you did read it when you clicked 'Accept' didn't you?) have been somewhat confusing over precisely what you are allowed to do with them.  For example the end useri agreement for ineen says

'License. Subject to the terms of this EULA, INEEN hereby grants You a limited, personal, non-commercial (at home or at work), non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-assignable, free of charge license to download, install and use the Software and Service on Your computer or PDA, for the sole purpose of internet telephony applications and any other applications that may be explicitly provided by INEEN.' (my emphasis).