05.10.07
Posted in Social Media, video at 5:00 am by Matthew Reinbold
Finding cool Internet entertainment has always been a fun past time of mine. Not just because of the obvious upside – a great distraction – but what it represented overall: talented people creating stuff and sharing it with others. A quick search for TV in the mutednoise archives shows its a topic I keep coming back to.
As a current favorite of the moment, Galacticast, states there are a lot of great reasons for Internet TV (while mentioning several of the better shows):
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04.19.07
Posted in Social Media, crowd sourcing, social networks at 9:52 am by Matthew Reinbold
I don’t want to belabor the tragedy of what happened at Virgina Tech; it was obviously a very damaged individual who methodically planned the worst shooting rampage in American history. It will be some time before the family, friends, and community surrounding Virginia Tech will be able to find closure from the senseless violence.
A by-product of those events, however, is the emergence of technology in the telling of this story. On one hand, as Liz Gannes reports, places like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal are essential tools for the students to getting word out to loved ones – “I’m ok” seemed to be a reoccurring statement. I found very interesting that despite the public nature of these forums those looking for a story – or profiteering from the grief – were quickly put in their place:
In many cases this happened through groups that are publicly accessible, in part so people who don’t attend Virginia Tech could see them. And on these same message boards on the highly organized and easily searchable site, reporters arrived looking for sources, and were derided — appropriately, in many cases — as vultures looking for a soft spot of a carcass.
Despite the fact that students were expressing themselves to the world, they didn’t want someone else to come in and retool those expressions for another venue. Despite the utter lack of privacy of the public forum of user-generated content, mourners expected to be left in peace. And the standard brusque “no comment” was expressed in a public forum, accessible to all.
More chilling is the multi-media CD (DVD?) of materials that the shooter sent to NBC. In the month preceding the event he had put together an elaborate video and text package. Rather than unanswered questions or the mute ramblings of a note goodbye the victim’s families are left with a leering, vocal testament to the madness that took them.
The package is said to have contained a DVD or CD which held a PDF document with embedded QuickTime videos, digital photos, and 1800 words of run-on psycho text. The contents of the disc are said to have amounted to a total of 27 video clips and 43 still photos, each of which was separately captioned.
NBC has had to walk a fine line. On one hand the killer didn’t send the material to the FBI or a spurned lover – he sent it to a major news outlet for the express purpose of having it exposed. Playing clips only seems to be granting him his final wishes and torturing those left behind. On the other hand, there are comments like Dave Winer’s:
NBC has a dozen Quicktime videos of the Virginia Tech killer. They’re sifting through them and deciding what to release and what not to release. This is wrong. It’s 2007, and it’s a decentralized world. We should all get a chance to see what’s on those videos. Given enough time the focus will go on their process, much better to just let it all out now, with no editorial judgement.
So what is appropriate here? If we have the technology to effortlessly distribute is it always appropriate to do so? Are there some boundaries that should be observed? Or is that naive in this day and age?
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01.31.07
Posted in Social Media, tools at 2:24 am by Matthew Reinbold
Yes, the title is sensationalistic. But when the product is as sensational as ZoHo’s notebook (to be released for public consumption in March) it could very well be true. From Social Media Today:
In a nutshell, Zoho Notebook is a place where you can aggregate any kind of content, share it with your colleagues and friends, and publish it onto the Web. You can create as many books as you want, and add any number of pages to any book. On a page, you can add some text, images, audio or video recordings, HTML code, links to external resources, RSS feeds, files, spreadsheets, documents developed with Zoho Writer, tasks, planners, contacts, calendars, anything&
But what makes Zoho Notebook truly remarkable is the ability to get access control and versioning at the object level, rather than just at the page or book level. What this means is that when you add an object to a page—say a piece of text, you can share it with whoever you want, either with read/write access or read only, while not sharing any other object on the page. And when modifications are made to this piece of text, a new version is created, independently of any modification that could have been made to the rest of the page. To be fair, this feature can also be found with some sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS), but never has it been implemented with such an easy to user interface, which also happens to be totally free to use.
Having worked for a document control company for several years I understand just how important those versioning features are in a corporate environment; now that I have a Subversion server set up at home much of my writing gets tossed straight over. But combining all major office tasks with hosted backup, universal access, and automatic versioning is hot. Google can’t be far behind (although Google only supports spreadsheets and written documents – ZoHo has a few extra apps like ZoHo show, a Powerpoint replacement).
This will significantly affect MS Office sales in 2008. I also think its about time to uninstall Open Office.
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01.12.07
Posted in Social Media at 2:01 pm by Matthew Reinbold
I don’t know if I can think of something more appropriate: The Pirate Party is trying to Buy Sealand. Sealand, you may remember, is a quirky little WWII relic/platform in the ocean that was declared a sovereign nation. During the first bubble the owners tried to make the isolated station a data center or any and all. That plan didn’t work and now they’re looking for new ownership.
Enter the Pirate Party, a group that has transcended their P2P roots and has become an entire political movement throughout Europe. They’re trying to purchase Sealand (or some other island) and are offering ‘citizenship’ to those who help.
More information is available on BuySealand.com. Also worth noting is apparently one can get their own island for as little as $50,000.
Abso-frequin’ incredible. The enjoyable third of Stephenson’s ‘Cryptomonicon’ (sp? too lazy to look that up right now) talks about a group and their efforts to set up rouge data centers. It’ll be incredible to watch what happens if the Pirate Party does indeed buys an Island (sealand or not). Is this the activism of convenience for our generation?
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12.18.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:28 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Well, maybe not you specifically. Time Magazine recently announced its annual equivalent of a PBS popularity contest, the ‘Person of the Year’. Instead of sucking it up and picking a controversial choice in a year of so-so they nominated everyone who has something to do with user generated content:
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
I will admit, social media is a big deal – I wouldn’t be writing on this site if I didn’t. However, the article reads like three day old pizza; it just doesn’t taste right. It’s typical of mainstream media coming late to the party and trying to catch up: they oversimplify and over expound.
Grandiose statements like ‘cosmic compendium of knowledge’ may sell magazines but overstate the truth; social media must be taken in context. The future is a blend of old and new ways of self-expression. Anyone who says otherwise is only seeing half the picture. The revolution was years ago – now we’re in the throws of reconciliation.
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12.11.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:01 am by
Despite being dated more than a year ago a thoughtful piece on why remix culture is happening now just caught my eye. The verbose piece by Lev Manovich covers much ground that we already know: culture is powered by the borrowing and reassembling of bits that have come before. As Lev states:
We can find precedents for this “remixability” — for instance in modern electronic music where remix has become the key method since the 1980s. More generally, most human cultures developed by borrowing and reworking forms and styles from other cultures; the resulting “remixes” were to be incorporated into other cultures. Ancient Rome remixed Ancient Greece; Renaissance remixed antiquity; nineteenth century European architecture remixed many historical periods including the Renaissance; and today graphic and fashion designers remix together numerous historical and local cultural forms, from Japanese Manga to traditional Indian clothing.
Here is the twist, however. Despite always having a knack for this remix form we haven’t seen the explosion of relevance until now because we have never had the ability to trade with such ease:
Since the introduction of first Kodak camera, “users” had tools to create massive amounts of vernacular media. Later they were given amateur film cameras, tape recorders, video recorders…But the fact that people had access to “tools of media production” for as long as the professional media creators until recently did not seem to play a big role: the amateur and professional media pools did not mix. Professional
photographs traveled between photographer’s darkroom and newspaper editor; private pictures of a wedding traveled between members of the family. But the emergence of multiple and interlinked paths which encourage media objects to easily travel between web sites, recording and display devices, hard drives, and people changes things. Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of digital networked media universe. In a nutshell, what maybe more important than the introduction of a video iPod, a consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another exiting new device or service is how easy it is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services – which now all become just temporary stations in media’s Brownian motion.
I think this speaks incredibly powerful for anyone launching a product or service at this point in time. Trying to create a closed environment is a path in frustration. Applications need to use open and common formats (Blinksale vs. Quicken), hardware must allow the user freedom (SanDisk Sansa vs Microsoft Zune), and companies need to figure out how to compete in a transparent world (? vs ?).
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12.08.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:13 am by
Just in time for the holidays comes a brand new mashup collection of the season’s pilfered best! Santastic II is a Christmas song collection of the year’s best mashup artists. Because of copyright law and major label frowning on non-royalty-paying creative expression get yours before the tracks disappear in a flurry of cease-and-desist.
Enjoy and have a great weekend everybody!
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12.06.06
Posted in Social Media at 12:59 am by
The mind reels at the number of still photos that were needed to put this together. However, given a little imagination and a recent computer, almost anyone could do something like this:
Tony vs. Paul
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12.05.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:07 am by
Just in time for the holidays, that perfect gift for the tinkerer in your circle: the Open Source Gift Guide, from the fine people at Make magazine. From the description:
There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy – but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.
The projects include Make magazine’s own Open Source MP3 player kit. It’s novel features include a host of accessibility options; even parallel and serial ports! Why buy a consumer good that is meant to be disposed of in 3 years when you can buy something to learn with?
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