(This has now ended)
DivX are giving away free licences for DivX encoder for one day only (A $19.99 value, apparently).
Read MoreSeptember, 2005 Monthly archive
I have just agreed to be a last-minute addition to the panellist at this weekend’s “Copy Fight LDN” talk at the London Resfest 2005 event.
According to the website, Copy Fight is a:
“A lively discussion of copyright laws, creative commons, and the future of remix/mashup culture. Featuring digital innovators, djs, vjs, and legal experts. This hot topic is set to comment on the future of intellectual property laws as well as the current lay of the land. Not to be missed”
Which sounds very interesting – if you are coming, see you there!
Read MoreFood for thought:
“More people know what dogging is than blogging, according to a survey which suggests that Brits are not as tech-savvy as might be expected.
…
Research conducted among taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub landlords – backed up by conventional market research of more than 1,000 adults in the UK – has found that seven out of 10 people don’t know what a blog is. Nine out of 10 don’t know what podcasting or flashmobbing are.”Source: DDB Research
This ties in with some thoughts I’ve been having about whether the much-touted benefits of remixing web 2.0 propositions on the web can ever go mainstream (assuming that some pretty hardcore skills are required to do it).
Where does the “average Joe” fit into all this, and do we risk getting carried away with ourselves, alienating the rest of online society?
Clearly if 7 out of 10 people don’t even know what a blog is, we’ve got a lot of work to do.
Read MoreFrancis Alÿs is a crazy installation Belgian artist who’s latest work, “Seven Walks“, debuts tomorrow.
Alÿs has been walking the capital for 5 years, it is claimed, producing a range of mainly film-based art.
The walks are enacted in different parts of the city – Hyde Park, the City of London, the National Portrait Gallery, the streets close to Regents Park. Involving a diverse range of collaborators from 64 Coldstream Guards to London commuters, Alÿs delves into the everyday rituals and habits of the metropolis. The ensuing films, videos, paintings and drawings are presented together in Alÿs’ first major public presentation in Britain.
In one of his films, Coldstream Guards (dressed in Buckingham Palace Guard-style uniforms) walk around a deserted London, meeting at points where they grow into a longer “snake”. In fact, when filmed from above, it all rather looks like a human version of the popular computer game of the same name.
However, perhaps his most intriguing work is “Nightwatch” in which he releases a fox into the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery’s security cameras are then used to film the little fellow wondering around the many priceless portraits and exhibitions.
Nightwatch is available as a free download online (Windows Media format).
Well, this ties two recent posts nicely together: My spat with Hugh MacLeud about his wine pimping and Google admiting their search engine is manipulatable to googlebombing.
You see, it would appear that 7 of the top 8 Google results for “crappy wine” now point to blog posts and websites that mention [name of Hugh's pimped wine*] via discussions about Hugh and myself’s little disagreement.
* = I’m not going to mention the actual brand as this is all just further marketing, isn’t it?
Read MoreNY Times has an almost-unbelievably detailed article about the future of TV at Yahoo!.
On the content side of things Yahoo! have always been an aggregator of third-party content (buying it in, branding it Yahoo!, etc). However it would appear that they are going to start commissioning bespoke audio-video material for IP delivery. Hmmm, interesting, but not as interesting as these few lines:
One of Yahoo’s secret weapons, Mr. Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service. Mr. Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.
“It will almost be like a television set,” Mr. Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo’s video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Mr. Braun is creating.
“People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do,” he said. “But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those.”
Very interesting – some kind of collaborative filtering system meets Yahoo! search technology?
So, I wonder whether this personalisation and recommendation is just within the relatively small scope of the programming Yahoo! commission, or whether this will also include IPTV programming made available by third-parties (ie back to Yahoo!’s strong aggregation model)? And if so, who those third parties will be?
Read MoreI seem to be getting quite a lot of hits via some postings that have been made about me on the very ammusing “Biased BBC” blog (do check it out, it’s well worth a quick chuckle).
Apparently my harmless comments about George Bush wanting a toilet break have been taken as “views of a leftoid of a lefty institution” and other similar “you’re a left winger” stuff.
Which is really quite silly considering those who know me will know that I’m nothing of the sort.
In fact, can I take the opportunity to ask those of you arriving here off the back of such comments to check out my (quite infamous) post “Spoil your ballot paper” – in which I stated my view that I don’t like any of the political parties in the UK (yes, not even Labour or Lib Dem) and that I wouldn’t be voting for any off them.
And to doubly prove I’m not a “loonie leftie”, I’ve countless times mentioned that I live in Bethnal Green – who’s MP George Galloway of the Respect Coalition is perhaps the most left-wing MP in the House of Commons. Not only did I not vote for him either, but I’ve even lambasted him as a “slimy bastard (in my opinion)”.
So please, cut the “Ben’s a biased lefty” crap cos it’s a load of pretentious bollocks. I’ve stated countless times on my blog that I have no political alignment whatsoever, to the point at which I have never voted in a general election in my life.
Read MoreA really great post from Danah Boyd: Why Web2.0 Matters, Round Two (which actually looks at a lot more than just Web2.0).
“It is not just about the social component, but introduces the legal, market and technological needs.”
Yes, yes, yes! There are too many people (well, companies/startups/websites-looking-to-become-startups) focusing on just one or two of the four pillars. Article goes on…
“We’ve got to move beyond the global village and focus on how people will repurpose it for their needs. This is why i think that issues of remix are essential to this narrative. What hiphop artists and anime remixers are doing is teaching us what it means to consume and produce as a connected process. In tech land, this is the value of OpenAPIs – this is fundamentally about remixing technology. Of course, all the efforts to legitimize this are dangerous. Part of the glory of hacking and remixing is the rebellious feeling of resistance. More importantly, anyone remixing is understandably wary of the institutions who are opening up or creative commons-ing the process. Aside from not wanting to be told what to do, there is fear of being too reliant on the master. This is part of the trick of OpenAPIs and CC licenses – they allow the owners to maintain power through a different incentive system. You are meant to feel like you have access as long as you want, but the one who giveth can taketh away. That, of course, is a longer conversation. But it’s important to remember that the power issues in remix are not solved by OpenAPIs and CC licenses. Of course, i’m all in favor of OpenAPIs because i think that they will push us further into remix culture, much to the chagrin of current hegemonic institutions. We just need to be careful so that we don’t get it all banned.”
Wow, some really thought provoking stuff there about the user-dynamics of remix culture vs OpenAPI’s from major players. Something definitely for me to reflect on.
I’m a hacker and remixer who finds himself in a large organisation that has slowly converted me (via 4.5 years of enterprise programming). Running backstage.bbc.co.uk I’m torn between the culture I love and the requirements of the business.
In fox hunting here in the UK (a horrid “sport” that is thankfully now banned) they say the enjoyment is derived from the “thrill of the chase”. I guess that’s one of the main drivers I’ve always had when I’ve knocked up stuff like the London Underground delay RSS script and the “better” output versions of projects I’ve built officially for the BBC is that I’m taking on the “big guys” via below-radar methods such as screen scraping and even, ahem, unprotected data sources available via HTTP.
The minute you legitimise all this and even write documentation and nicely package it all up, the “thrill of the chase” is perhaps somewhat lost.
Do we try and derive new buzzes or do we remove an element of the legitimisation? I guess it comes down to why people are remixing – and I don’t currently have an answer to that.
Read MoreHave Google admitted more then they meant to in their latest blog post by Marissa Mayer (Director of Consumer Web Products)? -
“If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.
Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.“
(emphasis mine)
Whilst this entire example looks at a trivial “prank” manipulation of their search algorithm, clearly the same technique can be used to manipulate Google to promote commercial and other such websites.
Of course, we all know this already – but my point is Google have never really admitted it in public. Even here, they are desperately trying to reassure us that it doesn’t happen (see emphasis in quote above). But by merely admitting that its possible to distort a “jokey” keyword they are also admitting it is possible to distort any keyword.
Read More