At Gnomedex

I'm at Gnomedex, the annual geek love fest up in Seattle. This was my favorite conference last year, and they're off to a good start on day one. Saturday they'll continue a live stream of the proceedings.

More and more familiar faces at these gatherings. Like: Buzz Bruggeman, Susan Mernit, Dave Winer, Halley Suitt, John Hartman, Eric Rice, Josh Bancroft, Derrick Oien, Doug Kaye, Brian Dear, Arieana Foley, Bre Pettis, Dave McClure, Mitch Ratcliffe, Steve Gillmor, Kathy Gill, Steve Rubel, Scott Rubel, Bob Wyman, Corey Denis, Boris Mann, Dan Farber, Kaliya Hamlin, Scott Mace and plenty of others.

The highlight of day one was former Sen. John Edwards' appearance. (Seattle P-I photo above. I'll post photos on Sunday; it's still too many steps to post my Digital Rebel XT's shots to Flickr.) I was an early supporter of Sen. Edwards' candidacy for president -- and I still think he was the best candidate running in '04. Edwards didn't give a keynote, but fielded questions and led a discussion on mostly tech-related questions, with the occasional political question thrown in.

I had a chance to praise him for his work with the OneAmerica Committee fighting poverty and putting it back on the national agenda. I asked what we in the tech community -- and the 320 smart people in this room -- could do to help spur public awareness and action to fight poverty, and how we could continue the conversation after today. Edwards said he would instruct his staff to open up a channel for that dialogue to take place.

We haven't heard anything so far, so I hope we can follow up. There were a lot of good ideas floating around the room after he left. I also had a chance to shake his hand and give him a copy of "Darknet" to get him up to speed on some of the issues facing society as we all become technology and media creators instead of passive consumers.

I'll be posting video interviews of Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble within the next week.

Other highlights

• Check out bLaugh, a new "blog humor site," featuring occasional caricatures of bloggers. The initial one -- of Steve Rubel (Rubel without a cause) -- is priceless.

Chris and Ponzi's rules for Gnomedex include: "Blog, cast, snap, stream – it’s yours. Feel free to blog, record, remix without permission. No weird licensing schemes. ... Assume your picture will be taken. ... Assume what you say will be blogged."

Good quotes:

• Kathy Gill: "Micromarkets is where it is. The mass market is dead."

• More Kathy Gill: "Geeks shouldn’t name things."

• Michael Arrington: "Jigsaw is one of the most evil venture backed companies on the Internet."

• Michael Arrington on the revamped Netscape: "It’s a frickin’ Digg clone now, it’s pathetic."

• Marc Canter: "It’s not about big or small, it’s about open or closed."

• More Marc Canter, in arguing for open APIs: "If you can suck, you can spit."

Later: Seattle Post-Intelligencer's coverage.

Tags: Gnomedex, Gnomedex 2006, tech

Outcome of the Transmission Global Online Video Forum

Ourmedia was invited to attend the Transmission Global Online Video Gathering on June 7-10 in Rome, but we couldn't make it because it was held the same week as Vloggercon. I organized a Citizens Media Summit in San Francisco in May 2005 attended by 36 people, so I’m a softie for these kind of efforts.

Anna Helme, who works with an Australian online video distribution project currently in development called EngageMedia (a site that looks really interesting), did much of the organizing for Transmission. Anna writes:

The Transmission wiki contains mp3 recordings of some sessions.

Here is a photo essay put together by Jerry from Asia247 on his blog.

Some of the proposals made for working together after Transmission can be found here. Mainly they involve making sure we can share and syndicate content, pooling help and tutorials resources, pooling database info such as screening organisations internationally, developing the Transmission network further and attempting to avoid re-inventing the wheel or doubling up on development work.

My own ideas are available as a PDF attached to the bottom of my blog here. It remains to be seen which of these proposals are taken up and put into practice. I think most of us left feeling quite inspired, and knowing more from being able to get inside each others projects for a few days.

Sounds similar in some ways with what we’re trying to do with the Open Media Coalition, only with a greater social justice/political bent.

Here's Zoe Young’s lengthier report from Transmission:

Transmission is a gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy. A host of initiatives have sprung up across the globe in recent years that seek to mix media activism with increasing access to broadband, new video encoding advances, content management systems, RSS, p2p and free software. These technologies and projects are converging to democratise access to video distribution on a global level, challenge the dominance of top-down broadcast media and give voice to range of critical social and environmental issues.

The aims of the Transmission meeting were to
• increase communication between projects
• build relationships between projects working on different aspects of distribution
• improve knowledge and skills of participants
• assess and compare the current tools and projects in a constructive yet self-critical environment
• investigate possibilities of technical collaboration and consider possibilities of common platforms

More info here

Participation:
Around 30 participants in the event came mainly from Western Europe but also from North America, Malaysia, Argentina, Korea, Hungary, and Australia, the home country of the main organisers Andrew, Anna and Andy of Engagemedia. Their main local contact was Agnese of Candida TV. There was a mix of highly technical code developers, online video project managers, indymedia and other online network types.

For a full list of participating projects see here.

For notes on project summaries presented to the meeting see here.

For documentation of the sessions see the Transmission wiki's main page.

Outcomes:

The real outcomes of the meeting have yet to be discerned, it was more the beginning of a process than a one-off event with immediate products. However, for me the most potent new directions were:

1. Building a go-faster network for online social social justice video projects

The chance for related projects to collaborate and evolve away from ‘reinventing wheels’ by all doing the same ‘online publishing’ task and instead evolve towards putting existing ‘wheels’ together to build a functional set of ‘vehicles’ to move forward more effectively as a community. This involves common projects like sharing software (eg, building on the materials in the new ‘NGO in a Box’ CD release), jointly developing documentation and help files in ‘wikibooks’, including shared development of work processes for translation and subtitling, and developing missing technical tools (eg, to enable automatic distributed online transcoding of uploaded video into different formats, and to enable different content management systems to ‘talk’ to each other using ‘APIs’, currently in development by a group of Transmission programmers.)

“NGO-in-a-box offers Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGOs” http://ngoinabox.org/
wikibooks pages on internet video http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Internet_Video,
wikibooks pages on subtitling http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Subtitles

2. Learning to ask the right questions …

3. Agreeing on terms, establishing context and standardising identification for automated media exchange networks to take shape.

A ‘common metadata standard’ could enable more effective media information sharing and aggregation (a). This ideal aims at attaching data fields to online video that contain not only the usual ‘title’, ‘producer’, ‘length’ ‘language’, ‘description’, ‘tags’, ‘license’ etc, but also ‘appropriate use’ (b) and a ‘unique identification code’ for each new piece of media published by participating organisations (c).

a. ‘common metadata standard’
through collaboration between projects represented at Transmission, a group of evolving, regional and/or issue-based online media projects could in theory negotiate and agree on a minimum set of information that any piece of online media should carry with it. This information would allow that piece of media to be searched, categorised and channeled through RSS feeds etc to wherever it wants to be seen/heard. Part of this process would involve negotiating a (non-binding) ‘cloud’ of common subject ‘tags’ to define uploaded media content, tags which would then form the basis for generating issue-based media feeds within and between online video projects and portals.

For example, say FOEI produced a video covering local perspectives and human rights abuse at a protest against the environmental impacts of a World Bank-funded dam project in Uganda. This video could be uploaded using exequo.org, participatoryculture.org’s ‘broadcast machine’ or similar online publishing service, accompanied by a complete set of metadata including subject tags such as ‘human rights’, ‘dam’, ‘World Bank’ ‘Uganda’ etc. Details of such a video and the chance to download it could then, in theory and where appropriate, be channeled via media RSS feed to Witness.org’s new hub for online human rights video, ifiwatch.tv’s portal to video critical of the IFIs, Pampazuka news’ vodcasts on African real world politics, FOEI’s ‘community testimonies’ portal, and anywhere else that chose to feature a feed of information on videos in their issue areas. If however such a video dealt with a similar situation only located in Laos rather than Uganda, info would not automatically flow to Pambazuka news, but instead to Asia247, which features feeds of video reports from the Asian region. And if there were no human rights abuses at the demo, and so the ‘human rights’ box was not ticked in the upload form, Witness.org would not automatically be channeled the media RSS feed, or if the World Bank or other IFI was not backing the project, and the ‘ifi’ field was left blank, ifiwatch.tv would be out of the loop.

For this to happen, all the involved projects would need to be using CMSs [content management systems] that recognised the tags listed above, as well as any others that relate to their work. Their use of these tags would not have to be at all exclusive, each organisation would be free to adopt or abandon any tags they chose, but to channel and receive video automatically they would have to be using a more or less commensurable ‘cloud’ of basic common tags with others in this network. I wonder if other networks are already thinking about doing this? perhaps oneworld tv? I would like to take this idea forward with anyone interested among the networks I’m sending this report to, obviously with help (not least from radical librarians?) if possible!

b. ‘appropriate use’
Some video is not suitable for every audience. It may be material that should only be made available in a targetted way for use as evidence in court cases, or to present to parliamentarians in a quest for accountability. Perhaps it is footage of rape or violence, which could be misused for pornographic purposes or to foment ethnic or other strife. Even peaceful protest footage can be inappropriate to screen if presented out of context. Other material is designed to introduce people new to issues, while more expects a basic understanding of a field. some material could be cynically entertaining about serious issues and therefore alienating to (say) religious audiences, and/or most suitable for educational use. Some reports are roughly cut latest news, not designed to be ‘evergreen’ for long term use, but possible to be recut at a later date into a fuller video or film.

In this context, participants in Transmission decided to create a field in a common metadata standard referring to the appropriate use of the material. This could be an ethical restriction on distribution, or simply advice on how it might best be presented. This advice would be displayed in the first frame of any encoded video that is published online. At the same time, the meeting decided to encourage a culture in emerging web video communities of responsible editing for the web, for example blurring faces where necessary andor using ostentatious time code to ensure that video of contentious events cannot be taken from the net and re-edited to bear false witness. This is a big and important set of issues which deserves more space than I have here, and more discussion than we were able to have at Transmission. Brian Nunez at Witness.org is the main contact for this ongoing discussion since it is a particularly important issue in their work.

Notes from the First do no harm workshop

c. ‘unique identification code’
A widely recognised ‘identification code’ for each piece of online media would enable content management systems (CMSs) to deal more easily with information about that media. It could be generated automatically by each publishing organisation in the network, and would then facilitate communication between different databases and CMSs. It would be functionally equivalent to a barcode for commercial products. At Transmission the proposal was to create a system for projects participating in the network to adopt a system of identifiers known as FPID, a File Publishing Identifier, (or Forte Prenestino Identifer). Andycat is the contact.

Other exciting projects and ideas emerging from Transmission include:
• a common aggregating site for all participating projects’ media outputs;
• collaboration on trainings for video on the web, including development of the culture of responsibility
• collaboration on regional or otherwise themed DVDs combining a range of media outputs from the network;
• shared and mutual publicity for our projects in the mainstream media;
• and a campaign against official moves in the US to create a ‘two speed internet’ favouring big corporations and government over the people who have made the net what it is today.....
• For inspiration, it is worth noting that in Korea, independent online video services such as Jimbonet and Chamseasan regularly distribute material to up to half a million people, and with only two full time staff, Asia 247 is a dynamic force for change in the balance of the media conversation in Asia.

'Listenomics: the Book'

NPR "On the Media" co-host Bob Garfield is writing a book — with the help of his audience. He writes about his collaborative online book project, Listenomics, in his Advertising Age blog.

Dan Gillmor, Lawrence Lessig, Christian Crumlish, Chris Anderson, yours truly and others have navigated these waters over the last few years. It's a lot of work, and will require lots more than posting chapter synopses online and asking for feedback.

Someone should write a book about it.

DIY journalism

AlterNet: Citizen journalism at its best. An all volunteer newspaper run by Liberian refugees helped their communities more than the writers ever imagined.

New City Chicago: DIY Media. The Daily News makes its case for online citizen journalism.

Steve Outing at E&P: How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational.

MediaLife: OhmyNews, where the readers report. In J schools they call it citizen journalism.

Flavors of grassroots video

What kinds of videos are people watching online? It's sure not Lost or Desperate Housewives, even if downloads of traditional TV shows command most of the media's attention, thanks to Apple's bottom line.

At Supernova on Friday, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, said she'd list the different varieties or genres of grassroots video her company is seeing on the Web, and here it is:

1.  Mini tv show-style  -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2.  Videobloggers:  telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson
3.  Genre guys:  snowboarding or car videos
4.  Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video.
5.  Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters
6.  Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin  tag: lipsync
7.  How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach:  French Pod Class
8.  Remixs and mashups:  The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future.
9.  Interviews like those at GETV.
10.  Parodies like the 8up commercial.
11.  AMV or anime music videos:  Loveless
12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

Mary forgot a couple:

13. Citizen journalism, like you see at Real People Network or Minnesota Stories.

14. Digital stories.

Retooling Ourmedia

If you're wondering why Ourmedia is down right now -- and the site can't tell you because, well, we're down -- we're in the process of migrating to new servers, and this may take another day. Apologies. We'll be right back.

Videos of Vloggercon panels

Ryanne has just finished posting the last of the video presentations recorded at Vloggercon on June 10-11. If you couldn't attend, or missed a session, catch it online.

The panel I moderated on Oral History and Digital Storytelling, with Denise, Jennifer and Susan, is here.

Cisco invests in Akimbo

San Jose Mercury News: Cisco to invest in home video firm Akimbo. Move aimed at speeding up Internet video revolution.

So, is Internet video a revolution, like the headline says? Or a "fad," as the reporter says not once but twice?

At Bloggercon 4

After Supernova, headed down to the street to Bloggercon 4, which its organizers decided to put on opposite Supernova as a protest against the latter's high fees and too-traditional content agenda. So far, not a great deal new here, though a nifty discussion about user gripes about software shortcomings. A few photos tomorrow. I posted a few photos on Flickr.

Doc Searls is doing a Docnography of participants' comments. Doc didn't, however, capture the complaint I voiced about DRM and the increasing monopolistic behavior by Apple.

I pointed out that those of us who want to support artists and listen to them on our iPods are more often than not given a single choice -- the iTunes Music Store -- and Apple has decided not to allow any third party music player, like the Sonos, to play any songs purchased at the iTunes store because of monopolistic behavior: they want you to buy their stereo music box. So we have this perverse situation where pirated music from the Darknet will play from device to device while legally purchased music will not. This penalizes both users and artists.

"Bullshit!" exclaimed ZDNet's Steve Gillmor, who said he simply goes down to the local music store, buys CDs, rips them, transfers them to his iPod without DRM.

Which misses the point. The digital generation doesn't want to buy physical CDs and do that workaround to get their digital music in a format they want that works across devices. We need to push back against Apple's monopolistic behavior here. If they keep it up, a boycott may be in order.

Regarding liability: Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, said he gets emails from bloggers every day from bloggers who are being sued or being threatened with a lawsuit. He recommends that anyone who achieves a level of popularity in the blogosphere should consider incorporating your blog "so that if you get sued, you get to keep your house."

The best part of Bloggercon, as always, is the socializing with old friends and networking with familiar names. Among those on hand here: Terry Heaton, Buzz Bruggeman, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, Sylvia Paull, Matt Mullenweg, Dan Farber, Steve Gillmor, Mark Glaser, Marc Canter, Scott Beale, Niall Kennedy, Jay Rosen, Lisa Stone, Jory des Jardins, Elisa Camahort, Susan Mernit, Philip Torrone, Ponzi, Chris Pirillo, Guarav and Ashish from Tekriti Software (the original developers of Ourmedia), Lisa Williams, Robert Cox, Toni Schneider, Paolo Valdemarin, Frank Paynter, Greg Narain and Bram Cohen.

Here's how to tune in today and tomorrow. Here are what the bloggers here are posting.

Tags: Bloggercon, Bloggercon4, tech, conferences

At Supernova

Spent the morning at Supernova, the business technology conference in San Francisco. Tomorrow I'll post Just posted to Flickr a photo of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps (forgot my flash card connector).

I moderated this morning's opening panel, "The Rise of the VideoNet," with Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), Mary Hodder (Dabble), and Robert Levitan (Pando). We spent a really good hour talking about the rapid rise of video sites -- 225 in all today. Mary Hodder will soon post an entry on Napsterization with a breakdown of video site traffic numbers (YouTube leads the way with 42 percent, MySpace with 24 percent, and so on).

We showed one of the best Mentos and Coke videos to kick things off.

The panel discussion will be podcast. Live audio streaming of all general sessions, as well as podcasts, blogs, and videoblogs, will be available here.

Here are some notes I took during Kopps' important talk:

"Centralized end user control is increasingly at risk. Broadband providers are increasing control over what comes into our homes over their pipes. ... Cable and DSL providers control 98% of the broadband market. We're nowhere near to seeing a ubiquitous third or fourth player to turn broadband into a vibrantly competitive market.

"If the marketplacde is truly competitive, then government should get out of the way and let a thousand flowers bloom." But currently, the bandwidth providers exercise a great deal of control over how you may use your connection.

"I’m amazed at the speed with which this issue came to the attention of the Congress, opening up a national discussion on the principles. ... The [broadband providers] want to inverse the real democratic genius of the internet. ... Entrepreneurs may have to ask permission to innovate from the owners of the broadband pipe.

"We need to change the terms of the debate. It’s not a net neutrality issue so much as an Internet freedom issue. ... Anyone who thinks the internet is going to halt media consolidationi has to understand that the internet may be heading down this very same path.

"These issues are too large to be left to a handful of broadband regulators. We desperately need your input. We need more of your input than we’ve been getting. Decisions without you are too often decisions against you."

Here's Colette Voegel blogging about today's sessions. Here are some others.

Tags: Supernova, Supernova2006, tech, conferences