More Thoughts on Technology and New Visual Journalism

I truly believe there is potential for creation of an online media publishing system centered around the style of visual journalism cameras like the G1 can create. The rhythm of shifting from video to still photography in the hands of a capable, creative visual journalist, could be expressed through an architecture and presentation suited to it. The combination of video and still images have the potential to create in the viewer a sense of surroundings, a picture of the whole event, seen two different ways.

The mix of still and video is suited to the idea of "quick-slow" development, where first captures can be uploaded for rapid presentation with little or no information and then later, more images can be added, stories added to flesh out the first blush images. Video can be edited to explain and give context to the event or stories can be added to give context to the visuals. The combinations are endless, given a sufficiently flexible system.

Brief posts of video or stills can flow onto a stream of consciousness, blog-like, photostream-like, until there is time to reflect on the event, compose stories to give context and explain the images by adding them later. The needs of journalism, immediacy and reflection are met.

By the way, I feel that Flickr represents, not a "photo sharing" phenomena, but a "photo looking" one, which essentially fulfills the function of the great picture magazines, Life and Look. The popularity of Flickr, I believe, is due to the same phenomena, an audience who enjoys learning about the world and getting their information visually.

Digital Rights Management and Documentary Films

One of the significant issues that came up over the history of Folkstreams was the concern by small, independent filmmakers that people could download their films freely once they were "streamed" on our website.

We chose to answer that concern by only allowing high resolution, full length films to be streamed and not downloaded. At the time, it was fairly difficult to save video being streamed over one of the major streaming media systems, Real or Microsoft (which we never supported because of its closed, proprietary nature). Our mandate as a non-profit organization is the widest possible dissemination of our catalog of films and to archive and present content in as open a way as possible. This is why we still offer video only through the antiquated method of a standalone media player and not the fancy embedded Flash player popularized by YouTube.

In the beginning, we did not want to frighten off filmmakers from contributing films to our project. I hope that as filmmakers become aware that digital distribution of their films does not threaten them, they will be more open to allowing downloads. We had considered using DRM to enable downloads, but the cost and complexity was prohibitive. It is good to see DRM falling by the wayside. Both Sony and Apple have begun to shake off the yoke of this abomination to common sense, Western culture and civilization.

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store

Who Needs HD DVD or Blu-ray?

The reason consumer electronic makers are scrambling to end the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is simply because watching movies delivered by spinning discs is a rapidly obsolescing technology. The days of the CD and DVD are coming to an end. The emergence of static memory devices that can store the large amounts of data required for audio, video and images spells the end of storage devices that require physically moving parts. The growth of video on demand over the network and in general networked storage means the only reason the HD format discs are hanging on to viability is that it remains expensive and difficult to send the HD quality video over a network or store it on static memory. The window is closing and unless the DVD makers get their act together their technology will be eclipsed and no one will need a "Blu-ray" player to play anything and those DVD can be used for coasters.

Archives may be one of the best customers for storage systems that spin discs to store large amounts of data inexpensively and permanently, but for consumers of media, the hard disk, the flash storage systems and network on demand storage systems will come to predominate more quickly than anyone thinks.

An Easter Egg in Winter

I had my first experience today with the emerging new technology of labeling individual food items in order to make them traceable. I opened a carton of eggs from Giant supermarket, picked up an egg to make my breakfast (my favorite fried egg and leftover dressing concoction). I noticed some writing in gold ink on my egg. An Easter Egg! WooHoo! And then I thought, perhaps it is one of those crazy internet projects where people put writing on things directing you to a website to track it. Like a garden gnome, a book or paper money. No, it said "Best by" and a date. Aha, I recognized it was an example of the individual food item labeling I'd heard about and seen demonstrated on television.

I checked the egg carton hoping there would be some information about the code on the egg. Yes, the carton directed me to a a website where I could find out more information about my egg: giantfreshegg.com (or you can go to http://www.myfreshegg.com/ for other brands), which redirects to a site where I can enter the code and sell by date into a web form to identify and trace my egg. I entered the code. A page displaying information about my egg appeared: "Key Egg Dates;" the date my egg was processed, the sell by date; "Your Egg Information;" told me my egg came from Hillandale Farms, which I know to be a large industrial egg producer.

The numbers and letters printed on my egg are called a "Freshness and Traceability Code." This is an attempt by industrial agriculture to satisfy consumer demand for knowing where their food comes from, which is gaining popularity with greater concern for food quality, ethics and safety. It is one more way that large scale agriculture hopes to compete with small, independent and organic farms. The company behind this (laudable) technology is http://www.eggfusion.com/

I welcome measures increasing the traceability of food, especially in the industrial agriculture and processed foods realm, where for example, one bad leaf in a field of spinach gets mixed up in tens of thousands of bags, inoculating them with bad bugs and the industrial system spreading them out over the country. When people bought lettuce by the head, only one person might be sickened by a bad head, but chop the lettuce head up, bag it and distribute it to tens of thousands of people and you have a new problem created by the efficiency of industrial agriculture. Yes, it's convenient, but is it sustainable? We need to know where our food comes from whether from big factory farms or small organic ones, in order to make choices about the advantages and disadvantages of factory farms and factory foods.

Yahoo Pipes

I made my first pipe today at Yahoo Pipes, which takes our Folkstreams recently additions feed and finds Flickr images that correspond to the folkloric subject categories associated with each entry, rolls them into the feed. I'm not sure if I constructed it properly of if it's useful, but it works, the Flickr images do show up in an element of the RSS item for each film.

It's a fascinating concept, although a feed mashup is not a new concept, Pipes is very broad, powerful and slick. It borrows from several novel websites, shades of Ning where users build technology using Lego-brick-like software components. Of course, it's like Unix, a set of simple tools with standard input and output that can be endlessly combined into new, useful tools. It also draws upon open source software development, since others can see how you constructed a pipe, copy it and make it their own to study or build their own tools on.

Pipes is a social network version of a RSS feed mashup service. The idea of mashing up RSS feeds to create a new feed, combined from other filtered feeds is nothing new. But sharing the feeds and the construction of feeds with other users in a social network environment like social bookmarking, etc. is novel. You can do the normal social networking things, aggregate most popular pipes. Any kind of content item can be social networked and then the aggregates derived from that usage data.

It definitely has shades of open source since you can see how any pipe is made; shades of wiki in that you anyone can study, edit and build the application from within the application through a language. It is similar to emacs or even Blender (which exposes its interface and engine to Python, so new interface elements and functionality can be added by users). Users becoming software builders is a growing phenomena, just as wiki showed readers could become authors, all part of a general trend toward what is called professional-amateurism.