Seth Keen

I read this article in the age on the weekend ‘Beginning to see the light‘, by Nick Miller which gives some insights into the next phase of the Internet. A phase which is all about increased speed “ultra-broadband”.

“With this light pipe and high-resolution video you have one wall of your living room dissolve and there are your grandparents; another wall dissolves and it’s the aunts and uncles, and you’re in one big room. These are the kind of things that will throw our intuitive sense of the physical world out the window.”

Caught up with Andy Nicholson from Engage Media today and learnt about their Transmission online video metadata working group.

A metadata standard for online video will ensure a common definitions for basic information such as title, date, author and language and (free) tags. This standard is to be used in video upload forms and video feeds of data coming from each participating site. The standard will allow creation of search and importation tools for (open source) Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, WordPress, Plone/Plumi etc to easily locate video data in other video databases that use the standard.

Johnan Oomen replied to a post of this on the video vortex list with a reference to TX metadata standard:
EBU Core pdf—– PBCore Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project. He states they are both “built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery (http://dublincore.org), widely used in the cultural heritage domain.

My one-minute rant for the Open Spectrum Quality/Control symposium held at the Melbourne State Library today. I lined up with 10 others and raced the clock to open the event. Documentation was done using a live blogging tool Cover it Live.

There is no content on the web!
on the web, content is a king (stripped naked)
content is everybody, content is communities…
content is creating accounts
sign in, sign out, log in, log out
passwords, more passwords…
content is social, content is friends, fans
content is connecting, networking, linking, traffic…
sharing, embedding, uploading, downloading…
content is comments…
searching, searching, searching
content is naming, tagging, categorising
favourites…love this track!
content is channels, playlists, slideshows, sets
organising…content is management…
content is piracy, bootlegging, plagiarism
copy, copy, copy
all rights reserved, attribution, non-commercial, no derivative works, share-alike, public domain…open…copyright…
content is dirty, noisy, messy
cheap, amateur, trash
content is remixing, cut n’ paste
content is user-generated
on the web, content is no king, it is a pawn (in virtual drag)

From the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies and the book review section where authors reply to reviews.

Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture
Author: Tarleton Gillespie
Publisher: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007

From a recent Leonardo Books review, October 2008.

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
by Christopher M. Kelty
Duke University Press, Durham and London, USA/UK, 2008
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223; ISBN: 0-8223-0-8223.

David Wolf and I presented Videodefunct at Footscray Audio Visual Social Club (FAVSC) on Tuesday night (part of the Footscray Community Arts Centre). I stepped in last minute for Keith who was down with a virus. The FAVSC blurb from their MySpace site:

FAV-SC is a regular meeting place for artists, noise makers, sound-designers, electronics boffins, installation artists, film freaks, VHS geeks, performers, programmers, DIYers, phonographers, photographers, holographers, circuit benders, laptop musicians, curators, producers and anyone with an interest in lo/hi-fi new/old-media art.

I got this via an article SOCIAL NETWORKING IS NOT WORKING, Txt: Clemente Pestelli / Eng: Chiara Resmini in digimag.

antisocial notworking is a repository of projects that explore the pseudo-agency of online social platforms. It takes a number of recent software projects as its inspiration to reflect upon the fashion for ‘participation’ with the arts sector and culture in general. The concern is how the Internet is increasingly charactised as a ‘platform’ (or collective machine) for ‘social’ uses, but to question what is meant by the term social in such descriptions. Although social networking platforms rely on user-generated content, what is the nature of this participation? What alternatives (or antitheses) can be identified?

extended notes and essay.

Howard Rheingold has made a video clip on the topic Video Vernacular in relation to “education and culture”. Embedded from his vlog http://vlog.rheingold.com/

Rheingold also has notes on course he runs called Virtual Communities/Social Media

Sean sent across the new book by David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the Digital Disorder. The summary from Amazon Books:

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

The Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube was released last week as a follow up to the Video Vortex forums, conferences and exhibitions staged from the end of 2007 into 2008.

Download the pdf
More publication information

about the book: The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media.

After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives?

Contributors: Tilman Baumgärtel, Jean Burgess, Dominick Chen, Sarah Cook, Sean Cubitt, Stefaan Decostere, Thomas Elsaesser, David Garcia, Alexandra Juhasz, Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Minke Kampman, Seth Keen, Sarah Késenne, Marsha Kinder, Patricia Lange, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Matthew Mitchem, Sabine Niederer, Ana Peraica, Birgit Richard, Keith Sanborn, Florian Schneider, Tom Sherman, Jan Simons, Thomas Thiel, Vera Tollmann, Andreas Treske, Peter Westenberg.

Started thinking about a one-minute presentation for the Open Spectrum symposium coming up at next week. Ellie Rennie is one of the key people behind the event and has written this supporting argument ‘Quality control: a new system for ethical media’. This article by Tim Berners_Lee Warning sounded on web’s future was circulated as coming from similar directions.