Seth Keen

From the engage media newsletter: The open video alliance wiki and principles.

http://osvideo.constantvzw.org/ – open source video blog

Open Source Video is a project of Constant, a Brussels based organisation for Arts and Media. This weblog is a collective testsite for producing and distributing open source video. Here we keep traces of experiments with software for sharing and editing video, and report on what we found to be effective hardware, good linux distributions and helpful configurations. Also: tips and hints on where to find manuals, practical info on using software etc. This blog contains posts on annotating, tracing, collectively editing and sharing video online. We are interested in finding ways to make archived video material accessible, to make it searchible and keep video archives alive by allowing the content to be re-interpreted.

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.

Received a link to this online design thesis openp2pdesign.org_1.1. I like the way this thesis has been re-designed for online distribution and translated from Italian into Spanish and English to increase the spread.

openp2pdesign.o rg was born in order to publish, disseminate and develop further my thesis, and to stimulate on it a collective discussion. The intention is to render the ideas behind the thesis not as property of a single person, but to share them collectively within a community. The thesis as the first source code on which to develop a community: this is why it has been translated to English and Spanish too.

There is some material in here on Free Software in relation to design, along with some nice design ideas like the way links are represented around the body text.

This application Sphinx-4 came up in discussions about tagging and annotating video content on the fly.

Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It was created via a joint collaboration between the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and Hewlett Packard (HP), with contributions from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

http://www.fridayarts.net/blogs/?p=3677

Internet video site YouTube needs no introduction. Its status as
both a branded channel and a medium in its own right has redefined
“new media” on both sides of the art and corporate entertainment
divide. But most of its content resides somewhere in between, and its
currency lies in the vernacular nature of the items posted there–to
the extent that the memes incubated on YouTube are trickling down
into the language of contemporary artists’ work and, in turn, re-
emerging on the site.

http://thekitchen.org

Previous research into open source led to this article ‘The Cathedral and the Baazar by Eric Steven Raymond, Nov 2006. I like many others it seems who are involved in open-source software development have been influenced by some of the ideas that Raymond presents. A quote from the introduction:

Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity— came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyoneanyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

From Markus Sandy’s blog a post tilted ‘Drupal as a framework for a social context engine’, a video record of Richard Schave’ s presentation at the Los Angeles Drupal Camp 2007. Some quick overview notes of the presentation. He looks at the goal of locating “an engine that tells you what you are looking for without having to look for it.” Two ways to locate information 1. a news reader (filter) 2. signaling The signaling option is about tracking interests, argues that this needs to be incorporated into CMS. He refers to webjay which has been pulled down as an example of a social context engine (also Flickr, del.ici.ous). Explains that signaling goes beyond browsers. Maps (Google maps) can be created out of syndication. He points towards signaling being formed around social groups. “Syndication; Serendipity; Civic Action” – “Maximise the diffusion of ideas throughout society and thereby affect social change.

References:

CiviCRM – CiviCRM is an open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

organic groups – niche communities

http://2or3things.org/andyhook – social context follow up

tipping point wikipedia summaries reference

freetagging