Seth Keen

An article in NYT titled by Adam Cohen titled “Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End” which references video:

Consider online video, which depends on the availability of higher-speed connections. Internet users can now watch channels, like BBC World, that are not available on their own cable systems, and they have access to video blogs and Web sites like YouTube.com, where people upload videos of their own creation. Under tiered pricing, Internet users might be able to get videos only from major corporate channels.

Sir Tim expects that there are great Internet innovations yet to come, many involving video. He believes people at the scene of an accident — or a political protest — will one day be able to take pictures with their cellphones that could be pieced together to create a three-dimensional image of what happened. That sort of innovation could be blocked by fees for the high-speed connections required to relay video images.

I enjoyed Tom Sherman’s (Spring 2005) articles on video in the Canadian Art Magazine. His frustration with the video being called film brought a smile. In the article ‘Video No Film’, he states:

Fuck film. The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video, Cinematic history is like a ball and chain. Video, as an inclusive soluble medium, is having difficulty defending itself from the weight of this affliction. It has become fashionable to declare, I “filmed this or that with my digital camcorder.” In this ahistorical time, it has become common to use the nomenclature of film, the predominant medium of the 20th century, to declare one’s existence in the 21st. Everyone is going retro. p. 5 of 6

His outspoken views prompted more discussion on the list nettime, by Alan Sondheim. And more here by Sherman, Is the new video ‘film,’ video or film? More on Tom’s video work here.

ipods are great for research – I watched and listened to on the train a video download from the conference Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I checked out the talk by Peter Armstrong from OneWorld.net as part of the ‘Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing’. He focused on video online in his talk referring to the following sources:

Some of his points. With interactivity the podcast mode cuts this off i.e democracynow video. Interactivity for Armstrong is about liveness where the audience has the chance to email, phone-in be actively involved. A key part of his talk was the question for video databases – Make your own work and host it; or tag other work across the Internet (like google video for example); or just aggregate other work. Also, Armstrong believes ‘freedom’ is the significant objective for media producers, where they are not tied to or beholden to media organisations or governments.

A video of a panel response on where the Internet is heading in the future. ‘The Web: 2012′.

A panel on the future of commerce, journalism, and community on the Internet, featuring Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Newmark. Moderated by Ken Auletta. From “2012: Stories from the Near Future,” the 2007 New Yorker Conference.

The speakers and moderator: Barry Diller; Arianna Huffington; Craig Newmark; Ken Auletta

In a closer look at this webcast it was interesting to see the differing perspectives of Barry Diller (fox/e-commerce) and Craig Newmark (social media/Craigslist). Diller argues that professional media practitioners will in the future be taking up a more significant role in the user-generated domain. A viewpoint that has some connections with Andrew Keen’s recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture’.

Panel Discussion:
Ken Auletta: …will user-generated content (like YouTube..) be as popular as produced content?

Barry Diller: “…the talent pool is finite there are only so many people that make programming that will resonate with a lot of people…these are very early days in video…as it evolves people who are trained and professional at it will get in the mix…”

In contrast Newmark envisions a extended use of social media as a means to provide a varied mix of viewpoints from all types of people.

“…I do see people who we would consider to be amateurs actually doing the heavy lifting in media and quality in media today…”

Arianna Huffington (news/The Huffington Post) sees a hybrid mix of the two types of content producers with citizen journalism playing a major role.

Arianna Huffington:
“…not just reporters but the wisdom of the crowd mechanism…users put together pieces…a hybrid future [mixing both print and online]”

Perhaps the hybrid approach is slightly more realistic in relation to user-generated content where these two types of content producers will develop separately and the distinguishing line will blur even more between the two. What is obvious is the nervousness of the traditional broadcasters who are working hard on ways to tap the user-generated pool.

Following up from my earlier rights online forum post, I found Andrew Garton’s introduction presentation. Which as he describes is influenced by the APC Internet Rights Charter , the Association for Progressive Communications: Internet and ICTs for Social Justice in Development. Andrew also provides on his blog an interesting report on the iCommons Summit 2006 held in Rio de Janeiro.

This abstractorr clip posted on engagemedia was played recently at the rights online seminar run buy open channel. abstractor.tv

Abstractor is a simple device that instantly transforms any TV into a beautiful piece of art.

Anyone can easily create an Abstractor by attaching two black boards to any TV screen. These boards cover the screen entirely – except for a small horizontal gap between them – allowing a narrow beam of light to escape from the TV. All TV programs and commercials look beautiful through the Abstractor.

A slightly tongue-in-cheek view by Louise Story in the New York Times on joost tv that looks at whether the long form may be the answer to online video content.

But the future of online television may lie with longer programs, the kind that merit curling up on your couch rather watching from your office chair. Most video viewing, after all, is still on television sets, and many people turn them on for hours at a time. In contrast, Nielsen Net/Ratings finds that consumers visit YouTube on average for only 11.5 minutes at a time.

On video vertigo they have provided some ethics guidelines for aggregating video.

Why are best practices needed?There have been a series of incidents in which the work of independent videobloggers, video podcasters and other creators of video works have had their content appropriated without credit by third parties. This is usually done via RSS, a technology that has led to intense value creation on the Web by making applications like podcasting possible, but acts as a double-edged sword in that it makes “page scraping” and “splogging” easier.

Steve Watkins on the vlogging list has a bit to say on this issue.

Today, in the lab we had a discussion about having to create a standard video format for ipods (i.e the frame size, data rate etc) just like for example creating a delivery format for a program for television. The lab decided to bypass being restricted by video podcasting standards, in favour of leaving the published video on the Internet. The discussion was prompted by the aim to set up a reblog of video content that has a web feed from each student blog. Each video object from each individual student, which is made around a pre-set theme is brought together into one blog via the use of an aggregator. Each video object on their own blogs remains in the context of the environment it was created in. In the reblog also like in their personal blogs all the video objects remain within the networked environment of the Internet.

Nicholas Carr in a recent blog post titled ‘Steve’s devices’ provides a critique of Apple’s motives in terms of how their devices like ipods are designed in relation to the Internet. Carr states:

Jobs, in fact, couldn’t possibly be more out of touch with today’s Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and the erasing of the boundary between producer and consumer. Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It’s as self-contained as a hammer. It’s a happening staged for an elite of one. The rest of us are free to gain admission by purchasing a ticket for $500, but we’re required to remain in our seats at all times while the show is in progress. User-generated content? Hah! We’re not even allowed to change the damn battery. In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

PIcked this up off the aoir list, a discussion about a video on YouTube titled ‘Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us’ that takes a swipe at web 2.0. A critique of the video on the on the Media @ LSE Group weblog in the post ‘Dangerously overstating the significance of Web 2.0′ Quote:

“It suggests that thanks to Web 2.0 technologies (which it neatly explains) “we’ll have to rethink copyright, identity, ethics… ourselves”.

And the discussion on the aoir list.