http://www.blogherald.com/2008/04/09/flickr-gets-video-but-just-for-90-seconds/
Flickr has launched its long awaited video feature, and it’s an interesting addition. First of all, all videos are limited to 90 seconds, and secondly, only pro users can upload videos (everyone can view and embed them though). Why is that?
wikipedia participatory video definition:
Participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories. It is therefore primarily about process, though high quality and accessible films (products) can be created using these methods if that is a desired outcome. This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take their own action to solve their own problems, and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people, and to help them to implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.
Lisa Gye posted this open book example ‘The Googlization of Everything’ by Siva Vaidhyanathanto to the fc list. The author Siva Vaidhyanathan uses the open book process (Institute for the Future of the Book) to critique Google. The book is a “book blog” and Vaidhyanathanto lays out some major research questions in the summary:
This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?
Vaidhyanathanto’s other books - Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). The about on the Institute for the Future of the Book:
We’re a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.
Dominick Chen’s presentation at video vortex was impressive in terms of his projects and the connection he made with theory. There was also an informative use of terms as way to describe varying activities occurring on the Internet. (more later once I review the video record)
Other links: A slide version of his presentation on slideshare. The Masters of Media blog post, Participatory Culture on his presentation. Dominick’s bio on the video vortex website. A summary of his presentation. His blog derive.
This facebook article from the Guardian Unlimited was brought to my attention on a few lists, With friends like these… written by Tom Hodgkinson. (The Idler magazine) This article does an in-depth analysis on the people behind facebook and their philosophical-economic motivations. It made me realise that joining social media platforms like facebook is like signing up to a company or corporation that you detest. Something you would never do if you understood in advance what they where about, which is where in following what I would call a “social media fashion”, i.e. blindly follow your neighbour, some very bizarre companies are making huge economic gains. These developments also have quite a significant affect on the development of the Internet. For example, connections could be made with MySpace and YouTube.
Some quotes from the article:
Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.
Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction.
Jean Burgess Why I am deleting my facebook account
Not long after getting up the first prototype version of videodefunct published, the Palabras project appeared on the video vortex mailing list:
Palabras, which means “words” in Spanish, is a set of software tools and interfaces designed to facilitate collective self-representation, and promote social inclusion through participatory media production. Typically, in workshops at local cultural centers at each Palabras site, participants learn to use inexpensive digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application to edit, organize, and share their videos online.
There is a demo video of screenshots to show how it works. The emphasis on tags and participatory content creation is excellent.
The web application was devised to facilitate the discovery of connections between participants’ personal stories, at each site and across cultures, allowing participants to label or “tag” their own video content and create an emergent, social taxonomy - or “folksonomy” (folk+taxonomy).
politube.org has started broadcoasting news from a different perspective. We invite people to share their audio- and video-content with us. If for example a politician gave a speech causing some international media-hype we would like to be able to show the complete speech in a video.
The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.
The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them. Even though most movies in the 0xdb are copyrighted, and many of them are practically inaccessible for legal reasons, the monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic allows the 0xdb to identify and index these materials.
articles: 0xdb Movie Database Goes Live; 0xdb: The ultimate P2P-powered film database; Site Review 0xdb
GT sent this URL for the website soundtransit that shares audio. He talked about the wonder of sharing sounds with people on the other side of the globe. Waking up in the morning and being able to listen to a neighbourhood in another country, or as the site says plan a “sonic journey”. From the site:
SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography.
Notes from the article, ‘The man who put teenagers lives online’, by Owen Gibson, Technology News, Guardian Weekly.
Firstly, for my own research specifically the move to video and the number of uploads per day is phenomenal. Quote:
MySpace can have a similar democratising effect in the world of short film with amateur film-makers building up a MySpace fanbase before being snapped up by a big studio or broadcaster - 50,000 to 60,000 new videos are already being uploaded per day.
Reading through this article on MySpace, I was intrigued by the way the original creators looked around at what they describe as “the best social features” of other social networking entities. It would be interesting to define these features in terms of a research inquiry. The sites Craigslist, Evite and MP3.com where key references for the creators. The community site craiglist is intersting from a community media perspective, about:
Local community classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else — all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.
The design of the site states Chris DeWolfe was not driven by a technical imperative i.e. lots of bells and whistles. The objective instead simplicity, with a focus on activities that young people engage in everyday, like for example locating tracks on an mp3 player.
Other associated links intermix media; friendster; geocities; tripod; Then there are copies facebook; bebo.