A Networked World

Take Five

Johnnie (who always finds neat shift) sent me to this, which is interesting, although I'm a bit cautious of predicting exponential change in the same direction, I have this nasty feeling that just when we think we are about to go through the roof, chaos has a way of opening up the floor. Discontinuity is nature's way of saying "Gotcha"

But while I was there I stopped off for a little of this. Which will just make your day.

Beatbox Aggregation

Via Euan, this from Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing: Amazing human beatbox guy on French "American Idol".

Amazing human beatbox guy on French "American Idol" (video) This "human beatbox" contestant on a French TV talent show has truly insane skills.

There are various suggestions for bigger, better and weirder HBBs but this one from Chris on The Obvious is the Killer

Take 5 and try out the naked beatbox chef.

Tim Westergren at Pandora Talks

After checking out Pandora the other day I have been listening to some of their streams and thinking about how this might work as a business. One of the great things about all this tech is that I have access to tools that are easier, faster and infinitelty cheaper than the old days in radio. Using Skype and SAM I can record an interview then using Audacity I can edit it up and drop the whole thing on the blog.

All you have to do is ask. Tim Westergren who is a founder of Pandora . said OK and here are the results.

1. First of all I asked Tim about the background to Pandora and how they tag the music so that an algorithm can fit any song into my personal preferences. (3:45 880KB)
2. Next we looked at something that has been nagging both me and Tim Cabell who has built a CrispyNews Pandora Community site. How do we connect with other people of similar tastes and how does independent music get a boost from Pandora. (4:00 933KB)
3. As a former radio programmer, the one thing that was always in mind was the role of gatekeeper that we played in controlling the information that reached the listener. Tim accepts that pandora is no different, Pandora is not a democracy, its a musicologist's dream, or nightmare. (1:45 408 KB)

Plenty to come by the look of it, but don't ask them to stick to a schedule, its already been beaten up too often to stick its head over the parapet again.

Euan Open's Pandora's Radio

I vaguely recall coming across Pandora a long time ago, and not making much of it, but Euan has managed to get himself hooked on it and, as an old radio guy, I can see why. (OK, so I've pumped a fair bit of time into it myself this morning)

The premise is a good one and based on the Trivial Pursuit model for business generation;' we have all this damned information, what the hell are we going to do with it?"

So the system takes either a song or an artist that I like and uses its algorithms to figure out what else I might like from artists producing similar work. And its pretty well on track. It did a great job of finding some Rita Coolidge overlaps and made a fair fist of Scott Walker/ Engels. Actually, I'm impressed that it even knew about Plastic Palace People.

More Media Mashups

Jon Husband pointed me this morning to Thermo[SAT] which touts itself as

an initiative from The Society for Arts and Technology [SAT], explores the evolution of internet-based media and the ways it is enabling individuals and groups to produce and share what they create. It will also offer analysis and opinion on the related potential for social, cultural and economic impacts.

More specifically, the first phase of Thermo[SAT]’s life will focus on a set of developments that is already underway - the Web-based transformation of the traditional radio, TV and cinema industries and the emerging arena for services like IPtv, podcasting, photostreaming and videoblogging

These developments are creating an environment in which individuals and small groups can produce and distribute their work as easily as the large networks. This capability is a recipe for creative disruption and innovation. At the other end of the changing distribution channels … the increasingly interactive media users, who can choose what they want to watch or listen to, and increasingly when, how and where.

They are going to be V Busy as we all try to figure out what on earth is going on in the media space. After years of declaiming, "The Internet Changes Everything" we really are seeing what that means, in the business models of media companies on the money end through to the democratisation of production and the distribution of distribution.

The World Cup is already a testbed for FIFA, now it looks like its also an R&D project for Lycos. Frank Barnako reports that

Almost nine months ago, the CEO of Lycos Inc. said he had plans to turn his company around and eventually take it public. One strategy would be to earn money allowing people to upload homemade video. Back then, few people had heard of YouTube.com, but what Alfred Tolle described sounded a bit like what YouTube is today.

Except that it accepts files. Lycos, Tolle said, would provide audio and video editing and production tools for people to produce their programming online.

Tomorrow, when FIFA World Cup kicks off in Germany, Tolle's company will have four "embedded" reporters who will be the focus of an effort by Lycos to do more than report scores and show highlights. "They will be testing new technologies, kind of an 'alpha' platform, for products to be introduced in the next three to four months," explained Brian Kalinowski, operating chief of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.

Their job is to produce daily vignettes, "with a lighthearted and satirical approach to the culture of World Cup," Kalinowski said. "They will also be testing techniques to let us deliver high-quality, even high-definition, video from our platform, which consumers may eventually be able to use to distribute and monetize their content."

What? Can we read that again please? Consumers get to use these tools to distribute and monetize their own content?. Is this what Rupert Murdoch meant when he said that he wanted his site to "be the destination" for bloggers? It certainly looks a lot like Shirky's Mass Amateurisation of Publishing from 2002. It might even be the kosher offspring of the Chevy Tahoe Fiasco.

"We need to position ourselves as the content destination for creators and consumers," he continued. "I would like to give people the opportunity to share in advertising revenue we would get from people watching and listening."

Suddenly the idea of a "content destination" has a different ring, not a place I go to get content, but maybe a place to which I take content.

In light of the development of YouTube.com, Tolle clearly saw the wave before many other people. His idea, however, includes something extra -- a profit incentive.

I'm sceptical about the last bit, I think if his tools are good, he will see all the traffic he could wish for as people upload their stuff and have fun, and other people take the stuff that is already there and make something else of it again. And what will it be for, all this endless mashing?

Snacks. Consumers Turn to Web for 'Media Snack' Fix. From TechNewsWorld.com.

"Consumer-generated content [such as] YouTube is the millennial version of 'America's Funniest Home Videos,'" said Jack MacKenzie, senior vice president of Frank N. Magid Associates, a media research firm. However, now it's portable and offers users a huge community to interact with.

Charlie Todd, 27, posts to video sites because he enjoys "the ability for your users to rate and comment on your work," he said. He also posts because he doesn't have the server space or bandwidth to host memory-intensive video. Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a New York-based improvisational comedy troupe that organizes heavily planned "missions" around the city to make people laugh, and then posts the results on the different video Web sites. They garner high ratings in the process.

Higher ratings means more views, which push the videos onto the front pages of the sites, which then guarantees more views. If it's good, it stays on the home page, said Arik Czerniak, CEO of Metacafe. At Metacafe, a top video could get half a million views in 24 hours. "You don't need to get lucky ... because we've streamlined the viral process, if something is good it will be noticed by the community. You don't need to have 1,000 people on your mailing list," he said.

The fundamental question is why this is so much better than traditional media fare and an answer is that it lets us do something that has been smacked out of our lives for too long, it lets US Play. Call me a Philistine if you like, but there are no redeeming social or humanitarian values to be gained from "Everybody Loves Raymond" and its ilk, none. Numa Numa, or the Brokeback Mountain trailer for Back to the Future or many of the hard case snippets on YouTube are no better as great art, nor any worse; but they are great generators of social currency, both directly for their creators and for those who email the links to their mates or blog about them or talk about them over the water cooler.

The revolution may not be televised, it may come in a torrent instead.

The Death of Radio

Just had this link to Tod Maffin predicting the death of radio from the very au fait Mark Bradley. Great piece, and even more inflammatory than me, which says a lot. U.S. lawmaker Mike Ferguson has drafted;

an audio broadcast flag bill that would let the FCC force radio stations to provide “so-called “flag” technology be used to prevent content on HD Radios and satellite digital radios from being re-distributed.”
[...] Here’s the issue. If the signal is digital, this lets people control it more. But rather than doing cool, enabling things with it, rights holders are trying to extract more and more from less and less. One day, probably quite soon, one of these idiots are going to wake up and realize that nobody wants to have 30 “But it’s only $9.95 a month!” licence fees or subscription packages.

Frankly I hope they succeed, we wont pay for their crap when we can get free crap and they will go broke.

I have this theory that culture creates itself out of whatever bits and pieces it finds lying around freely available, you are either part of that or not, the culture that results really REALLY doesn’t care.

Those who want to withdraw their production from the meme pool from which culture is created, are not only entitled to do so, they should be encouraged do so and leave more room for the rest of us.

Update: There is something else that will kill off radio and it is people like the repellent Bill O'Reilly. Lately he has been running a petition to get news commentator Keith Olbermann replaced by his predecssor Phil Donohue. Mostly because Olbermann has the temerity to quote the frothing rubbish that O'Reilly spouits on his various media outlets.

There is, to put it mildly, bad blood. Including an online campaign by DailyKos regular to retaliate on O'Reilly's radio show. Today Stark got through and mentioned the now forbidden name of Keith Olbermann. Big deal, but what O'Reilly did next is a shinign example of why corporate media is in the can and sinking.

Listen to it here. Priceless, if he was my jock he would be out in the street so fast his shoes would still be under the desk when his butt hit the kerb. That he is paranoid and stupid is one thing, that Fox continues to employ the guy at all is much more important, and tells the real story of the failure of corporate media.

The Video Phone Fallacy

I got thinking about the Video phone thing when I saw an item today on the BBC about 3GSM in Barcelona. Despite the rep's insistence that video wasn't the be all and end all of 3G and that operators would be offering services, he then went on to talk exclusively about video clips, TV programmes, video calls and not a single word about services that 3G might be able to implement.

It reminded me of all the talk in the past about how people could get services to their cell phones and the ones quoted were always share prices, weather and TV guides. And deep down we knew that, like Iridium phones, the demand for those services was, and is trivial beyond words.

I think I can see how we keep gravitating back to the idea of video calls and equally, I think I can see why, in fact, we really aren't interested.

Video calls are a technology driven outcome, as companies compete to offer ever more technical enhancements to their products, be they handsets or networks, inevitably the race becomes one of gadgets at one end and bandwidth at the other. Cramming the most possible functions into the smallest handset connected to the fattest pipe is the only technologically way they have of competing because there is an absolute limit to the size game unless we want to have the think surgically implanted.

The challenge then is to find streams that eat the broader bandwidth so we go from skinny 3k voice calls to higher fi music and eventually we are forced to look at video as the only kind of stream that doesn't fit into a smaller pipe and, making a virtue of necessity, they announce mobile video as the next killer app.

BS.

From a purely human psychological perspective video phones encroach nastily on an area that we are very uncomfortable in. Many people don't like having others take photos of them, the idea that turning a camera on themselves just so someone else can watch them talk is terrifying. Remember that public speaking is one of the most frightening things most people ever contemplate and most of them head for the hills.

Entailed in public speaking are two concepts that scare us a lot, witness and record. I've seen it for years as a broadcaster, slap a microphone in front of the most voluble opinionated joker and they turn instantly into bumbling dribbling idiots. People hate the idea that their words are being recorded and witnessed by people somewhere outside their control. Cameras are even worse, hence the many hours of video garbage shot doing vox pops for TV.

The other personal issue is privacy; holding a device to our ears, or talking into an earpiece cord is fine, we even forget how public we are and rave on at the top of our voices because the intimacy of the process acts as a security blanket. But force us to hold the device out in front of us, pointing in our direction, while we talk into it, and the whole thing gets disturbingly demonstrative and most of us ain't. Oh, and while we're at it, making sure that it IS pointed at our faces while we talk, and at the same time watch the other person on the screen and gesturing with it all and we need to be exhibitionist octopuses before it will work, let alone be a selling point.

The other game is downloading video and here there is a whole new set of problems.

The first is that we have followed with video/TV the same trajectory as we did with music, a steadily rising level of technical excellence until we reached, with CD in the audio case and flat screen TV in the other case, a level of technical reproduction that exceeded both our sensory capacities and the inherent quality of the content.

The music business underestimated the threat of MP3 because it was a lower technical standard than CD and, since all "progress" had been measured in technical terms thus far, they assumed that technical standards was what we wanted because that is what they could provide.

But it wasn't. MP3 is a perfectly acceptable technical quality because most music is worth listening to at about that standard and most of us can't hear the difference. I have three flavours of tinnitis myself and my top end cilia are long dead. Younger people, brought up in a high volume world are probably worse off than me.

Same with video. One reason we haven't rushed to mortgage our souls for digital is that the quality of the content is pretty well matched by the visual reproduction of a good flat screen TV, and that's it.

On the other hand, nobody is going back to 78's in audio and we sure as hell aren't flocking to 3cm screens to watch the footy. And we wont, they both fail on the other end of the content/ technical quality continuum.

Network operators are planting themselves in a Pareto trap if they depend on "content" to make a profit. They will find themselves drawn inexorably into having on tap the kind of "content" they think their customers might want. Far from charging content providers for the delivery, they will end up having to buy it themselves; and then they will stuck with the reality that 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the content, while the other 80% of the content is the profit.

Not only will it be a hiding to nothing on the buying end, it still wont deliver the kind of transaction volume that will turn a profit for the network. Nevertheless we still get people like Bill Gajda, chief marketing officer, GSM Association delivering a page of sleeping draft that keeps saying;

The fact that we can now watch television on the mobile phone is an arresting one. Technologically, it's brilliant. As a new market medium, it's unassailable. Yet mobile TV is just one application from a whole new armoury of content and services becoming available to the mobile user.

Yet can't, in several hundred words, find a single one to mention beyond TV to your mobile. In language that, frankly doesn't belong in polite company. On the other hand Andy Oram at O'Reilly Media gets it pretty well right. Network Neutrality and an Internet with Vision

Meanwhile the guys at FON are in the process of implementing David Reed's realisation that there will be no business case at all when each new connection to the network brings more bandwidth than it uses.

Content Charges

More thoughts on the whole bizarre idea of networks charging for content delivery.

Media companies have been trying to get us to pay for their content since day 1, and failed miserably pretty well every time. So the vast majority of "content" from those big companies is either text and image or some audio or maybe video clips, none of which, absolutely none, will we pay for. You put money in the way and we just leave.

So if some network owner, in addition to charging for the bandwidth or the access or whatever the hell they want to call it, then wants to stick us (me and you Rupert Murdoch) for actually delivering the bits that we have paid to receive, they can look forward to some interesting stories appearing in news media around the world giving the pipe owners a serious scrutiny; and we KNOW they'll find something because everybody has a skeleton.

But lets look at something we apparently are prepared to pay for, iTunes at $0.99 a shot. Now, since that has been the price since day 1 we can assume that iTunes doesn't have much in the way of pricing power and that any attempt to increase the cost is going to reduce the business, if not actually create major hassles for Apple. But lets say that the networks can stiff the customers for another 1 cent a tune without killing the goose that lays the tin eggs. Now lets add it up.

In December 2005, after 17 months online, iTunes Europe sold its 100 millionth song, making a princely rate of  5.8 million songs a month. Lets be generous and round it to 6 million.

Meanwhile, in the US, the counter at the store says that 957 million songs have been downloaded, at an average or 29 million a month. That's 35 million CENTS a month in ePostage for the carriers. Ummmmmm, $350k a month split across all the networks? Like their lawyers will get out of bed for that.

And regardless of the BIG players, I'd bet that the vast majority of the traffic that networks are currently being paid for is content that people are sharing among themselves, be it blogs or P2P.

Take away that traffic because they aren't paying the postage, and the bandwidth based contract that I need to access the net gets a LOT smaller.

Telcos have to understand, surely, that they are in a commodity business; they will make profits based on moving as many bits as possible among as many ends as possible. Any and every action they take that reduces the demand for bandwidth undermines whatever is left of their business model.

They might even succeed in getting congress to pass a law that stupid, they might even try to implement the business models that could ride on it. But I would bet that they will just go broke even faster.

The perfect example is the British booze business, that lobbied for longer and more flexible opening hours on the grounds that they made $X per hour before, so more hours must mean more $X.

But that tiny shift has made a big difference, not just to the amount of booze that people drink, nor the rate at which they drink, but the places they choose to drink as well. No, really.

Pub chain: Longer opening hours have hit our sales

Regent Inns, the company behind the Walkabout pubs and Jongleurs comedy clubs, has announced that it has done badly out of the new licensing laws. Other groups have seen only a modest boost from extending trading and none have posted big profits in the aftermath of the licensing revolution. Many stay open an extra hour or two on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Those that serve food open an hour earlier on Sundays. One of the effects of the new regime has been a shift away from the high street towards local pubs, as people no longer go searching for late-night bars.

When you are in the wrong mindset, getting what you want doesn't help, because what you want will be the wrong thing. The Telcos are relentlessly in the wrong mindset.

You Have to Admire the Transparency

The other day I fired off about the moribund music industry shifting its target from downloads to target lyrics websites, in essence offering to litigate them into oblivion. But I was wrong about their attitude.

The music business knows one thing better than anything else on the planet; money. How coincidental that 36 hours after they launch their latest assault on the Internet and its capabilities, comes this little gem from Frank Barnako. Searches Of 2005: Music Lyrics, Paris Hilton

A Web service that returns results from several leading search engines announced the most popular Internet search terms of 2005 included music lyrics, Paris Hilton, poetry, and names and their meanings.

Jon Nolz, director of marketing for InfoSpace Inc.'s (INSP) Dogpile.com said, "Seeing 'lyrics' in the No. 1 position is surprising given the number of huge headline news events over the year, but points to what online search is all about, finding information that does not have a readily known source."

Just as they salivated over getting paid for every "illegal" download, so now they are licking their lips at being paid for every copy of every lyric of every song. First shut down the free sites, then put all the lyrics, even the ones that are out of copyright, behind a paid login and behold, instant profit in the billions. Open champagne, order new Ferrari, dance on table top.

Oh, and don't think you can get round it with technology either.

An Eye on the Storm

As half the world holds its breath for the climax of Hurrican Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico advancing steadily towards New Orleans, I've learned more about weather systems like this in 24 hours than I ever imagined I could. Mostly by checking Steve Gregory's Weather Underground site. To quote the man.

But given the immense size and intensity of this once per century type storm -- there may be 'no stopping' this storm -- since Super Storms, like Katrina, create their very own , self sustaining environment -- and can 'deflect' small outside influences - such light wind shear, or areas of dry air.

Personally, as a scientist who's lab is the world around him -- I would be exhilarated to see the 'pulsation cycle' unfold -- as long as we then get a lot of shear to weaken Katrina and prevent what may be the most catastrophic natural disaster in modern times for the U.S.

This is exactly what we mean by citizen journalism, not some loudmouth blithering about stuff he doesn't understand, but experts in the field who share their knowledge for the public good. A good that right now says, "if you live within cooee of the storm track and haven't left yet, what the hell are you thinking?"

A little zinger for the Peak Oil watchers, about 30% of US oil supplies and a goodly chunk of its refining capacity flow through the piece of coast that is going to get slammed by this beast, so there is no surprise that NYMEX Crude Oil has busted the $70 mark and is hovering around it as I write. (Hover the mouse over the CL square on the right side bar)

And to make it a 3-fer, all the climate change Cassandras have been saying for 20 years that global warming wont give us longer days at the beach and better tans, it will give us longer droughts, worse flooding and much more viloent storms. The only question is when will the Polyannas have enough "information" to change their minds?