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September 30, 2004
how many clicks does it take?
Everything I needed to know about content distribution I learned from this old tootsie roll lollipop commercial:
That was going to be my entire presentation at yesterday's spectropolis panel. For real. Then I remembered that the discussion was about policy and not content.
I wonder if it would have made any sense to anybody without an explanation.
Posted by yatta at 2:13 AM | TrackBack
September 29, 2004
why can't i tivo off off broadway theater?
tonight i'm going to miss one of cally's plays for the first time in forever. i can time shift everything nowadays, from tv to radio, but i can't get theater performances when i want them.
blasphemy, but that's not theatRE, blah blah blah. in the same way that cally criticizes me for believing in community media, i criticize her for working in a quaint medium with fickle attendance. okay, i don't fully believe what i say to her, but it's only to illustrate a greater point: while community-produced media will find a sustaining audience once it moves away from mediums that demand that only the most popular survive, theater is bound to geographic-specifc meatspace which severely limits it's potential audience.
someone has to figure out how to pipe off-off-broadway theater online. if they can, something tells me that they'll thrive.
Posted by yatta at 2:50 PM | TrackBack
did someone "produce out" talib kweli's flow?
i usually don't do music reviews but then again, i also don't "do" anything on braintag but pipe thoughts to bits so whatever, right? plus this isn't as much of a review as it is a way for me to take my mind off of spectropolis presentations for a while.
anyway, i remember getting into this argument with this guy at a rooftop party in union square years ago. he was suggesting that talib kweli was to mos def as phife was to q-tip. although i loved phife in the context of a tribe called quest, i could never get into any solo-phife that i heard it on mixtapes and the occasional bootleg. kweli, i thought, was different. kweli's rhymes were clever. his lyrics had imagination. most importantly, there was a kineticism -- almost stress-like -- just beneath the top layer of his flow that i remember describing at the time as sounding like a man on the verge of revolution. 'dead prez implicit' i called it. (dead prez' album had also just dropped that summer.) for that i never questioned that he would have a record contract outside of black star.
in 2002 kweli drops both reflection eternal (with hi-tek) and quality. i wonder if the kid who argued with me on that rooftop in union square even remembers our conversation. more importantly, both albums stay in heavy rotation through two generations of my ipod.
all that was setup in order to say that i just listened to the beautiful struggle and came away feeling like something was missing. the kineticism was gone. it sounded like the producers he assembled for the album had gone through and sprinkled a layer of barbituates over the entire thing. and here's what was really weird about the album: it made me feel self conscious. Maybe I was wondering if Kweli's well documented concern about his flow had gotten to him. Or to his producers. Or both. (either way, i don't agree with the criticism.)
whatever it was, i know it's not permanent. that energy was still in kweli at the block party the other week. his live show still jumped. i hope his next album will again.
Posted by yatta at 12:44 AM | TrackBack
September 28, 2004
conversing on a panel @ spectropolis tomorrow.
i forgot to mention that I'll be talking with folks at tomorrow's Spectropolis panel on the digital commons. I hope to keep my presentation very short (i'm aiming for 90-120 seconds) in order to spend more time in a conversation during the question and answer period.
Victory of the Commons: The Case for a Public Airwaves Movement
September 29, 7:00 pm, Multi-Purpose Room at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
This panel will evaluate the case for a widespread social movement advocating open spectrum policies led by community wireless groups. Panelists will present the successes and failures of earlier media and technology movements including media reform, low-power FM, public access television, and open source software.....
Participants: Chris Anderson - Indymedia New York, Dharma Dailey - Prometheus Radio, Anthony Townsend - NYCwireless, Michael Scott Jones - Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Moderator: Laura Forlano - Columbia University This event is ticketed. Admission is $5; free for Pace students. To order tickets or for box office hours, visit http://www.pace.edu/culture. Both Pace University's Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts and the Multi Purpose Room can be found by entering on Spruce Street between Park Row and Gold Street, just east of City Hall Park.
Yeah, my name isn't on the list, but I'll be there.
Posted by yatta at 6:52 PM | TrackBack
the open content evolution
Wrote an article on the Open Content movement for the Community Media Review. It's a basic survey piece that kinda outlines the parallel histories of open source computing and community media. I thought it'd be useful to community media folks just getting into this thing. I wish I had posted the initial draft online for my friends to edit, Darknet style. Next time I'll practice what I preach. ;)
Read it after the continuation...
...
The Open Content Evolution
When musician Colin Mutchler wanted to release his acoustic guitar track, “My Life”, he wanted to see what other artists would do with it, so he posted his song as an mp3 to the website opsound.org and published it using a Creative Commons license, effectively inviting everyone to do something interesting with it – as long as they agree to release their track with the same permissions. Within a month, a violinist named Cora Beth, who had never once met Colin, took the song and added a violin track to it, renaming it “My Life Changed.” And Colin is more than happy with the results. “I think the track is definitely more beautiful now,” says Colin, “Maybe eventually we'll add drums and words.”
People are embracing the open source movement as a way to enable new levels of collaboration, evolve ideas, and ultimately transform not only the way we make media but how we distribute it and how users ultimately participate in it.
Put simply, "open source" describes any project that allows for the following: free redistribution of its work, allows anyone to make modifications or derivatives of its work, does not discriminate against persons or groups, and does not restrict its use in conjunction with other work. It’s a work methodology that stresses the openness of the creative process, backed up with licensing that explicitly promotes the widespread distribution of the work, free of charge.
When most people think of open source they think of computers. One of the most important movements within Computer Science, the open source software movement has created some of the most widely used applications today – applications like the Linux operating system, the Mozilla web browser, and the Apache web server software which powers over half of the world’s web pages. What makes this software succeed isn’t necessarily the genius of their programmers but the terms under which it is licensed and distributed. By producing this software under open source licenses, it allows programmers and users alike to contribute improvements, squash bugs, and enjoy a level of independence by relying on the power of the community instead of the economic health of a single software vendor.
Open source is not just about software. Millions of people everywhere are using the open source model in media, allowing people to redistribute and create derivatives of their words, photos, audio, and video with an "open content" license similar to that of open source. By combining this open content with media-making tools that take advantage of the network (blogs, video and audio editing applications, and playlist generators) users are changing the way that we make and curate media, and allow people to remix, collaborate, and expand upon the work of others like never before.
If any of this seems a wee bit familiar to you, it should. The idea that a group of people with common interests could come together to work on something is not new to us. Community Media has known “open source” and “open content” processes for a while, although we’ve called it things like “media collectives” and “public domain.” Our early involvement in the open source movement can be seen in the open collaboration projects of the 1960s and 1970s. While computer programmers in places like UC-Berkeley, Bell Labs, and MIT worked in environments that promoted the free exchange of software they had written (allowing them to fulfill the hacker credo of “pushing the limits of the do-able”), projects like the Alternative Media Center at NYU, Open Channel, and Global Village showed people that collaborating on video and film productions could yield greater results than working alone. While the products of their work may have seemed different at the time, both movements still shared common thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.
As the economic pressures of the 1970s and 1980s bared down on both the community media and open software movements, their paths split. While community media found legislation as a way to help determine it’s future (public access), the business world picked up on the profitability of computing and sent the programmers on a path of entrepreneurship that traded in the idealism of the “free software” movement for an Ayn Rand-style pragmatism still seen in geek culture to this day. Open source still existed, but the driving force became less about community and more about self-interest.
During the telecommunications and dot-com boom of the 1990s, a computer world flush with money began thinking less about return-on-investment and more about making a “contribution” to the internet world. More times than often, they ended up being one in the same. (Who needs to think about money when everything is profitable?)
Programmers dedicated to open source projects took advantage of the network (the internet) and learned to collaborate on software projects across cultures and across languages. The network lent itself to such collaboration – projects could be hosted on websites and source files weren’t so unwieldy that they couldn’t be transferred in a reasonable amount of time across a 56k modem connection. It was during this time that the computing world saw an explosion in the number and variety of software projects calling themselves “open source.” Everyone wanted to learn how to leverage the network for their projects – and why not? Linux made the technology and business headlines daily and money was being poured into any business plan with "open source" in its model. Open source software seemed to be a success.
Meanwhile, networked-based media still had a ways to go. Audio and video media files were large and unwieldy. Because of the state of digital encoding and slow modem speeds at the time, a 30-minute video program could still take up to three days to transfer over the internet. Despite the success of open source software, and the relative success of early collaborative media distribution projects like indymedia.org, audio and video media production was still not ready for network collaboration.
Flash forward to the current decade, where an audio file can be transferred faster than you can say the word “Napster.” Technologies like QuickTime, mp3, MPEG4, and Windows Media allow 30-minute programs to fit on a USB key drive the size of your thumb. Cable modems and DSL lines transfer files up to 100 times faster than 56k. The advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing means that you no longer need a web server with an expensive bandwidth connection in order to distribute a file. (When you download a file off of a P2P network, you automatically help redistribute that file.) The tools had grown to support the sharing of media and the tools and processes were being assembled to support it.
Now people are using P2P networks to trade media, share homegrown remixes, and distribute original content to the world. End users, not just media makers, are distributing media to the point where it now accounts for a steady 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic. But while this has been wonderful for the end-users, the commercial content providers have had a less than stellar time of it. Most of the content being shared on P2P networks is theirs, and it's all been published with closed content licensing. Legally, it shouldn’t be out there.
Both Hollywood and the music industry have built an entire industry not on the creation of media but on its duplication. While P2P networks are built to promote widespread sharing and distribution of media, Hollywood makes their money off of controlling who gets to see their media and when. As a result, commercial content makers have taken to suing thousands of people and threatening millions more. It's a heavy-handed tactic, but they have yet to come up with an innovative way of dealing with this disconnect. All of this would be less of a problem, of course, if the media people were sharing was originally distributed with an open content license.
Fortunately, not all groups are interested in holding back the proliferation of their work. Community media has traditionally placed a higher value on maximizing the reach of their work over its commercial viability. Most community media producers would welcome the widespread proliferation of their work. While some producers see community media as a stepping stone towards earning their Emmy, most are attracted to cable access television and community radio as a way to exercise their First Amendment rights.
But despite this, the majority of content on public access is distributed with licenses of copyright and not copyleft. Most producers are unaware that alternative licensing is out there and fairly easy to understand. Groups like Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) provide a number of simple, easy to read open content licenses that allow for reasonable levels of use permissions without necessarily giving up all rights as an author, perfect for the producer of a public access program looking to make their voice heard.
It would be quite simple for a community media center to download Creative Commons licenses from the web and create posters that explain all of the options available to a media producer. Copies could be distributed and explained whenever someone new signs up for a show.
By using open content licensing in their work, producers create the opportunity that their ideas will be heard beyond their primary audiences. By promoting the use of open content licensing among their producers, community media centers create the possibility that producers’ monologues get turned into dialogue.
Producers more interested in making their work completely free, can use the open content license put forth by the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) or continue issuing their work in the public domain.
Besides individual artists like Colin Mutchler and media collectives like indymedia, people unfamiliar with the community media movement have taken an interest in open content. People like J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter, founders of open-media.org, and Jeff Jarvis, proponent of the Center for Citizens’ Media have seen what open source can do for the computer science world. Now they want to see the same processes applied to the media. They've started projects that promote the creation and proliferation of grassroots media using the internet as it's medium. In the process, they’ve attracted scores of people who weren't otherwise familiar with community media.
Another important aspect of the work of new groups like open-media.org is that they’re attracting computer programmers capable of building the tools necessary to take advantage of open content licensing and P2P networks. While pioneering net-based media collaboration projects like Michael Eisenmenger’s Indymedia Global Video Exchange used centralized servers to store and share media, more recent tools like BitTorrent allow people to share and distribute media without the need of large file servers with lots of bandwidth.
By encoding a video file on your home computer and uploading a pointer to that file to a BitTorrent tracker like DV Guide (http://dv.open4all.info/) you can use your unused home cable modem bandwitdh to share your media with anyone who wants to see it. Applications like webjay (http://webjay.org/) allow users to create playlists of their favorite internet audio and video files, creating thousands of micro-channels of content. New projects like the Digital Bicycle out of LMC-TV in Lowell, MA (http://10speed.ltc.org) look to provide a more community media-centric approach to things like webjay and the DV Guide project, making it easier for centers to share and distribute programming via the P2P networks instead of “bicycling” tapes. All of this starts to shape a world where media production and distribution can easily bypass traditional media networks and reach audiences potentially in the billions.
Ultimately, community media's involvement in open licensing and networked media tools shouldn't end in finding new sources of footage and easy distribution. Tools that empower the media makers also empower the audience, and their proper use and deployment allow us to close the feedback loop started when the first community media projects began over forty years ago.
One of the early goals of community media was to create a safe space for dialogue among the community. For years, that meant providing a space for people to make themselves heard through things like cable television broadcasts. But television is a one-way technology. The soap box only enables one half of the conversation. There also needs to be a way to enable the community to talk back to their broadcasts, hopefully in a respectful, responsible manner.
Internet-based communications tools like instant messaging, text messaging, and video chat continue the conversation started by live call-in shows by providing a way to interact both with their media and each other. By incorporating these tools into television broadcasts both live and taped (squeezed into the corner through a DVE), centers give the community a place to comment on the work they see. Language filtering, user registration, and abuse blocking allow centers to a add a level of responsibility hard to maintain with live phone call-ins.
Projects like Shawn Van Every’s Interactive Tele-Journalism project (http://www.walking-productions.com/itj/) enable audiences to enter a conversation with the media maker, asking questions and leaving comments in live interview situations, while programs like BrowseTV (http://browsetv.net/) use video chat to engage audiences and allow them to help assemble the content of the video program on the fly.
By providing an environment where anyone can take video and audio from a program, remix it, comment on it, and make it their own, centers can enable audiences to gain more control over what they see and transform themselves from passive consumers of media to active participants in the media that they use.
The mediasphere is quickly evolving from an industrial-era hierarchy of producers and consumers to a nodal world of end users with varying levels of participation. These users have started taking control of what media they see, when they see it, and what they share with their community. Traditional media has been slow to respond to this, marrying themselves to content licensing and business models built for a world based on atoms and not bits. In the meantime, community media finds themselves in a world of open content, open tools, and new relationships, giving them the opportunity to finally use technology that mirror the values they already share.
kenyatta cheese (mail@kenyattacheese.net) is a media developer based in New York City. Currently he works with the art and technology lab Eyebeam Atelier (http://www.eyebeam.org) and edits unmediated.org (http://www.unmediated.org), a group blog on decentralized media.
Posted by yatta at 6:40 PM | TrackBack
September 27, 2004
art+tech+activism panel @ New School tonight.
Hot Enough? Art, Activism and Wireless Technology During the Republican National Convention
with Yury Gitman, Tad Hirsch, Natalie Jeremijenko, Joshua Kinberg,
neuroTransmitter, and moderator Jonah Peretti
Monday, September 27, 7PM
The New School, Theresa Lang Center, 2nd Floor
55 West 13th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
Wow. Just look at that title. I bet they could've fit "locative media" and "social software" somewhere in there if they had wanted to.
Hope to see you there.
Posted by yatta at 5:02 PM | TrackBack
welcome to microcasting.
Adam Curry has a couple of posts today detailing Hugo Schotman's audio blogging setup. The best part about it: he uses iChatAV to send live audio to distribute audio via IM. (**whoa! there's the problem with reading blogs at 4am -- I delved deeper and realized that Hugo's using iChatAV to receive audio and not send it. Still a great idea, but different from microcasting. -kc.)
If you're a blogger with a tiny audience of, say, your family and friends, you can put your media on a loop and connect it to your computer in a way that it thinks it sees a webcam (for video) or microphone (for audio). You can create a bot that does nothing but listen for incoming videoblog or audioblog requests, and initiate a one-way video/audio chat with your viewer. All of a sudden you have streaming for an audience of one. No, it doesn't scale, but that's part of the point.
Maybe the answer to the bandwidth question isn't to throw more money at it but to go with what you have. Maybe there was a way to solve the distribution issue by throwing a clever hack at it. That was the basis of the microstreaming project I presented at the Tactical Media Toolkit workshop at Eyebeam this year:
Although extremely inelegant, I threw lots of hardware on the head end of iChatAV, transforming a DVD Player with RS-422 and an analog to DV bridge into something that would trick iChat into thinking it was a webcam. (Well, I guess anything firewire could work.)
After burning a couple of Jay Dedman's early videoblogs onto a DVD, I started learning to program bots, occasionally picking the brains of frumin and peretti for ideas. Eventually Jonah pointed me to Andy Baio's InfocomBot. About a month later, I came across Andy Ihnatko's iChat TV scripts in his "iChat With Your TV" article which provide a way to automate the one-way video chats. Since then, I've been working on-and-off on machine control (bad pun) via Applescript and thinking of ways to eliminate the DVD player and bridge setup. But also since then, I've come to remember that this was an exercise and not the end solution to the bigger problem of live distribution for video bloggers, so the project has kinda been archived for now.
If anyone can think of a reason to revive the vidchatbot, please let me know.
Posted by yatta at 4:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 24, 2004
"I have a window office."
I think the Wu got herself a free subscription to nerve.
Nerve.com Pickup Line Contest
PICKUP LINES, ORIGINAL DIVISION
"I have a window office." — Alice Wu
Posted by yatta at 1:22 PM | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
the philosophy of the reblog.
tomorrow is tom moody's last day reblogging for the eyebeam reblog. there's been a steady stream of amazingly great rebloggers over there including tom, beverly tang, alex galloway twhid.... I've been checking out the other reblogs out there and I've been pretty damn impressed with those as well. btang's is awesome, near near future is wonderful, and gavin's clippings has been pretty fantastic. (uh, who slipped the 8th grade adjectives into my drink?) oh yeah, and we can't forget sexblo.gs.
anyhoo, tom's gone and put his reblogging philosophy down on blog for others to see. i'm about to give up reins to the unmediated reblog (there are seven authors who post to their own blogs + del.icio.us links and the reblog aggregates them all) for a couple of weeks. I think i'm going to hand out a link to tom's philosophy as a guide.
Posted by yatta at 11:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 21, 2004
it brought tears to my eyes.
britney spears busts one. no need to hate on britney but i haven't felt like this since i first heard those william shatner records.
via stereogum
Posted by yatta at 3:55 PM | TrackBack
September 20, 2004
most memorable shows ever....
that i can remember right now, in no particular order:
- 1994. stereolab. mercury lounge, nyc. band arrive in a ford extended passenger van and carry in their own gear. nuff said.
- 1992. versus. some kid's basement, westfield, nj. don't remember who the kid was but how the fuck did he get versus to play his basement?
- 1984. dj cheese (aka: cousin poopsie). my aunt joyce's apartment in the meadowbrook projects, plainfield, nj. watched him scratch for hours.
- 1992. pearl jam. trocadero, philadelphia, pa. went to the show on someone's plus 1 and didn't give a shizit. came away giving a big ass shizit.
- 1994. poor righteous teachers. trenton, nj. don't remember where but that's where i learned the best hip hop is always local.
- 1993. nirvana, roseland, nyc. last show in nyc. audience sings along to (was it "come as you are"?), so kurt cobain starts asking everyone to "shut the fuck up".
- 2004. dave chappelle's block party, quincy st in brooklyn. kanye west opens, accompanied by a marching band. the roots are the house band, backing up almost every single act. yes, the whole night. jill scott and erykah badu sing a duet. during the roots' own set they bring out big daddy kane and kool g rap. i watch mos def and talib kweli perform together as black star for the first time in fuck. between acts there'a sound problem so dave chappelle come out and does stand up for close to an hour to kill time. they end the night with a fugees reunion show (for real this time, lauryn fucking hill). forgot to mention dead prez, common, jeru.... beyond ridiculous - this show was impossible.
between sets i walked back to my place, checked email, had lunch, made calls, played nfl 2k5. when i heard someone go back on, i walked back outside. like i said: never again absolutely impossible. felt like i ran into pretty much everyone i haven't seen in forever. hip hop heads at the show. friends riding through the neighborhood just happen to stop by. sitting on my stoop. drinking beer watching folks trying to figure out the portapotties, listening to the fugees rap over a the roots playing "smells like teen spirit". (have i said 'impossible' already?)
took some shots and vid from the street and my roof (i'll post them later) but i didn't get my camera in the show so go check out downonlove's pics instead.
Posted by yatta at 10:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 18, 2004
uh, what's dave chappelle and michael gondry doing in the backyard?
someone told me earlier this week about a wattstax'-like movie being made by dave chappelle and michael gondry. the thing was to be shot at a secret location in brooklyn. well i found out this morning that the secret location is my frikkin backyard.
The security folks said that no one is being allowed in who haven't been brought in by secret bus, so I guess it really doesn't matter that I tell you that the location is Quincy Street and Downing in here in Clinton Hill. Don't know if I can claim hardship (you're keeping me from sleeping, I might as well party!) and get in but I'll try anyway. Otherwise I'll just listen from my roof. I'm probably closer than most of the audience will be anyway.
I'd be really excited about this whole thing if it weren't for the 15 portapotties lined up in front of my place.
They're expecting 5,000 people for the event. And only 15 portapotties. All lined up on my block. Could anything be more frightening?
Posted by yatta at 2:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 17, 2004
sims 2
sheila's afraid of the pending release of the sims 2. she's afraid that it will eat up entire weeks of her existence and it's true. i mean -- she's already in the game....
If contextual menus start popping up over her head I'm gonna just put her out of her misery.
Posted by yatta at 1:54 PM | TrackBack
September 16, 2004
Bike lock anti-terror rhetoric
Kryptonite responds to the bicpengate at Engadget:
The current Kryptonite locks based on a tubular cylinder design.... In 2002, Kryptonite began development of a new disc cylinder system... We are accelerating the delivery of the new disc cylinder locks... The world just got tougher and so did our locks.
Phillip Torrone's response made me giggle:
The world didn’t get tougher, it got Bic pens, blogs and your locks got opened.
{chuckle.}
Posted by yatta at 6:19 PM | TrackBack
September 15, 2004
Colin Mutchler's "Free Culture" show tonight in Williamsburg.
Colin's producing his Free Culture show at Checks Cashed tonight.Free Culture is multimedia performance by Brooklyn based artist Colin Mutchler that mixes music, image, video and spoken word to speak his personal journey, both physically and digitally, through the last four years.I can't make it tonight (nothing to do with my aversion to bars named after their pre-bar occupants. honestly!) but knowing Colin, it'll be a great show. It's free, so drop by if you can.
In the spirit of remixing and sampling culture, Colin uses a unique combination of laptop, projector, and acoustic guitar to share his own experiences and vision since graduating from Duke in 1999, including September 11th, youth media, and the emerging creative commons, where citizens and artists collaborate across space and time.
Posted by yatta at 5:51 PM | TrackBack
shhhh. (it's a modest mouse show.)
Wolf Parade &38;38; Friends @ Webster Hall. (the 'Friends' part.)
Posted by yatta at 5:25 PM | TrackBack
force quit.
Posted by yatta at 5:17 PM | TrackBack
eduardo galeano - blogger extraordinaire.
just re-read the book of embraces. he would make a great blogger.
Posted by yatta at 12:56 PM | TrackBack
September 14, 2004
This weekend I sat around my apartment, rented a movie, watched the squirrels out my window.
This weekend, Michelle does a frikkin triathalon.
(Okay, maybe I didn't just sit around the house, but everything pales in comparison. Kudos, Me-shell.)
Posted by yatta at 2:27 PM | TrackBack
"Compression makes the Internet economically viable."
JD Lasica interviews the folks from DivX for Engadget and pulls the following candy over at New Media Musings.
What is the 10,000-foot view of some of the possibilities that codec technologies like DivX hold out for home entertainment? Will we see a grassroots video movement, for example?Greenhall: ... Compression makes the Internet economically viable. No matter how good your broadcast is, it only has the ability to deliver out a certain amount of content in temporal fashion. I turn on my satellite receiver, I’ve got 30 channels. But those 30 selections serve 10 million people, so they’re going to be very generic, and I don’t get a lot of control over the programming. If I start to use recording technology like PVR and TiVo, I can time shift that, but my selections are still based on the economics of mass media. But if you start layering in the Internet, you can do one-to-one communication. You don’t have to get out to an audience of a million in order to be viable, you can get out to an audience of six and be viable, depending on what you want to accomplish. So that signals the ability to deliver very narrowly tailored content out to individuals. People will be able to slice and dice what they consume - and somebody has to produce all that content. Now I have the ability to create and publish content at a very high level and deliver it to millions or to one person. So you’ve got hundreds of millions of potential publishers.
Posted by yatta at 1:39 PM | TrackBack
callablahg, nstw, h2ed: a bunch of blogs of note today
Well, besides noting that both this site and unmediated were unreachable for half the day. ugh.
Daniell (of Digital Bicycle) pointed me to a d/l of Extra T's "I Like It" in the comments a couple of days ago. More importantly, I followed the link to his personal blog and found some good stuff there. Thx, Daniell. Keep it up.
Just spent the last couple of hours playing with MT templates for H2Ed in order to relaunch their site using MT for the entire backend. I had been wanting to do that for a while, then after seeing how great a job Will Richardson did with the Hunterdon Central HS site, I went ahead and made H2Ed live. TW's gonna convert all of the static pages over to MT entries with easier to remember URLs. We'll have to see how that goes.
And, finally, I've been waiting years for this one: Cally is blogging. 
Besides being my lifetime partner for world travel, Cally is a playwright. Although I don't know what her site is going to read like, I will tell you that listening to her plays makes me want to eat words:
I knew a man who ate the moon once. A long time ago. He was polite about it. Asked permission of the stars first. Wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin when he was done. I asked him how it tasted. He said, exactly as you might imagine.
She just started blogging a couple of days ago. Let's hope it takes.
Posted by yatta at 12:29 AM | TrackBack
September 13, 2004
like frikkin bunnies.
I went to go catch up on a month of unread messages in the videoblogging yahoo group this evening. and this is what I'm presented with:
i need to switch to digest mode.
Posted by yatta at 11:58 PM | TrackBack
hey ryan.
i'd love to hear your thoughts on this, mr. shaw.
Posted by yatta at 11:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Are WiFi City Clouds Practical?
In the wake of Philly's announcement, TechDirt tackles the concept. DailyWireless tackles the tackler (with excellent linkage, as always.)
Posted by yatta at 11:11 PM | TrackBack
September 12, 2004
omfg: a bit late to the kill bill thing.
just watched the edit decisions for the final fight sequence of kill bill vol. 2 sixteen times in a row. in slow motion. absolutely wonderful.
Posted by yatta at 4:14 AM | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
pretty pretty reblog.
bev tang's gone and remade her blog into a reblog and it looks mightyfine. I've been working on and off on redesigns of this site and unmediated for a while. seeing this makes me want to get it done sooner than later.
Posted by yatta at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 10, 2004
You must relax.
Okay. After three years of Cold War fever, this ultra-nervous thing is really getting on my, uh, nerves. I'm about to launch my own campaign called "Refuckinglax New York".
(via Gothamist.)
Posted by yatta at 10:04 PM | TrackBack
king of all metadata
is it any surprise that schachter seems to have the most organized tags on del.icio.us?
Posted by yatta at 8:57 PM | TrackBack
September 9, 2004
girl, I know the dawn and clear sky (even rise?) just to honor the persona of my boo.
dusting off cds I come across my copy of prince paul's a prince among thieves. listening to it now. parts of it just blows my mind.
Posted by yatta at 9:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
unconventional tv via demandmedia
akb points to unconventional tv clips available for d/l over at archive.org.
Posted by yatta at 8:11 PM | TrackBack
If a march sh!ts in the woods is it still effective dissent?
Found this NYPress Op over at jsmooth's. It says in short: marches are useless, protesters are smelly, who's going to bring the revolution, blahblahblah.
He also says something about the need for work stoppages as true dissent, but the climate doesn't seem right for that sort of direct action. (Would've made perfect sense after Florida in 2000, though.)
I do agree with one thing which is that marches don't work. They don't work b/c they are no longer spectacle. Haven't been in over thirty years. Disappeared about the same time the town square did. How can you demonstrate anything to anyone when there's no one to demonstrate to? The people you really need to reach are caught in shopping malls or stuck in front of their TV sets. So even if you do amass half a million people in the streets, it doesn't matter.
In the meantime, specials interests have media coverage on lockdown. They've rendered political marches into -- as TW puts it -- "a bunch of dirty granolas who haven't come to terms that they aren't oppressed." If you dismiss the imagery, you get the meat of the problem -- protesters are just another actor on the stage.
So what's my two bit remedy? Forget the spectacle. Go for substance. As Mike Taibbi says in his column, marches don't mean shit. No one's scared of marches unless you live in a country where large gatherings of people still matter. But can you imagine what would have happened the media and the police put all this time and energy into the anti-protester machine and no one showed up?
If the RNC protest organizers said "fuck it", dropped their placards, and while Dick, Bush, and the rest of the Zellinators were conjuring up the hounds of hell in MSG, thousands of people showed up in the swing states, en mass, organizing voter registration drives, handing out voter guides, and leading workshops in media literacy?
Now that would have scared the melgibson out of them.
Posted by yatta at 7:47 PM | TrackBack
John Bruneau Interviews Cory Arcangel
Not that I'm one to misquote people but Cory's worried about the things that get lonely in your closet.
Posted by yatta at 6:28 PM | TrackBack
installed the ecto 2 beta without thinking.
now i need to figure out how to get my prefs back in ecto 1.
idiot.
Posted by yatta at 6:25 PM | TrackBack
September 7, 2004
Anonymity today.
d-boogie shows me this article with the following caption:
Uh, okay.
Posted by yatta at 10:57 PM | TrackBack
wattstax
is on POV tonight! Hot damn!
featuring a young unknown comic named richard pryor and hosted by a baddass rev. jesse (with a baddass fro), I first saw a battered vhs copy of this doc at a party when I was in the 11th grade. it was one of those films that helped cement my decision to go into media.
I guess there's a DVD out now. Never saw it on TV before. Glad to see it now.
Posted by yatta at 10:40 PM | TrackBack
Words I haven't used since high school.
Just going through a bunch of old floppies from my DHS days. Among the words that stand out that I haven't used since then:
- fresh.
- dude.
- word up.
- not. (in the wayne's world sense, tho i remember using it pre-ww.)
- vociferous.
Posted by yatta at 12:18 AM | TrackBack
Project Censored 2005 - Online!
Is this new? It used to be that you couldn't actually read Project Censored "Top 25 Censored Stories" online. You had to buy the book.
I guess they decided to finally join the end of the 20th century.
Posted by yatta at 12:10 AM | TrackBack
September 6, 2004
waiting on the mysterious black box
Jay has had a bunch of posts lately talking about Dan's "black box." (Didn't you sign that NDA, Mr. Melinger?) At first I thought he was talking about the thing the crew is working on, but today I see he's talking about a Linux-based PVR.
Whew. Maybe I'm in the far out minority (or maybe a couple of months ahead of the curve?) but I don't like watching TV anymore. The TV has become such a secondary object to me. I use it to check the color fidelity on my Final Cut Pro outputs more than anything else.
My TV is peripheral to my computer.
Maybe I can convince Jay of the same.
Posted by yatta at 11:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 3, 2004
unmediated mnn
drazen, shawn, and i are appearing on jay's tv show this afternoon (6.00p EST) to talk about participatory media. not sure what channel it's on but you should be able to check the stream at mnn.
Posted by yatta at 4:32 PM | TrackBack
Terror Quiz.
via Tom Moody (who's reblogging this week, by the way.)
Posted by yatta at 1:25 PM | TrackBack
September 2, 2004
rnc redux done.
just finished reduxing with the screensaversgroup in w'burg. we started off at the brooklyn public library by grand army plaza. that went well until the confrontation with the police (who were into the projection until the staff sarge showed up.) left to join the bopcollective in w'burg and just called in the night. pretty successful week. i'll post clips, pics, and screengrabs on the ssg site in a bit. to everyone who came out to support ssg: thankyou thankyou thankyou!
Posted by yatta at 10:56 PM | TrackBack
September 1, 2004
when nerds protest the RNC.
via cory
Posted by yatta at 1:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack