Lisa Williams - Emotional Life Bloggercon IV

Here's the Emotional Life session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, video

Niall Kennedy - Standards for Users - Bloggercon IV

Here's the Standards for Users session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, blogs, Users, video

Chris Pirillo - Users in Charge at Bloggercon IV

Here's (most of) the Users in Charge session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, conference, Users, video

Bloggercon bootleg feed

Bloggercon bootleg feed live from my camera.

Update: Offline for now - maybe back tomorrow. Check subsequent posts for recorded sessions.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, video

Taxing VoIP - regulation telcos like to see

The FCC has imposed Universal Service Fund taxes on VoIP services that connect to the legacy phone network. USF is allegedly a way to bring services to rural and low-income communities, but in practice is outdoor relief for big telcos. I assume that the telco lobbyists see this as a victory, but as it only applies to interconnecting services, those that are pure internet services now have an even bigger cost advantage.

As for subsidising communications for low income users, it looks like the internet is doing a far better job by making everything cheap or free, as even the homeless are connected to the net.

Technorati Tags: politics, Supernova, telco, USF, VoIP

How are we all feeling?

I am feeling very impressed with We Feel Fine.

Technorati Tags: blogs, statistics, visu

iPod friendly versions of Dvorak's troll confession

Dave Winer managed to stir up a storm by capturing a video of John Dvorak confessing how he trolls Mac users for extra pageviews. Although Dave posted the video in QuickTime format using open codecs (JPEG video and 8-bit uncompressed audio), which should mollify Mark Pilgrim somewhat, the iPod Video won't play this. I converted it using the handy iSquint tool into standard mpeg-4 files. I present 3 alternatives for you:

1. iPod compatible MPEG-4 version, using H264 codec - requires QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84
2. iPod compatible MPEG-4 version, using the previous MPEG4 codec - works in QuickTime 6 or earlier iTunes
3. Dave's compatible MOV version via BitTorrent - should play back to QuickTime 1.0 once you have downloaded it

Those of you playing close attention will notice I am using markup based on the microformat brainstorming for expressing alternative versions of the same file. As this uses rel-enclosure, it will be picked up by Mark's Universal Feed Parser, and also by FeedBurner's version of my blog feed.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, formats, HTML, microformats, movie, podcasting, QuickTime, troll, video

Robogames

15th-18th June - Robogames at Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA

The Robogames is the US's biggest robot competition, featuring battlebots, robot building contests and my boys playing for the UK in International Humanoid Robot Soccer.

Andrew and Christopher made a video report on Saturday.

Walukiewicz's Law

When I joined the BBC in 1988, my first direct manager was Ian Walukiewicz. When I expressed my frustration with management or colleagues to him, he explained it by a very simple principle.
People take jobs to improve themselves. They pick things that are hard for them. So, if you hate people you go into personnel, if you are chronically disorganised you go into management, and if you break everything you touch you become an engineer.
Derek Powazek and Merlin Mann discuss how they suffer and work extra hard at writing and being organised, respectively.
Which makes me wonder what things I am doing because I am bad at them. I've always been told that I'm completely useless at small talk and meeting new people, so the fact that I went to 4 public events last week and have 5 more lined up this week should be a big hint as to the character flaw I'm trying to fix.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BBC, BloggerCon, mashpit, meme, microformats, Robogames, social, Supernova, where

Open formats revisited

Mark Pilgrim has a thorough post explaining his move to open formats. If you care about preserving your data, you should go and read it. On one small point I may be able to give some advice. Mark said:

[I spent] Years of creating content, most recently video content in iMovie. Home movies of my children being born and growing up, heavily edited and burned to DVD and distributed to friends and family. Plus a few screencasts and some other odd video projects I’ve never released. Years of tagging and organizing an ever-growing collection of music, photos, and multimedia. I’ve now exported all my home movies as .DV files — one for the final product, one for all the unused clips. All other edits are lost. All editability is lost.

Mark, have a look at the QuickTime format. It is published and open, has been substantially the same for 15 years, and iMovie (finally) stores it's edit lists in it.

Technorati Tags: formats, video

Scoble eschews PR

When I dropped by Vloggercon on Sunday, I ran into Scoble and Furrier in the lobby, and said hello. They mentioned that they now realised they didn't need a press release. This matches what we do at Technorati - we just blog things ourselves. The press can find them.

Scoble puts it this way:

I talked with the grassroots FIRST. Against the advice, by the way, of a lot of PR people (they wanted me to break the news to Walt Mossberg or someone "important" first — they thought that's how I was going to get the biggest story going).

They all are wrong. I almost bought into it too. In fact, I did. On Saturday I talked with maybe 20 people and said "can you wait until Tuesday to talk about it?" I wanted to give the story to the Wall Street Journal too. Not to mention I wanted to tell my coworkers before the story hit. I didn't get that chance and I'm lucky, in hindsight, that I didn't. Because the story started on the grassroots first it got far far bigger than if I broke it on a big newspaper.

Of course, the Cluetrain chaps were ahead of us all:

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Technorati Tags: meme, press, rhetoric, technorati, writing

Once a troll, always a troll

Dave Winer got Dvorak to admit to being a troll. No surprises there - I discovered a while back that his columns are straight parody fodder. Deconstructing the Troll is based on this one and To Troll or Not to Troll, That Is the Question is based on this one.

Technorati Tags: attention, blogs

When antonyms are synonyms

I had an odd moment of cultural misunderstanding yesterday - I was speaking to an Open Media developers group and I said "Technorati is catholic in what formats it accepts" - and no-one knew what I meant. "You're the pope?" was the reaction.

I quickly restated: "Would you prefer it if I said we were format agnostic?"

Technorati Tags: meme, microformats, rhetoric

Lots coming up over the next couple of weeks

• 6/13 7:30pm-8:30pm - Geo Microformats BOF II: Developing a 'directions' Microformat @ Paseo Room, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA
  The goal of this BOF is to once again bring together key interested folks in the geo and microformats communities, discuss the work on the directions microformat to date, and brainstorm on proposals for a directions microformat.
• 6/20 10am-7pm - MashPit @ Wharton School, SF (u)
• 6/20 8pm Microformats.org 1 year anniversary (u)
• 6/21-23 - Supernova 2006 - at Wharton West / The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA (u)
• 6/23-25 - BarCamp San Francisco - at Microsoft (u)
• 6/23-24 - BloggerCon IV - at CNET

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BloggerCon, microformat, microformats, Supernova, where

The BPI gets tangled in DRM

Just after the All-party Internet Group moved towards a sensible position on DRM, the British Phonographic Industry gave confused testimony to the Select Committee for Culture, Media & Sport inquiry into New Media and the Creative Industries.

Obviously, the Record Labels' official lobbying group is going to be self serving, but they do seem very confused by DRM, judging by their headlines:

• BPI reassures consumers: “We will not sue you for filling your iPod with music you have bought yourself"
• Failure to extend copyright term "could turn an export into an import” - akin to scattering Britain's crown jewels of music across the globe.
• BPI to sue illegal website AllofMP3.com
• Digital downloads can cost more to distribute than CDs
• BPI hopes to reach voluntary settlement on download royalties
• Apple should make iTunes compatible with other players
• Music “more popular than ever”

Let's group these together and deduce some consistent legislative proposals

BPI reassures consumers: “We will not sue you for filling your iPod with music you have bought yourself"

BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson: “We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.”

Excellent, so lets have a law explicitly permitting non-commercial copying, and lets also make DRM technology that interferes with it illegal.

Apple should make iTunes compatible with other players

Jamieson called on Apple to open up its software in order that it is compatible with other players. “We would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability,” he said.

Well, iTunes is actually pretty good at turning locked purchased files into uncompressed Audio CDs. That said, requiring them to distribute DRM-free files would solve this problem too. So nice to find a policy that satisfies all your points.

The next three are a bit of a conundrum, however

BPI to sue illegal website AllofMP3.com

AllofMP3.com’s claims to be legal are false, she said. Neither artists nor record companies receive any payment from the site.

BPI hopes to reach voluntary settlement on download royalties

BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson revealed that the BPI, together with music download stores and mobile companies are still trying to reach an amicable settlement in their dispute with music publishers and songwriters over the royalties which must be paid on downloads.

So, the BPI and AllOfMp3.com are both selling downloads that they don't have clear rights to? Tricky stuff. And yet:

Digital downloads can cost more to distribute than CDs

When questioned on the relative prices of CDs and downloads, Richardson revealed that for an independent company like his, the costs charged by digital distributors are actually higher than those for physical product.

Speaking later, he said, “It is early days for digital music. At this point in time the cost of distribution for downloads is actually higher than for CDs. Regardless of that, however, distribution remains a relatively small part of the investment record companies make in music. All of the key costs for a piece of music remain virtually the same whatever format you distribute it on.”

This gets more confusing. Apple takes a small enough proportion of the price per song for the iTunes store that it has been accused of loss-leading them to sell iPods, and AllofMP3.com is just charging for bandwidth, so how are you running up these costs?

Clearly we need to find a way to separate paying for music from distributing it, as combining them, and trying to wrap them up in DRM is what is causing you such problems.

Failure to extend copyright term "could turn an export into an import” - akin to scattering Britain's crown jewels of music across the globe.

“British music is one of Britain's greatest ambassadors, but failure to extend term could turn an export into an import,” he said. “If we lose the Crown Jewels of British music, little money will flow back to the UK.”

Ok, you've really lost me there. If the UK term is lower than foreign ones, as at present, then that is a great way to favour domestic production over imports - you can sell old foreign recordings in the UK with impunity, and you have 45 years more protection in the US so you can export your back catalogue there. Seems like a win-win for the UK public and economy, and suggests there would be a big benefit from shortening copyright terms in the UK further.

Music “more popular than ever”

Asked to summarise the position of UK record companies, Jamieson said, “Music has never been more popular. But it’s not time to break out the champagne just yet. Digital was always a threat and an opportunity, and I believe we are getting beyond the threat stage.

Richardson dismissed the idea that the internet somehow renders record companies redundant. Many of the oft-quoted examples of internet-built bands are simply an adaptation of long-established business methods. “Far from doing without record companies, they have used the internet to get themselves better deals with record companies,” he said.

So, music is more free, more available, more popular, and less subject to manipulation and domination by the labels. I think it is time to break out the champagne.

Technorati Tags: art , audio, BPIP, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, DRM, economics, law, meme, music, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, rhetoric