Music in speech from 2 angles

Mark Liberman at Language Log turn pitch in speech into pictures.
Radiolab discovers that repeated speech becomes music. Listen to it in this mp3, it's amazing.

Technorati Tags: music

Self-evolving systems - threat or promise?

The Lifeboat foundation is thinking about future threats. I was struck by this one:

A system that evolves freely is potentially very adaptable and creative. It could also become nearly anything, with consequences ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. It is likely unlimited self-evolution will need to be contained carefully even as we mine it for truly new inventions. The arrows nicely hint at a chaos-star as well as replication.

Somehow this reminded me of danah's exasperation with politics, business, academia and media. The disappointing elites she describes would see self-evolving systems as a threat. I prefer to see them as a promise of something better to come.

Technorati Tags: economics, emergence, future, politics

This American Life becomes a podcast

This American Life is the best radio documentary series I know of (Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson agree). I heard on the radio today that it is officially becoming a podcast, and their website confirms it. Free for a week, old episodes for 99¢ each.

Subscribe on iTunes or in your feed reader, you won't regret it.

Technorati Tags: interactive radio, iTunes, podcasting

BBC and insurgents

The BBC terminology guide, 2006:

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. [...] We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunmen", "kidnapper", "insurgent" or "militant."

George Orwell, As I Please, 2nd June 1944

Nearly all human beings feel that a thing becomes different if you call it by a different name. Thus when the Spanish civil war broke out the B.B.C. produced the name "Insurgents" for Franco's followers. This covered the fact that they were rebels while making the rebellion sound respectable.

Technorati Tags: BBC, words

Valley geeks on the YouTube acquisition

Foxtrot is way ahead of Dilbert these days.

Technorati Tags: Google, long tail, puppy, RSS, video, web 2.0, YouTube

Doing more good

Creative Commons are having a fundraiser:


ORG is looking for members:

and recruiting a full-time Executive Director to build on the great work Suw Charman has been doing there bootstrapping ORG.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, digital rights, Open Rights Group, ORG

A five point plan to save us from crappy Flash video

Now YouTube has Google backing, they can stop making us watch Flash video. Everyone who cares about video quality, from Hollywood, to the BitTorrent-using TV bootleggers use mpeg4. Everyone who doesn't uses Flash.

I've pointed out before how Apple screwed things up, but it is still fixable. Heres my 5 point plan.

1. Apple, drop the tacky upgrade ads. Seriously, they make you look like the Giselle wannabee here. You don't need the money from the upgrades, you give away better editing tools on the Mac, and you're just pissing people off needlessly.


2. GooTube, write a detection script, and give us MPEG4 quality if we have QT or another player installed. Google Video has nice MPEG4 versions, but they force you to download them completely and play later. Stop that.


3. Apple, make QT play DiVX AVIs and the other MPEG4 variants. You have the codecs, you have the parsing, you have the engineers. You should have done this 5 years ago. Heck, just bundle Perian and port it to Windows.


4. Google, drop your client, adopt Democracy Player and promote it.


5. Everyone: forget DRM.

After all we deserve better than having to put up with Flash video.

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, formats, Google, iPod, Live TV is Dead, movie, pirate, podcasting, QuickTime, video, YouTube

An Omenous conjunction?

Neil Gaiman writes:

An interview with Terry Gilliam about Good Omens (really, if someone would just give Terry $65,000,000 he could get going. Do you have $65,000,000 you don't need? Check your pockets. Maybe it's in a drawer somewhere. No? Look harder.).

Google buys YouTube, meaning a couple more chaps may suddenly have that much money lying around.
PS - Terry Gilliam's first usenet post (I watched him make it in our office's stock room).

Technorati Tags: bubble, movie, YouTube

Vendor management and personal data

Doc wrote about Vendor Management Systems to counter Customer Management Sytems.

One technique I picked up from Stuart is to register a domain (preferably your own name), and forward any email to it to your inbox. Then, when you need to give a vendor an email address, give them their name at yours, eg godaddy@kevinmarks.com. That way, if the subsequently get spam, or unexpected mail, you know who it was. This can confuse people on the phone though - "what's your email?" "earthlink@kevinmarks.com" "Don't you mean kevinmarks@earthlink.com ?" "Nope".

Dave wants a way to keep his movie reviews where he controls his own data. We have a way to do this with hReview - post the reviews on your blog, then get the vendors to read them. The smarter review sites, like Yahoo Tech are already doing this.

Technorati Tags: hReview, microformats, web 2.0

Geolocation and privacy

As our gadgets come to know where we are, we need to think about who should be able to find this out.
A metaphor that came to mind is that we need be building the Weasley's clock, not the Marauder's map.
Update: Jorge points out that Microsoft Researchers in Cambridge have built a prototype.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, ethics, geo

Foxtrot gets Web 2.0 spot on

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Any comment is superfluous.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

Warhol codename flashback

Microsoft's new video sharing site, Soapbox, was codenamed 'Warhol'. As 'Warhol' was the original codename for QuickTime, back in 1990, I found this rather amusing.
Does the iTunes store's support for video podcasts count as Apple's video sharing competitor?

Technorati Tags: microsoft, QuickTime, video

iTunes store hobbled by DRM

The Beeb misses the point a bit:

On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

The report warned against simple characterisations of the music-buying public that divide people into those that pay and those that pirate.

The glaring omission in that report is of course podcasts, which have shown huge growth, and have been part of the iPod and iTunes experience for over a year now.

Even though I got $250 of credit on the iTunes Music store from ValleyWag, we have been reluctant to spend it, compared to buying CDs from Amazon. The need to burn your own CDs after purchase (to be sure that the tracks don't vaporize next time you have disk trouble) is a significant extra burden, driven by the DRM. Apple's sync-back from iPods to computers in the new iTunes is a step in the right direction, but a more sensible policy towards failed or deleted downloads is long overdue - failed TV show downloads, and purchases lost through disk failure meet with shrugs from Apple.

From Apple's point of view, the iTunes store is a small part of their business - the bulk of the money passing through it goes straight to the rights-holders or in payment processing or bandwidth costs, while they make far more revenue and profit on the iPods themselves. Overall this is a good thing - if Apple were really beholden to the labels and studios for significant revenue, then online culture would be in worse trouble. As it is, Apple's neutrality means that they are happy to encourage podcasters to show up in their listings, as more media means more iPod sales.

Technorati Tags: audio, iPod, iTunes, podcasting, video

In Memoriam Rob (lilo) Levin

Rob Levin, the leading spirit behind the freenode IRC network, died yesterday from injuries sustained by being hit by a car while cycling.
I never met Rob in person, but his indefatigable work in keeping freenode running supported hundreds of conversations I have had with people around the world, many becoming friends, colleagues or collaborators, and I counted him as a friend. I was hired at Technorati through a conversation on freenode, and the #microformats, #technorati, #wordpress, #wikinews and of course #joiito channels are a key part of my online life.
When setting up transient channels for conference backchannels, Rob was always helpful and courteous. I am sad to hear of his death, and the best memorial would be to keep freenode and the PDPC going as he did so well.
Lilo's accounts are still logged in at freenode, and every so often jibot reminds us:

lilo is the executive director of Peer-Directed Projects Center in Houston, Texas & he's another boring cooperativist propertarian Peircean pragmatist anarchist & he runs freenode (http://freenode.net/) & certainly hasn't been getting more sleep lately & is working on freenode-registry in Ruby & blogs on http://spinhome.org/ & http://bloggage.org/ & also uses the nick 'somegeek' & passed away Sep 16th, 2006 (RIP)

Update: Rob spent his days in a constant battle to keep freenode as a place for civil discourse, fighting off trolls, spammers and other net parasites. He did this with grace and good humour, imposing as few rules as possible, and generally inspiring people to behave well by trusting them to. Sadly, the self-described deletionists who infest Wikipedia (summed up well as people who remove what they find unsuitable, while giving little "awards" to each other for removing things) have decided to delete Lilo again. Please help explain to them why this is mistaken, pettifogging, and in appalling taste.

Technorati Tags: freenode, lilo, RIP, Rob Levin, Wikipedia

Douglas Adams' Hyperland

I got a surprise birthday present today. 17 years ago, when I was at the BBC, my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior put together this amazing drama-documentary with Douglas Adams on the future of media. Using 8-bit animated icons keyed over video, they predicted the future of digital media in ways that are only now coming true.
There is a version up on Google Video, but I also cached it on the server I use in case the BBC's 'no-one outside the UK' policy whisks it away from us again. Download Hyperland here, and join me in remembering Douglas Adams.

Technorati Tags: BBC, culture, Douglas Adams, Hyperland, hyperlinks, Live TV is Dead, movie, video