Bandwidth Upgrade
Those stats are the current upload and download speed test results whilst watching France 24 on Zattoo. In other words I should have enough bandwidth to use operator11 without too many problems now.
Bill Palmer of Iprong 3c, twittermail3k twittter 3k+
Today’s news is as follows. Having seen that Bill Palmer of the Iprong podcast and website would add the 300th friend on Facebook I decided I would take this opportunity to add him. His podcast is “for the ipod generation so take the time to listen to it. It’s mainly about iphones and ipods but mixes in quite a few artists in the process.
The second event was becoming the 3000th person to use twittermail. I saw someone mention that they were up to three thousand and I decided to be the 3000th. Now that’s done it’s great. It’s twice as great since it helps to emphasise that I have reached over three thousand tweets since becoming a twitter member.
The last bit of news is that it’s blog action day tomorrow. The topic is going to be the environment so right anything with an environmental conscience for your blog and share it with the world.
That’s it for tonight.
Why Audiovisual Content That’s Not On-Demand is Dead to Me
I’m online from 10-15hrs a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.
From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.
The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.
A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.
Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.
Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.
There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology. We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.
The Kendra Party – Networking Event and Party
Last night I went to the Kendra event not knowing what to expect from the event. It started at 6pm and ended by 9pm and i had the opportunity to meet with a few people of which Brendon Kenny of VK media and the Jummp project.
A large amount of metadata is currently being discarded without understanding its value! JuMMp aims to promote interoperability for metadata and signalling information exchange. This will enable contextual navigation within live and recorded content for users of digital devices such as PVRs, games consoles, mobile phones and computers – providing value to end users and to all stakeholders in the content chain.
It’s an interesting project and you can participate in the conversaton and learn more through their facebook group. It’s an interesting project with some very interesting backers so I look forward to seeing how they implement this in the wild.
Other people I met with are Mark and Alex of Astream – a streaming service provider, Darren of Ioda, an independent online distribution Alliance and Dennis of zzizzlfilm – short film distribution for filmmakers by filmmakers. I was also introduced to Nick, product development Director for Bsky and a few more people.
It was a good event with many interesting people to meet and whenever the next event is organised I will make sure to turn up.
Vtap to play videos on the Iphone and Itouch
Today whilst surfing through the webapps I found one that’s great for what I do, share video content via the web. I found Vtap, a video sharing website that allows you to search through, select and stream videos straight through to your iphone or Ipod touch without either converting it to an ipod compatible format or using the youtube website.
For certain videos it gave me a feedreader rather than playing the videos but for those that are already indexed it works well. It’s definitely worth a try and it’s a taste of the future.
The Facebook Friend Density Map
The Friend density map is an interesting one. It shows you where the highest concentration of your friends is. It’s a good idea when you’ve got friends spread around the world as we do. It’s a shame it’s limited only to the US at the moment. I can only see six percent of my friends this way.
I sent a quick message to the creator of the API and I hope he resolves this issue in the near future.
England is Top EU country for social networking
According to a recent article in the Times England is top EU country for social networking with 5.6 hrs a month spent on social networking websites such as Facebook:
Britons are the ‘social networking’ champions of Europe, displaying a far greater appetite for websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo than fellow citizens on the continent.
British internet users spent an average of 5.8 hours a month – about a 11 minutes a day – on such sites, in comparison with their nearest rivals the Germans, who spent 3.1 hours a month (6 minutes a day), according to research.
source It’s an interesting figure. Why would England be the top country for social networking? Does university attendance and movement from town to town make a difference? Does the fact that people are so spread across London mean that they are more inclined to stay in touch via electronic methods rather than in person?
I’d like more information on how they came up with these figures.
CCTV, Two Exhibits, one town crier and of course John Bull
England is a CCTV nation with more cameras per capita than any other nation. As a result there is great interest from people like Christian of documentally.com and Our Man Inside and John Perivolaris. Both of them are working on CCTV related pieces.
At Parliament Square Christian demonstrated his great ability to talk with anyone he meets. Two characters we met whilst at Parliament square were the London Town crier and John Bull from Birmingham. The London town crier has some interesting stories to tell should you desire to hear them. John Bull wears an image of the Queen on his left side and a picture of Winston Churchill on his right. He often comes down to London to protest about a number of topics.
As if that wasn’t enough a stop was made at London’s Photographer’s Gallery where there’s Taryn Simon’s exhibit for restricted places. It’s free so if you have the time you might as well drop by there.
To top off the day there is an exhibit starting in London very soon showing Giuseppe Di Bella’s stamps. Those are well known because they are referred to as the “Abu Ghraib Series”. The concept is simple enough. Print some stamps and mail them to people around the world and get the official seals. You can find a more complete explanation here if you desire.
What is a Twitterstorm
The Twitterstorm is a description of an event where hundreds of 140 character messages are sent at the same time. The most recent example of this occurrence is the one that took place when news of Jaiku being swallowed by google broke. Both Twitter and Jaiku are similar. They both give you 140 characters to express yourself and they can both be taken with you.
When Jaiku was sold to Google the Twitter community has been wondering what’s next for them. That is true, at least for those who are not heavy users of twitter. For the more passive user Jaiku is more appealing because it’s got more bells and whistles. Twitter relies on your ability to express what is on your mind exclusively through text. Tinyurl does make the task a little simpler.
What made the storm so interesting is how over a period of just a few minutes hundreds of SMS could be received should you turn on twitter tracking as I did. I was been bombarded by messages at a tremendous rate. Everyone wanted to be able to say that they twittered the event. They did. Twitter didn’t go down.
Jaiku did though, after all there’s nothing more attractive than a website that’s just become part of the Googleverse. It’s fun to see these new media events. That’s right BAMS students. Do media events still occur? Yep, and the Twitterstorm around Jaiku is one of them.
We shall see many more of them as big stories break.
A MacBook, a MacBook Pro and a Remote
Yesterday I was lucky enough to be asked what the remote on the new MacBook and MacBook pros were for. I went to the owner of the Macbook’s room and picked up the remote. Both my machine and hers were side by side and I started to play. I was controlling both computers at once. It’s not the type of thing I usually do but it’s amusing. You could control quite a few more machines if you like.
For some reason they appeared to be on the same menu so I’m wondering whether there’s something built in that tells them whether the remote wants video, music, DVD, or photo.