Category Archives: Conferences

08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Chris Jackson – A community effort to improve metadata

I’ve been MCing the TV Un-Festival all day, and it’s been fun so far. Right now they are recording a podcast, which I’m not going to blog because at some point you’ll be able to listen to it yourself. Meantime, here’s a short burst of blog posts that I’ve put together throughout the day for your entertainment. (Note: There was no official schedule, so if I’ve misspelt names, please accept my apologies.)

Chris Jackson – A community effort to improve metadata
Chris is a freelance broadcast tech and strategy consultant, geek at heart, ideas for things that are more community based than big companies. At the TV Festival [of which this is the fringe event] hearing about Joost, wasn’t saying anything anyone in this room would be surprised about but it was news to the TV people. Big disconnect between us here and them there, who don’t know much about tech but do know about audiences.

Technically elegant ways that, say, torrents, work doesn’t make sense for the audience.

Two ways to watch TV – either watch what’s on, or you can dereferencing a pointer, i.e. look something up and make sure you are there. Bit torrent is not that simple for people to use, it’ snot something that works well after a long day. How can we make that process easier, that would turn it from looking through a long list of sites to find the torrent, to something that’s as simple as turning it on and see.

Would love to see:
– Permanent URLs
– List of locations for individual programmes, whether TV schedule, bit torrent, iPlayer, and gives the data as to what DRM there is on it, what sort of format it’s in.
– Wants that info to be flexibly improved, so if broadcaster wants to say “I have the definitive information” that it references the canonical.
– Wants the metadata to be simple, and standardised.

TV Anytime is comprehensive, but difficult to use.

Broadcasters should, ideally, be providing comprehensive information. But some broadcasters have different unique identifiers, e.g. the BBC has three for each programme. But a broadcaster might tell you the metadata but would never tell you where the torrent was. Community could step in and do this.

Need to:
– create a standard extensible format
– with an API
– data licensed liberally
– crowd sourced improvements

If this data was better, could make better clients, that could give you all the official locations, times etc. but would also give you all the other locations, and tie them together with a single URL. So people who have seen a programme could send a URL to someone who could then choose how they wanted to watch it, whether on BT, or iPlayer or old-fashioned TV.

Would be interesting then to gather information on how people like to access programmes, so you could see if they prefer to watch TV or use iPlayer or BT.

Risk with current systems is that you only ever get, say, the link to the RSS feed of Heroes.

Q: Broadcasters don’t see it on their interests, because the first thing that people do is tag where the adverts are and cut it out. And broadcasters don’t want to do anything that makes it easier. From our point of view, an extra person who watches it is an extra person, but they see it as a person that they couldn’t make money from.

CJ: Agree, but can do all sorts of other things.

Q: But this is the same as the Freeview programme scheduler.

CJ: What I’m saying is, why don’t we take that info, plus the torrent sites, and iPlayer, and put it all together.

Q: BBC say that “It’s illegal to do this”, but they have never prosecuted, and never will prosecute, but it’s illegal. The problem is that it’s technically possible, and no one has ever been prosecuted, so until the broadcasters either have a day in court and see whether it is illegal, no system will have any support from the BBC or any other broadcasters. EPG data is copyrights, sharing a programme onto torrent is illegal, so no one has been prosecuted. PACT, who represent non-BBC producers, and say “This is out content, so the BBC can only show it once and that’s all they can do”, and we all have a right to record and store on VHS, but transfer it over hte net and PACT say it’s illegal. So it’s not technical it’s a lawyer.

CJ: But there’s a distinction between content and metadata. My understanding is that you can republish the BBC metadata if it’s non-commercial, and Bleb.tv have only been threatened by ITV.

Q: There are all these legal arguments, so why do have to bring them together as a service, because that creates a legal target for litigation. How about a client that pulls together different sources and presents it, differentiating the sources, and lets people choose.

CJ: Yes, we shouldn’t keep it all in one place, but we should have a standard.

Q: So what we need is a common identifier for each programme.

CJ: Or multiple identifiers that are cross-linked. But yes, the identifier.

Q: So you could do it the barcode way, there isn’t a global organisation that organises barcodes, so that would be an easily distributable system.

CJ: i presume the names are URLs. But there are a whole bunch of existing systems, and we should be able to make it better. TVAnytime has programme groups (series), programmes, and segments of programmes, and programme locations (like a URI). If the data format addressed these types of ID (possibly except programme segments), should be able to take the URI, and use that to reverse look-up to get the metadata, and then pass around the URL that describes a specific programme, and then others can use that URL to find the programme itself. Not the only way of doing it that, but doesn’t seem to need permission, or to modify streams, etc. If we did this it might help the broadcasters change their minds.

Q: Are there parallels with the music industry and iTunes. Do we instinctively favour solutions that are too complex.

CJ: This is like an equivalent of MusicBrainz, but with links to all the places you can get the programme, not just a link to one source – Amazon in the case of MusicBrainz.

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08.23.07
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Going to the Edinburgh TV Un-Festival?

Kevin and I are off up to Edinburgh tomorrow, for the TV Un-Festival – a fringe event to the Media Guardian International TV Festival. Ian Forrester has been putting a lot of hard work into getting the Un-Festival organised, no easy feat when so many other festivals and fringes are on at the same time!

So what’s an un-festival? Well, it’s like an un-conference, but more unlike a festival than it is unlike a conference. In other words, it’s a:

Day-long event which takes place on Saturday 25 August [and] will centre around the clash of the well established TV world and the constantly accelerating Internet world using the unusual un-conference format, where the cost of entry is participation.

A ton of interesting people and companies have signed up already, including the BBC, Google, BT Vision, Microsoft TV, P2P-Next, Joost, Trustedplaces.com, Mind Candy, MTV, Tapeitofftheinternet.com, Freenet, Blip.TV, Zattoo, and Licorice Film. In addition, there will be a number of darknet people coming, some of them with names you might know, like Ian Clarke, and others more secretive. Ooh, now that’s intriguing.

There are still places available so if you want to sign up, so do now! And if you’re coming, there’s a wiki for participants.

08.14.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Martha Ladly, Mobile Experience Design

Again apologies to Martha about not getting this up sooner, but I’m glad that I’ve had some time to digest what she was saying and also do some casual surfing to explore the projects that she was talking about. Twenty minutes is difficult to get a sense of the breadth of work that she’s done.

I met Martha at the opening drinks of X|Media|Lab and really liked her ideas about digital storytelling and emerging mobile applications.

By way of introduction to her talk, she talked about how she got into design. She played in bands and designed album covers. OMG, Martha designed the Power, Lies and Corruption cover for New Order. She worked for Peter Gabriel for 10 years and designed 50 album covers for his Real World label including Sheila Chandra and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

In 1992, Peter Gabriel wanted to create an interactive CD. She worked on the Eve CD-ROM project with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. I actually have Eve. It’s a fascinating interactive experience. You can’t really call it a game. It’s more of an experience. They also created an interactive CD called the Ceremony of Innocence based on the Griffin & Sabine books.

She now works with a group called Horizon Zero, a monthly web publication. They have created digital documentaries. They had a lovely project called Murmur in the Market. It was about a neighbourhood, Kensington Market, in transition, and they recorded stories about the neighbourhood that were overlaid on a hand drawn map of the neighbourhood. I like the flash-based map navigation, and the audio works well in the player that they developed.

I especially like the audio segments that have street sounds and give me an sense of the bustle and activity in the neighbourhood. One of the common mistakes with audio is to only do the interview in a nice sound-proofed studio, but if you’re trying to evoke a sense of place, it’s always good to have ‘nat-sound’ or ‘wild track’ to set the scene for listeners. In London, I often go and buy lunch at the market in Leather Lane around the corner for our offices. There is a great street vendor who has a wonderful sing-song quality as he hawks his wares. His voice falls up and down in pitch. “TOP QUALITY (then low) get it here. ONLY BEST BRANDS (then low) three for a pound.” I’d definitely add that as a transition between more set piece interviews, and a good directional microphone can keep the voice of the subject in focus while letting a little street sound bleed through.

Back to Martha’s talk…two years ago, a group got together about how to move mobile experience forward. She is working on the Park Walk project. They are telling stories about Toronto’s High Park using mobile phones with GPS units. They also play a game called “The Haunting” with Mont Royal Park in Montreal. They have also done some great stuff in Banff called Global Heart Beat. As people move through GPS zones, they find out about the animals that live in that habitat.

Mobile technology can bridge the gap between virtual and real, and she highlighted, Blast Theory, a group of artists in the UK that have produced video games based in real space.

She talked about some open-source technologies such as Arduino, an open-source prototyping platform. (She mentioned quite a few, and I’ll mention a few that I know of as well, including OpenMoko and their Neo open-source mobile phone. I am also thinking about trying the GP2X handheld game. It’s not a mobile phone-data device per se, but it’s very extensible, possibly a bit beyond my meagre tech skills but worth a play. I like the fact that you get a fully operational Linux device that can actually be used as a full-fledged pocket computer.)

I’m going to paraphrase Martha. Mobile has yet to hits its stride, but it has a lot of technologies that could be used to tell location-based stories. GPS, cameras and bluetooth all have application that is only being explored. From my point as a journalist, I think this is an area rich for exploration as far as newsgathering. Possibly in the future, information will delivered across cities based on not only subject relevance but also local relevance. As I said, lots of area for exploration.

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08.14.07
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X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Liz Heller, Buzztone

Sincere apologies to my fellow mentors for not getting some of my notes up sooner, but without WiFi on Friday and the mentoring all weekend, I usually ended up posting late at night. Friday, I stayed up until 130 in the morning. I did as much as I could in between sessions on the weekend, but being a mentor, I wanted to do justice to the groups who came to discuss their projects. As for continuing the late night blogging, exhaustion prevented me from doing more over the weekend.

Liz Heller started out in sociology, and she is fascinated how people travel in ‘groups and loops’. They formed a company called Buzztone, which “creates award-winning lifestyle, pop culture, urban and guerrilla marketing campaigns”. She went on to describe social motivations to keep in mind when thinking about social software and services:

We share a lot in common. We want to be a part of something. We want to share what we love. We all want to be just a little famous. We all want to think that we are the first to find something new. We all want to have friends.

People want to stay in touch with friends they already have. Social networks are seen as ways to deepen existing friendships not supplant them. (Bravo Liz. I couldn’t agree more. Media always cover online social networks as if they supplant not supplement real world social bonds. For most of the people I know, it’s just not so. And Liz added a new word my vocabulary: Frobligations, friends referrals through other friends that you feel obligated to befriend.)

Her work revolves around marketing campaigns that relied on some of these social needs. They used a social club and lots of social outreach to connect women to French wine. They used feedback from the members to feed back into the social club. (Again, I think this is a key thing that most ‘social marketing’ companies forget: Feedback. Most of the time, they focus only on seeding their message in social networks, not using those social networks to make their products better and their companies genuinely more responsive.)

They also developed a student network for Microsoft called Spoke. It was the first social network for tech students. It was global and regionalised. It helped to change student perceptions of Microsoft.

Social networks are a filter. She pointed out MoveOn.org, OurChart (a social network for lesbians from the popular programme The L Word), Block Savvy (a niche urban-focused social network) and a number of others. (When people ask me about how I stay on top of developments in digital media and journalism, and one of the best tools I have is a the dozen or so digital journalism experts who blog in my RSS reader. They are my filter, my radar, my early warning trend watchers. Now, seeing all of these social networks developing, I must say that it reminds me slightly of the late dot.com boom when sites took an e-commerce model and chased increasingly small sales niches. Remember all of those pet e-commerce sites? I think there is value in focused communities online, but that is value to me as an end-user. I’m not so sure about value in terms of a sustainable business model. However, I can see the justification if you’re looking to build a social network around a marketing campaign, even if that isn’t my particular focus.)

Groups and loops for causes. She showed stopglobalwarming.org, a social network following on from Live Earth and Zaadz. Social media encourages face-to-face engagement. Houseparty.com and reunion.com all encourage real world events. (Again, it was really good to hear someone counter the media-driven myth that online social activity creates a world of anti-social people. Whether it’s Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr or my blog, these things reinforce my real world social interaction. They helped jump start my social life when I moved to London a couple of years ago. But as Suw says, Twitter gets her out to the pub to spend time with friends.)

I liked the ideas Liz was presenting. The marketing-sensitive consumer in me was possibly too aware of commercial purpose of some of these projects, but Liz wasn’t just talking about trying to infect social networks with marketing messages, which seems to me the purpose of some viral campaigns. Social marketing campaigns that don’t listen, aren’t social, even if they are targeting social spaces online, and her emphasis on using feedback from the community is often missed by many digital marketing companies.

And I really liked Liz’ emphasis that there is a symbiotic relationship between online and offline community. It’s a myth that online community is a parasitic drain on real world social interaction, and it’s great to hear someone like Liz challenge conventional wisdom.

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08.08.07
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Speaking at X|Media|Lab Melbourne

Ideally, I should have blogged about this earlier, but I wanted to mention that I’ll be speaking at X|Media|Lab in Melbourne Australia this Friday. The theme is Digital Worlds: Social, Mobile, Virtual. Good news if you are able to make it, they have changed venue and have some more tickets available. I’ll be speaking about how what mass media companies need to do to become social media companies. I’ll be blogging the conference here and also on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder media blog. The rough schedule on Friday is:

9.30am Session One: Digital Worlds

Kevin Anderson

Head of Blogging and Interaction, The Guardian

(London)

Kim Dalton

Director of Television, Australian Broadcasting

Corporation (Sydney)

Dale Herigstad

Four times Emmy Award Winner, and Winner of the

inaugural Interactive Emmy Award (Los Angeles)

Shekhar Kapur

Film Director, Co-Founder Virgin Comics and Virgin

Animation (London/Mumbai)

11.30am Session Two: Online Video

Liz Heller

CEO and Co-founder Buzztone Inc (Los Angeles)

Marcelino Ford-Livene

General Manager, Interactive Content, Services

and Advertising Development, Intel Digital Home

Group; Governor of Interactive Media, Academy of

Television, Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles)

Brian Gruber

Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer,

FORA.tv (San Francisco)

Jason Roks

Advisory Board Member, The Real News

(www.therealnews.com) (Ontario)

1.30pm Session Three: Mobile Communities

Francisco Cordero

General Manager Australia/NZ, Bebo

(London, Sydney)

Jennifer Lewis

Editor, STOMP (Singapore)

Martha Ladly

Director, Mobile Experience Design, Mobile

Experience Lab (Toronto)

Tom Kennedy

Director, Digital, Belong Group, Australia’s Leading

Digital Interactive Communications Company; Chair

of the Digital Content Action Agenda Experts Group

and Australian Film Commissioner (Australia)

Martin Hoffman

CEO, Loop Mobile (Sydney)

3.30pm Session Four: Virtual Worlds

Dr David Liu

Founder and President, Cyber Recreation District

(Beijing)

Jason Romney

General Manager, Innovation, Telstra BigPond

(Sydney)

Lizbeth Goodman

Director, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, University

of East London (London)

Keren Flavell

Executive Producer, SLCN.TV (Melbourne)

Bruce Joy

Founder, VASTPARK, Australia’s own virtual worlds

platform (Melbourne)

07.11.07
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Social Tools for Business Use

I’m at Dave Gurteen’s conference today, talking about social software and Web 2.0. It has, as Dave’s last social tools conference was, been attended by some really interesting people. I’ve had some great conversations during the breaks which is always fun.

No live blogging today, but then, I don’t really need to because they are recording both audio and video, and the audio at least is up online already on the Focusbiz website. They have a number of pre-conference interviews up, including one with me, as well as the audio from the sessions – mine was called ‘The Beauty of Web 2.0: Tools that get out of your way‘. Do have a listen and let me know what you think.

06.21.07
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Supernova 07

I finally made it to San Francisco at some godawful hour last night. I’m going to be live-blogging as much of the conference as I can, but over on Conversation Hub, rather than here. I’ll post links as they go up, and may cross-post later.

First session notes from me:

Industry Visions: Nathan Myhrvold, Greg Papadapolous, Irving Wladawsky-Berger
What will drive future growth and innovation in the technology sector? Hear the surprising predictions of three industry heavyweights.

06.20.07
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Enterprise 2.0: The proof of the pudding is in the meetings

Enterprise 2.0 is over for me. The conference continues, but I have to leave tomorrow morning to fly to San Francisco ready for Supernova on Thursday and Friday. It’s been a flying visit to Boston, but well worth it.

After lunch today was Stowe’s session, and then my talk and the accompanying panel, with Anil Dash, Oliver Young and Sam Weber. I will admit I really struggled – forming coherent sentences was incredibly difficult, and I’m not sure I really did my best. But the discussion went really well, with some great input from the audience and some very good questions, so i really enjoyed it.

Once our session was over, there was a very long – three hour – period for eating nibbles and drinking free wine and talking to people in the vendor demo room. I’m slightly perplexed as to why they crammed so much in during the morning, with really short breaks, and then did a three hour cocktail in the afternoon.

But the best bit of conferences is the bits in between the sessions, and I did have some very interesting conversations, and gathered a number of business cards. I’m trying much harder this time round to make notes on the cards I get so that I can remember who’s who. I speak to a lot of people, and I enjoy hearing what people have to say and learning about what they’re doing, but it’s very easy, a couple of weeks later, to totally forget what you said to whom!

Despite the crap vendor pitches and the hideously bad jetlag, I’ve enjoyed today. Next year, I hope the organisers ditch the pimping, draft a schedule that doesn’t start so early, and invite me back!