Category Archives: Media 2.0

08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Sclipo

Gregory Gimi

Social network that allows people to share knowledge through video. 600 million people use the internet to find information and to learn. Learning on the internet is a very important one. Why Sclipo? Three phenomena:

– video became efficient, most of the learning you could do before was text based. So can see what you are being taught. Added quality of learning.
– web 2.0, user generated content. Not so much that people generated content, but that people looked at people generated by other people and find that attractive, e.g. Wikiepedia, YouTube. Without being recognised professionals. Adds efficiency to the process.
– social networking effect. very popular, and learning experiences depend on social networking.

Have different ways of browsing the video content, looking at videos that teach skills, through ‘Academies” which are channels, and skills channels which are companies demoing their products.

Everything from cooking to technology. Similarities with other websites, but we use more educational terminology. You can learn through two methods – looking at the video and then by webcam, so if I find someone who’s good at cooking and I have a specific question, the next level of learning is through a webcam, and this is what we call SclipoLive, so can request a class from that person.

[Demo of a live webcam teaching session.]

The webcast is automatically recorded, so can then be watched by other people afterwards.

Three models of academies: if you teach and make money then there’s a commission, if you don’t make money then add ads.

Q: Do you share the ad revenue with the person giving the class?

Not at the moment.

[Long discussion of how payment system could be built.]

Q. what licences, e.g. Creative Commons, can I use?

Publisher owns the content, the person putting the video up.

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Jonathan Tweed – BBC iPlayer Facebook app

Hackday – put iPlayer on Facebook, wanted to show the iPlayer team what they should be doing. People are too busy to watch TV. Times this week reported that usage of social networking site exploding and that this is going to have an impact on TV viewing.

When people aren’t watching TV they are either going out or going onto social networks like Facebook. Answer to this is to put TV on Facebook because that’s where people are – put your content where people can’t miss it. Problem – if they are not watching TV, how do they know which shows to watch. They trust their friends more than anyone else, so have to add social features so people can recommend things. Everything else has social features, but iPlayer doesn’t. So added social features to iPlayer, shows what friends are watching, and what they think of them, also have current pics on iPlayer, and last night’s TV. Provides a click through to iPlayer to download/watch the TV, so can also search iPlayer.

Can also add reviews, which adds to Facebook, and to iPlayer. That’s as far as it’s been taken so far. At the moment you have to seek out what your friends are watching but want to add in a notifier to tell you what your friends are watching. Going to add recommendations. Want to find out what you think, what do we need to add to make it compelling?

Should we be doing this? Other companies are doing similar things? Should the BBC host a site where users are reviewing its programmes? What does it need? What would make it use it? What’s the future for Facebook applications? Is it a fad?

apps.facebook.com/bbciplayer, but need to be on the iPlayer beta at the moment. Once iPlayer comes out of beta it can be on the directory.

Q: Have you thought about widgets?

Yes, we are. But this isn’t an official project. Did this for Facebook because we can’t do it on MySpace or Bebo, but will put together widgets for other sites.

Q: Why do recommendations by brand?

We’re going to do it but programmes, or by genre, or whatever you want.

Q: What about the ability to become a critic?

That’s a good idea.

Q: Can you recommend stuff that’s not on iPlayer?

No, because it screen scrapes the iPlayer site. Quit hard to get access to the internal BBC data but because this is hosted externally we can’t. Value in the application. Need to get more stuff on there and use other ways of finding it. Is it reasonable for the BBC to do this?

Q: Is this programmes or just clips.

This is full programmes.

Q: Is it worldwide.

Application is available worldwide but iPlayer is UK-only.

[Lots of discussion about possible functionality which I’m not going to transcribe, because I’m getting tired now.]

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Paul Cleghorn – Tape It Off The Internet

Designer by trade, made some screens of what he thought that a compilation of what TV was available on the web, and took a lot of user feedback and started a build from scratch, starting in March. Live with a new version launching in a week or two. Going to open up to beta users.

Core mission of Tape It Off The Internet (TIOTI) – like Wikipedia, start with licensed TV information, can add all sorts of things to it, video clips or photos or text description, fan fiction, production notes, etc. Indexing all stypes of TV. Started with BT because it was the only stuff out there, now also iTunes, Amazon, as well as Joost, TV-Links.co.uk, etc. Taking any format and gluing it all together.

Building a social network around it too, can invite fans, can recommend shows, use your peer groups as a basis for recommendation. Trying to get hte whole world of TV in one place. Still a bit hard for people to find what they are looking for, we are trying to smooth that process.

So look at a show, pull in licenced source, but let people add things, so there’s a photo gallery too, so if you saw these people at an awards show then you can draw in from Flickr. Build up user generated stuff around the show. If you find something related on YouTube, e.g. a spoof, or blooper reel or anything else, can add that too so that you build up a full resource.

Trying to connect it up with other services such as Facebook, using Facebook login and will pull in the ‘TV shows you like’ so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

Using tags such as country, and badges so that people can link through to, say, your Flickr page. Looking to open it up over the next couple of weeks. Has widgets.

Indexing stuff like Virgin so detect you have a Virgin IP and show you what they have available.

Being open as possible with user data so that people can take their stuff with them. Trying to cross-reference different sources to help the recommendation engine. Doesn’t seem to be a definitive TV microformat yet, so might make a new one or hijack one. And RSS feeding a lot of stuff, can get feeds for discussion, downloads, etc.

Q: Tivo patent could be an issue for season passes.

We’re not a recording service, we’re just showing information about TV, so we’re not doing season passes, because we’re just listing as many options as possible (unless that becomes unmanageable). But we’re not a recording service.

Q: Where do you licence the data.

From Tribune Services, mainly it’s EPG content, so weekly update with about 2 weeks of information. they have a 40 year archive which we’re using for our archives. Not doing a schedule-based aproach. Do want to skirt around the Gemstart grid patent. Better way to do it.

Q: What about the licensing of data that people put up?

We need to look at Creative Commons, atm, it’s standard terms and conditions, but not sure that’s the best way to do it. But that’s how our lawyers like it at the moment.

Q: You’re being respectful of other sites, but your competitors aren’t and are indexing more content. Is that a worry? E.g. Share.tv

So we index them but we don’t index YouTube because there are two many cats. Not uch reason for us to spend a huge amount of time filtering big buckets of video when others are doing that. We want to be the metaindex at the top.

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Ian Clarke

Degree in computer science and AI from Edinburgh, and designed a project to exchange info in countries where there is censorship. This became Freenet. Non-profit corp in USA, since 1999. 2 Million downloads of software. One of the things that happened with Freenet, even though it was designed as freedom of speech idea – was at same time as Napster – it was perceived as indestructible Napster as it was designed so that it couldn’t be shut down.

Has been thinking, how do you enforce copyright onlne, and the answer is that you can’t. Enforcement of c is about preventing people sharing information when they don’t have permission to. So if you can’t enforce copyright, what is the alternative?

Founded Revver in 2005, to help foster an environment of creativity online, want an ecosystem where creators can be paid for their work. Interested in online video, this was at the time when broadband was starting to make this possible, devised a way to attach unobtrusive ads to end of videos, release under CC no-derivs, attrib, licence, and share the revenue on a 50-50 basis with creators, or 40-20-20 if there was an affiliate, so produce financial incentive to share video.

A lot of the people you may have heard of use or have used Revver, e.g. LonelyGirl15 for about a year, ZeFrank. Almost every well known video blog has used Revver, except Rocketboom.

Whilst at Revver, got curious of how to figure out what people are interested in and show it to them. Not a new problem. Started to look at collaborative filters, basically a system which looks at your behaviour, perhaps what you buy on Amazon, and then recommends things to you that you might like. Amazon, NetFlicks. Problem is that they either work or scale – but they don’t do both. if they can recommend stuff well, they don’t scale, or they dumb down the recommendation so it can scale. Built a filter called Daedalus for Revver, and licensed it to Reddit.

Whilst working on this collaborative filter, noticed that collaborative filters need a lot of data before they can figure out what they are interested in. So Reddit needs people to use the website for several hours continuously. Real opportunity in online news space, with n otable exception of Reddit, no one was really doing personalised news, and those that were were using collaborative filters that are problematic, and the quality of user submitted news is extremely low. If you’re familiar by Digg, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

This was the genesis of Thoof. Alternative to collaborative filtering, figures out your interests more quickly, based on your behaviour, your browser, your approx. geographic location. There are generalisations you can make about mac vs PC users, or Firefox vs. IE, or based on geography. Built tech to recommend stuff to you, but if you see something on the website that can be improved, you can change it and fix it, although there is a voting step – you propose a change and if it survives the voting process it can be applied to the story. Raised a million dollars in seed foundation, launched in June, and traffic growing at 25% per week.

Using Freenet is like using a web browser, but slower – learnt that one of the key problems is that even when there is information available, that doesn’t mean that people will find it. It’s not just about accessing information that they know they want, but about finding information that will interest them once they know about it.

Go to URL in web browser, it’s easy to find out who’s hosting what. With Freenet, info is distributed through the network in a decentralised way, so unless an author chooses to reveal their ID, you have no way to know who they are. But threat model with Freenet at the time was that no one would know what people are doing with Freenet, but that’s not enough. What if you can be punished for just using the software, irrespective of what you are doing with it, e.g. China, so set about redesigning Freenet to use a darknet methodology, so that you could just connect to those people you know personally, so no one knows you are connected to Freenet, but through those people you become a part of a global network. Been working on this for two years, but working pretty well so far – lot of people don’t already have friends that are using Freenet so there is a way you can connect to strangers as opposed to friends if you choose to do that. Freenetproject.org

Q: Are there access points into Freenet, like SMS?

Not an SMS gateway to the best of my knowledge, are web gateways, but using a gateway is … you’re throwing away a lot of the benefit. To get the security, you have to be running Freenet on your computer. It’s not going to run on a typical mobile phone.

Q: You said it was friends of friends, if you try to keep cosiness amongst your contacts, how do you deal with infiltrators?

The only people who can cause problems for you are the people you have immediately connected to. So if your friend is stupid and connects to a government agent, that agent has no way to tell you are part of the network. Many Freenet users don’t care, because they live in the US or UK where they aren’t going to be jailed for this, and will connect to anyone. But we try to place it in the hands of the individual as to how much security they want. There’s a trade off between convenient and connected.

Q: What happens with people abuse the tool.

Any tool can be abused. But the freedom to communicate – if one person wants information and someone else wants to have it, that freedom is essential in a democracy. Our leaders are chosen by us, and in order to make effective decisions we need free information. So totalitarian countries spend a lot of money controlling their people’s ability to communicate. Any tool can be misused but the benefits outweigh the potential abused.

Q: How do people know who to trust?

When people are anonymous how do you know when to trust them? That’s a question that the internet in general gets, blogs etc. But at Freenet we address that problem with the concept of a Nym, an anonymous identity so anything you publish is signed by the nym, so you can link together discussions and content to the same person. Even an anonymous identity can build up trust. Similar to the WWW, a blogger can build up trust. This problem is not completely solved – what might be intersting to experiment with, and we may do it with Thoof in the future, and Thoof’s approach is to fix in a peer reviewed way which works well. What we’re likely to do in the future is to create a ‘web of trust’ so can build up trust based on performance. So if you propose a change and it’s rejected, that decreases your trust level, but if you propose a lot of changes and they all get voted through you’d get more trust. So maybe then stories you right are promoted more quickly, but the mechanisms within the site will get rid of it really quickly.

Q: Where are Thoof stories from?

You can submit anything that has an URL. YouTube, BBC article, anything. What goes on Thoof itself is a title, description and tags. Intention is that the title and description will be impartial and unbiased description of what’s being linked to, but the thing being linked to can be expressing an opinion. Can edit review, title, and even URL.

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Hazel Grian, John Williams – Alternate Reality Games

Alternate reality games. History is it was a marketing tool.

Meigeist, partly funded by HP, corss-media narrative, takes place on- and offline. Puzzles for people to solve, and they have to get otgether to get hte next part of the story. Need diverse players. Games like ILoveBees are complex puzzles that need people with diverse interests to solve it. Get passionate online community to solve it.

Story is a scifi one, but set in as much reality as possible. Totally free – funding was from Film Council and HP and other bodies. Eight week run. Main characters had own blogs, Eva McGill, main character was a student who finds herself mixed up in this extraordinary world. Video blogs, backdated to give it history. People could email Eva and she would email back. Level of interactivity was really high, lots of personal contact which people really liked. Answered messages, comments, sent things in the post, had an eBay auction of a toy that had a clue. Had as many platforms as possible, Live chats, set a task, mission is to help the main characters through her problems where she’s starting to have strange psychic happenings in her head. Players made films, and were rung up on the phone, asked to perform tasks, also received SMS messages although US people had a problem with that. Main thing was to keep up the level of interactivity – we could do that because we were doing it full time, role playing, and doing improvisation.

Had a live event in Bristol, had the actors hired for the day, did a mock symposium, had little adventures with the characters in town, so the players got to meet them in person.

Also had a sense of humour, so did characters who were investigating paranormal activities, based in Radstock, but their function was to be like the players to that they could drop hints, a bit like the Greek chorus, emphasising the key points. Developed another game using them.

Most impressie things is the communities that get involved, people from all round the world play. It’s not just 15 year old boys – 50/50 split m/f, age 14 – 47, all getting involved and sending emails. Different levels of interaction, so had lots of different ways to interact depending on people’s own comfort zone. 30,000 unique IPs logged. Want to look into demographic more in future, because it was using platforms everyone uses every day, you didn’t have to buy a different bit of kit or learn new skills. One of the key players was a woman called Sylvia from Ohio. Had a few thousand that gave contact details and about 50 people who got really involved. Quality not quantity.

Cost of project was £30k, for ten month project with two people.

People worked together through a forum. That was set up so that people could collaborate there and that was the hub of how they could communicate. Work people do is amazing.

ARGN.com is a good place to start.

Q: What has the most successful ARG?

Well, lots are for marketing, so ILoveBees for Halo, but how do you class its success? Difficult to say how successful it was because it’s hard to say what the aim of each ARG is. Ours was very successful by our own aims, but it didn’t sell anything. We weren’t pitching it that way.

Q: Has it broken through to the mainstream?

Q: PerPlex City, by MindCandy, was bigger, company made quite a bit of money as people could to buy merchandise.

Doesn’t exist any more though. Made a lot of cash from merch, got a lot of investment and sponsorship, but caused so much pressure on MindCandy that it split them apart.

But we didn’t get any bad feedback at all – it was just “the best thing” that the players had done for ages.

Q: I played it, but you didn’t mention yet, the real-time chat channel by IRC, even just 5 – 10 people, but that was the heart of it for me.

Saw that as well, it was nice when something was released in the chat that there’d be a lot of buzz.

Q: Were you in the channels?

We were but we’re not going to say who we were.

You want to know what the audience things, and you have a live feel, you can see what people are thinking and feeling, it’s almost like stand-up comedy.

Q: In reference to early question, one successful one is CourtTV – it’s a story over 14 days of a woman who’d found her husband cheating on her, and it was a story that lots of people followed, but not a game. Another over, proper ARG, 8 days, 30k people playing, 6k got the solution right, all using online materials etc.

Looking now at Geocashing and Geodashing – augmented reality games.

Q: At the moment you are creating things ad hoc, would you imagine in the future would there be a more high-level thing that controls is, so you could create a website that is more automated?

Problem is the more you automate it, the more personal it is. If it’s really chatty, and personal, then it’s a whole different game, autoresponders are a bit cold.

Hazel is a writing on Kate Modern, a Bebo promotional thing. Getting that level of interactivity is interesting, all has to be answered online all the time. New level of this. What’s also interesting is how you fund, sponsor, set up these things. Should the BBC be commissioning these things? Same people as LonelyGirl15.

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: George Wright – BBC TV Backstage

Part of BBC Backstage, charter to educate and inform. Interactive TV – BBC is world leader, but find it very hard to find people who know what they are doing in it. Very niche, small talent pool. Focusing on MHEG, but relevant to all formats and platforms.

Going to be doing tutorials, teach people how do work with the technology. Starting off with simple tutorials, including podcasts, including examples. Currently Windows only, but cross-platform coming soon. Plug-in to MythTV, so you can play it from there, looking for extensions for full MHEG 106. Think it could give a kick to the market, the existing vendors, etc. Times we think that the barrier to entry to t his areas should be lower – this is part of the aim. Will also release internal tools and tests. By giving these away it will benefit the community and those who work with us to deliver code.

60 – 70% of interactive developer pool available in UK, so we’re not aiming this at everyone, but want to deliver the equivalent of View Source in web browsers – tiny steps. Going to tell people how we think we do things the right way, but we are going to expect people to tell us we’re wrong. Lots of new ways of doing things, but hoping that by opening it up we’ll get new ideas of how to do things.

Chosen MHEG because it’s an open standard, but increasingly MHEG is being used in a hybrid box, i.e. aerial and internet connections. Other platforms are likely to use MHEG, and it’s becoming more of a worldwide standard, e.g. New Zealand are using it, so code written here is also usable there.

Looking for a bigger developer community. Want others to embrace out code.

Q: Is this the wrong time to do this? People don’t want to interact.

Our figures don’t support that, we have lots of page views each week.

Q: Isn’t this just more about multiscreen?

There is some of that, but that’s not all interactive TV is good for. Yes, we probably should have done this 10 years ago, but when’s a good time to plant a tree? Do you think this is pointless?

Q: I work in this area, but there are very few programmes that you can actually enhance – people want to watch TV they don’t want to do other things. Interfaces are either too lightweight, or they distract from the programme, but generally it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be the future anymore.

I don’t think it needs to be the future. But that’s more about where’s the interactive TV going.

Q: In US, 36% of interactive TV through gaming consoles by 2012. How do you compete with that?

Two questions in there – is MHEG good to learn if you want to work on other platforms? We think it does. Should someone use proprietary stuff? Probably no. If you wanted to learn the most popular interactive TV language, need to look at Open, which is what Sky uses.

Regarding the console,I think it’s the other way round. If I was developing for a console, I’d look at MHEG. Many other things we could take a punt on is because it’s in Freeview, and you can get boxes that you can chuck USB key in and run code.

Q: MythTV is really difficult to get to work. Are you going to help them make it easier?

Not giving end-to-end support, but will be giving instructions for setting it up. Will have stand-alone MHEG browsers based on MythTV, so you don’t have to install it.

Q: You say people can play around with MHEG, but people can’t actually put it live. Is this just about teaching people?

We’re teaching people how to write MHEG, but also telling them how to deploy it. Apache can serve MHEG2 to a set top that’s on the same network.

Q: So you need the hybrid boxes?

We’re not saying that people are going to write this stuff and stick it up on the web. But we might take the best apps and push them out daily, so people can browse through them. Not just teaching, but want to do groundbreaking new ways of doing interactive TV.

Q: How much bandwidth does MHEG take for a typical app?

Overhead is never the text, it’s the broadcast quality video.

Q: What about Flash video? Why not write a Flash player for MHEG?

Have done experiments with SWF format, and there were good things and there were bad things. It’s not something we’re looking at right now. Surprises me that so many sites that use FLV don’t have any interaction in it, because Flash is good for that. We’re partnering with YouTube and other sites that use Flash but haven’t seen any interaction even coming from us. Could do an MHEG -> SWF converter, it’s an interesting thought.

Q: Is there a complete programming language in there? Is there a javascript converter for it?

On the latter, I doubt it, it’s a very different. But yes, it’s a real programming language and it’s complete. You really need to work at a large broadcaster to know anything about it, but we’d like to create the equivalent of a graphical MHEG creation tool as in a drag-and-dropy thing. Would benefit us internally and others who want to have a play.

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08.25.07
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TV Un-Festival: Zattoo

Mario Costa, Alexandra Illes

Zattoo is regular straightforward TV as per free to air channels, but played across broadband. Live TV, not time-shifted, but available on your laptop. 24/7. Mac, PC, Linux, free client, all you need is broadband.

Each time you log-on, you get a channel line up, in Switzerland redistributing 52 channels. Quality pretty good, 400kbps to receive, what’s different to most of the other players, but the Zattoo is just redistribution – no catch up, no chat, no video on demand, no frills redistribution of television channels and do that with the most widely possibly channel line up in every country. Reason for being is that a number of interactive players on the market and Zattoo is a platform is focused on only one thing. Don’t want to compete with broadcasters IPTV, as they have more rights to do things with their content, but to be a compilation of different channels as an aggregator.

It worked really well this morning when the network is not being used by so many people.

Unabridged retransmission, limited by legal requirements for broadcasters. Signal protection and geoblocking, another requirement from broadcasters, so operate with the licensing regime and go country by country, and not receive outside the territory of the area we have the licence for.

Idea is to bring linear TV to a new medium, and bring people back to linear TV. Bridge to the old-fashioned TV, and to allow people to do interactive things at the same time. 700k users in Europe, available in Swizterland where co. based, Denmark and Spain. Very successful in Spain, word=of-mouth and blogs at core of success. Beta test in the UK with a couple of channels whilst going through rights clearance, aiming to launch in Germany, Austria, Belgium, then Poland, Italy, France, Poland and the Netherlands.

People use Zattoo because they want to do things at the same time, or use PC in another room than the TV is in. Not a substitute for the TV set, but complementary to it.

Aged distribution, primarily the younger, 25 – 34 is main user group, but that’s shifting. Young, early adopters first, but shifted in Switzerland and have a quarter of the broadband market.

Q: How do you make money?

Advertisements within channels, buffering when switzing channels, and have inserted adverts there. Users don’t mind that. For advertisers, people have focus on the screen as they are waiting for the channel to come up. There are also paid packages, so have a lot of free TV, the public broadcasters and commercial stations, then special interest and ethnic packages. Learn from traditional TV environment, but open to more new things. Think that people online are more interested in special interest. Feel want to make a la carte packages, which can’t be done on traditional TV environment. Foreign language packages too.

Security is a big issue, specially for the broadcasters signal protection and double authentication process that ensures geoblocking works.

Q: What’s the point of that?

We agree with you, that’s what we want, but from a rights point of view we’ll probably not get there. It is not 100% watertight enough, but it’s watertight enough for the reasons we do it. But we can’t get the rights for you to just watch international TV without the right clearance.

Due to launch in the UK, but it’s a question of clearing the rights.

Q: How are you doing the geofiltering?

Don’t know the answer to this.

Q: It’s a p2p service, what’s the upload bandwidth.

400kbps download, and as much upload as your ISP allows.

Zattoo developed by a professor at Michigan in five mins.

Beta testing in UK since July, focused on retransmission. If you want text access, can send an international invitation that will give access to the Swiss line-up to see how it works.

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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
by

New, new uses, or new to you?

A few weeks ago, I blogged some thoughts about innovation inspired by the close of The Economist’s Project Red Stripe, to which Jeff Jarvis responded. Jeff’s post was interesting, as were the comments, but one in particular from Malcolm Thomson stood out:

John Robinson says rightly “A protected group from within can come up with innovation, but unless they require no money or commitment, then they have to go before some decision-making person or body.”

But ‘unless they require no money…’ is of significance. Now that the tools of video journalism are so incredibly cheap, now that tuition with regard to the essential skills is so accessible (CurrentTV’s tutorials, etc.), the reporting/storytelling innovators must surely already exist in growing numbers.

Many months ago, I collaborated on a project looking at the future of retail. I’d been asked to take part in two discussion sessions by the company writing the report, and four of us sat around a big whiteboard thinking about trends in retail, and what the future might hold 5, 10 and 15 years out.

Our main conclusion was that the final recipients of this report, a global company who wanted to be prepared for the future, were woefully unequipped to even make the most of the present. Many of the most basic things that you’d expect such a company to do online were not being done and it was clear that, given the culture of the organisation, they were not likely to get done any time soon. It wasn’t so much that they weren’t Web 2.0, more than that they hadn’t even made it as far as Web 1.0 yet.

Much of the media – and other sectors too – struggle to understand the developments of the last 5 – 10 years, and find it difficult to work existing technologies into their business, even when there are clear benefits to doing so. But it’s not like things are actually changing that quickly, especially if you stay on top of developments. As Tom Coates said about the broadband vs. TV ‘debate’ last year (his italics):

These changes are happening, they’re definitely happening, but they’re happening at a reasonable, comprehendible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don’t die if you’re not the first mover – you only die if you don’t adapt.

My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention.

When businesses talk about innovation, they frequently mean “new” in the sense of “brand, spanking, no-one-has-ever-done-this-before new” or “first mover new”. Because they see the landscape as changing at an alarming rate, and they see innovation with the same blank-paper fear as the blocked writer, the whole thing becomes terrifying. Add to that the fact that they do not have a good solid grip on the state of the art as it is now, and you end up with a group of petrified execs standing on the brink of a chasm they fear is too wide and too deep to risk jumping, because the only outcome they can see is crash and burn.

Another type of innovation is the “new use” – taking tools that someone else has created and using them in an innovative way. How do you use all this Web 2.0 stuff that people are creating all the time and work it into your business? How does it bring value to your audience? What symbiotic relationships can you nurture that will enable you to do something different? This is the sort of innovation that I think the media needs to focus on.

Some are trying very hard to do this, some are just paying lip service, but many aren’t trying at all. Comments are a great example of a relatively new technology – it’s only been around for a few years – which the press have embraced en masse, but entirely failed to use effectively. The point of comments is that it allows writers to have a conversation with their readers, and for stories to continue to be developed post-publication, yet in the majority of cases comment functionality is slapped on to the bottom of every article – regardless of whether that article would benefit from comments – and readers are left to fight it out by themselves. Little of worth is added to either the articles, the publisher’s brand, or the commenters’ lives.

Creating a boxing ring online is not an innovative way of using comment technology, it is obvious, old-school, and short-sighted. It’s creating conflict to sell newspapers, increase hits or get more viewers for your TV slug fest.

Equally, using video to replicate television is like using Thrust to do the shopping – it makes no sense and is a massive waste of money. There are plenty of big hitters already doing TV rather well, and in an era of 24 hour rolling news, the last thing that we need is to replicate that online. Rather, the media should be using online video to do things that TV cannot do, to get places TV cannot go, to examine issues with the sort of depth and nuance that 24-hour rolling news couldn’t manage if their very lives depended upon it, to tell the stories that TV has no time for.

Where are these media outlets – newspapers or otherwise – who can honestly say that they are using even just comments and video truly innovatively? In so many cases I see new-school technologies used in old-school ways that transform it from groundbreaking to mundane. One case in point was Ben Hammersley’s BBC project about the Turkish elections. Yes, he was using Del.icio.us, and Flickr and he was blogging and using RSS, but with a distinctly old-school flavour that robbed the tools of their own potential.

A pneumatic nail gun can put nails through steel girders, but if all you do with it is build a garden shed, you might as well have used a hammer.

Finally, technology may not be new, but if it’s “new to you”, it can have real value. It used to be just blogs that provided an RSS feed, but then the tech press started using RSS, and now it has become standard across the majority of major news sites – no one sensible is without it. Other outlets might be using blogs or Del.icio.us or wikis, but that shouldn’t stop you from assessing how best you can use these tools yourselves.

But businesses are inherently neo-phobic, and this has resulted in the Great Race to be Second: the burning desire of companies everywhere to watch what others do and see if it succeeds before they follow suite. Neo-phobia also leads companies into a state of group-think, where they use technology only in the same ways that they’ve seen other people use it. RSS is another fabulous example of this – news outlets will only provide a headline and excerpt news feed, rather than a full feed, because they are scared that if people can read their content in their aggregator, they will not visit the site and if they don’t visit the site then valuable page views and click-throughs are lost.

Every now and again I see an article saying that full feeds increase click-throughs, the most recent being Techdirt, and their argument is compelling (their italics):

[I]n our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.

But even if the assumption that partial feeds drive traffic to ads is correct, there’s still no excuse for having partial feeds, because ads in RSS have been around for ages. I don’t remember when Corante started putting ads in the RSS feed, but they’ve been doing it for ages and I have never had a single complaint about it. I don’t know what the click-through rates are compared to the ads on the site, but I’m sure that it would be possible to experiment and find out. It is undoubtedly possible to design a study that would give you the right sort of data to compare the effectiveness of partial, full, or full with ads feeds, but I’ve yet to hear of one.

And therein, I think, lies the rub. We don’t always know what will happen when we introduce new technology, but instead of experimenting, the majority prefer to go along with group-think and the old-school ways. They want innovation but only as a buzzword to chuck around in meetings – the reality is just too scary. Yes, there are mavericks who get this stuff, but they are frequently hamstrung by the neo-phobes, and have to spend their time pushing through small, bite-sized changes whilst they wait for the dinosaurs to die off.

08.22.07
by

Bring on the noise

Looking through my feeds, I noticed a wonderfully droll post by Steve Yelvington on yet another tedious bloggers versus journalists article, this one by Michael Skube in the LATimes. Mr Skube’s professorial tone befits the news as lecture model that he seems to be defending like a modern day Williams Jennings Bryan. Mr Skube writes: “One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more.” To which Steve responds:

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

It would appear that Mr Skube’s commentary is “a potpourri of opinion and little more”. You see Mr Skube, as Steve and others points out, hasn’t actually read many blogs. He hasn’t done the reporting that he’s chastising bloggers for not doing. But more than that, Skube refers to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo as an example of a bloviating blogger. TPM and its sister site, TPM Muckraker, actually do journalism, and more than that, they have some of the more successful examples of crowd-sourced journalism to date. Josh e-mailed him and asked if he was familiar with TPM why had he included it as an example of a “dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere”.

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”

An editor added the reference and Skube didn’t know enough to ask that it be taken out. Dan Gillmor calls on the LATimes to print at least a correction if not an outright apology.

UPDATE: (Via Jay Rosen at PressThink. Thanks for the link and quote, Jay.) The LATimes editorial page editor Jim Newton has published this note about the editing process:

Note from Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton

August 22, 2007

A number of readers have contacted The Times in recent days regarding an Aug. 19th opinion piece by Michael Skube. In some cases, readers have asked whether Times’ editors improperly inserted material in Michael Skube’s piece without his knowledge or permission. That was not the case, as this note from Skube makes clear:

Before my Aug. 19 Opinion piece on bloggers was printed, an editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.

– Michael Skube

Readers will choose to agree or disagree with Skube’s conclusions, but I hope the above resolves questions about the editing of the article.

Sincerely,

Jim Newton

Editorial Page Editor

This reader doesn’t see a clarification, but a game of pass the buck. What’s even more shocking, is that this is the second poorly researched and reported piece by Skube on the subject, notes Paul Jones, who teaches at the University of North Carolina.

Skube unfortunately seems to fall in the trap of so many commentators who seem to think that style trumps substance and that a finely honed piece of prose somehow obviates the need for research. Dearth of reporting perhaps, Mr Skube?

I share Shane Richmond’s reaction:

What’s exasperating is that every time some journalist notices blogs (where have they been, for goodness sake?) and decides that they herald the end of civilisation as we know it, there’s some editor somewhere who will print their ravings.

These columns keep getting printed because they play to the professional biases of journalists. They play to the uninformed view that passes for conventional wisdom that there is a monolithic blogosphere, and that it is populated by wannabe columnists who try to get a foot in the door of the media by being louder and more irresponsible than the columnists they hope to replace. If you want the model those bloggers are emulating, look to comment pages and the head-to-head battles of cable news networks.

But the problem is that despite a consistent portrayal in the media of the blogosphere as political shouting shout match, this represents a fraction of the blogosphere. In the US, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that only 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government and only 5% focus on general news and current events. My hunch, and I won’t say that it’s a well researched one, is that these commentators only see political blogs because there is a professional selection bias. They comment on politics or current affairs so every blog they are familiar with, or indeed interesting in, is about politics. The blogosphere is a rich world to be explored, not just a political battlefield of the intemperate shock troops of right and left.

I’ve stated my view in the bloggers versus journalists debate frequently. Bloggers don’t want our jobs. Most bloggers write about their personal experiences. Yes, they write about their cats, their sewing, their kids’ footie games. But occasionally, they get caught up in a news event, and then they keep blogging. They commit random acts of journalism. As I just wrote this week for the Australian site, NewMatilda.com, it’s not a threat but an opportunity for those journalists willing and open-minded enough to take it.