Author: Clinton Forry

Have you ever been witness to some piece of technology, earlier dismissed, that now proves to be a an obvious chunk of awesome?

Count me in on the streaming live video front now.

As the McCain/Palin ticket graced the fringes of the Twin Cities metro on Friday I had a unique opportunity to witness some of it live. Not in person, not on the television, and not on a mainstream media news site. Instead, it was on www.theuptake.org.

The Uptake is an aggregation of citizen journalists, using a central site for coordination and distribution. We can now say that citizen journalism is nothing new. However, the critical difference is now that technology allows them to stream live video from their compatible devices [ a hacked iPhone in the clip I viewed, as the cameraman described it to an interviewee. ]

These streams are available on theuptake.org live as they happened, and also in archived form after the fact. They use the service Qik for the live video back-end, and blip.tv for archived/produced pieces.

I have been aware of the technology since Qik’s release, but thought that it might be an answer looking for a question. The tech itself seemed sound enough, but the missing link to me was in notification to potential viewers. How would people that wanted to see the video know to visit The Uptake to partake?

The answer was now simple, as it was how I found out. One of my Twitter followers, @noahkunin, is a correspondent for The Uptake. He sent out tweets that preceded the event, and while it took place.

Now, the picture is complete. The tech to harness the moment live to teh Internets is in place, an aggregator like The Uptake is in place to coordinate the coverage, and, a suitably viral method to notify people about it is also in place. The archive in is place; it is the last and oldest piece.

What does this mean?

It means that now things will be covered in a way that they haven’t yet been covered. Citizen journalists are not only equipped with a phone/camera/video camera in their pocket; now they are packing what is just shy of a complete news studio. And that is a big deal.

I had to read that a couple of times. Microsoft Midori.

Microsoft is now looking into the world, post-Windows. This BBC story tells us that MS has become aware that many people are no longer tied to a single machine; rather, they are promiscuous with the devices they use to consume data.

To cope, they are set to create an OS that will accomodate such behavior. And the project shares its name with a melon-flavored liqueur. Midori. [it also means “green” in Japanese, tells me the Wikipedia entry.]

Microsoft names projects after alcoholic drinks, and the BBC tells me that I am promiscuous. Somebody had a good weekend. Wow, it really is Monday morning…

[ image courtesy of moneboh / Flickr ]

Our friends at Amazon.com this week announced a Beta of their video on demand service. It has been described by the EVP of Amazon, Bill Carr, as an outgrowth of their Unbox video download service. People were bummed they had to wait for the video to download to begin viewing.

Netflix just announced that their streaming video service, originally offered on their website and then through a dedicated set-top box, will now be available via the XBox 360 this fall. This of course means that Netflix and Microsoft are now in partnership. That seems like kind of a big deal.

These two items in the same week? Good thing it wasn’t last week, amid the destroyer-class hysterics of the iPhone. Which brings up a good point — people are still going to go home to sit in front of a screen. Granted, wireless personal devices are going to be the major focus from here on out, as this article from Information Week indicates. But, not everything will be consumed on a personal device. From Apple.

The floods of 2008 have been covered in a way that those of 1993 and 1999 were not. This has been close to my heart, as I have family that was affected by these floods. My grandparents’ home was rendered uninhabitable by the flood waters, so naturally I wanted to know what was going on in the state.

I turned to the site iowaflood.com upon the suggestion of Public Radio International’s morning news show The Takeaway. Andy Brudtkuhl, a consultant from the Des Moines area, set up a site that drew upon the strengths of citizen journalism and user generated content [UGC]. [In two hours, no less.]

Rather than exclusively posting content of his own, he tapped major media sites [TV, newspaper], services like releases from government officials & the National Weather Service, and feeds of user-generated content from YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter to create a much more comprehensive resource. Other tools included Yahoo Pipes and WordPress. He gives the full details here.

This, to me, represents what citizen journalism can really be. In situations where people need up-to-the-minute coverage of events that change as quickly, custom aggregators like this have no peer. The local TV stations don’t have the manpower or editorial jurisdiction to place unedited feeds on their sites. Conversely, the average Joe doesn’t have a helicopter for those aerial views of the flood damage.

At certain times like this, the power and resources of the masses, with their cameras and mobiles, comes to the fore to complete the coverage. The media goes on about its business most of the time, with UGC trickling in to augment coverage, but switches gears when significant events deem necessary. I don’t think one will not supplant the other; we have proof of a symbiotic relationship in iowaflood.com.

This may well prove to be a model to be followed for future catastrophic events.

Here is a novel idea — take headlines, and put them on t-shirts, on demand. Clever, ironic, and just the thing for all of your news-following hipster friends.

I noticed this on the CNN website for the first time today — there is a little t-shirt-shaped icon next to some of the stories with intriguing headlines. The only other icon there is the video camera denoting video content. There is a list of all of the shirts they have come up with so far here. Some highlights:

“Robo restaurant a hit with diners”
“Food zips on rails in automated eatery.”
“Look out! Your groceries are shrinking!”

The design is simple: the headline, and in a smaller font below, the phrase “I just saw it on CNN.com” followed by the date and time that the article was posted.

This, combined with their Twitter feeds, will have them in with the cool kids.

[ image courtesy of Joe M500 / Flickr ]

The Internets are bound for the sewer. Literally.

The BBC has a story today about an Ofcom pronouncement that indicates the new home of the mega-fast internets could be in the sewer.

Basically, this is not that big of a deal. France is doing it already. It is more sophisticated than running a fatty LAN cable through the storm drains; it is an extension of ‘conduit sharing’ that is already taking place. Providers are also looking at literally sharing conduits with other utilities as well.

As the next generation of broadband leaves the once-fast cable modems in the dust, we move closer to instant access. The article states:

Connections of up to 100Mbp will allow for a host of new services including on-demand high definition (HD) TV, DVD quality film downloads in minutes, online video messaging, CCTV home surveillance and HD gaming services.

I have high-speed internet, and video-on-demand in my home, and it is abundantly clear that it operates at the fringe of effectiveness much of the time. Compression artifacts in video distract from viewing, audio on some on-demand material is less-than-mp3 quality, and overall navigation time of the system is snail-paced.

Frankly, I am still sometimes amazed that Comcast is able to shove as much stuff through that standard 75-Ohm coaxial as they do. Imagine if it were fiber optic, at 8-10x the capacity. Now we are talking.