Category: Media

Pleasantly surprised this morning when I found a message in my inbox floated from Dylan Tweney’s blog. I had checked the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box when leaving a comment there a week ago, not thinking much of it. Turns out Dylan is using the excellent Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin, which fills a real hole — I would never have thought to return to the site to see whether there were follow-up comments (I only do that when a good argument is in progress :).

The plugin is now installed here as well.

FWIW, the post in question is re: a pair of amazing videos of Stevie Wonder throwing down on Sesame Street, 1972 style. One of them complete with talk box, a la Frampton.

P.S. I now know the difference between a talk box and a Vocoder.

Used to be that stock photos cost a couple hundred bucks or more. Used to be that photographers could make good money in stock photography. But now millions of people have (more or less) high-quality digital cameras and broadband internet, sites are finding ways to leverage the public’s massive image database.

In The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired follows a stock photographer watching his business being undermined (if not decimated) by the rise of sites like iStockphoto, where the public can contribute images to sell — at prices ranging from $1 to $10, rather than the more traditional $400.

Of course all of the images at iStockphoto are by “amateurs” rather than pros. But browsing the collection, it’s clear that there are thousands of images there that most web/print designers would consider to be “good enough.”

Aside from the fact that most amateurs will never earn enough from a site like this to pay the rent (or even buy a bag of groceries), I’m curious about what kind of revenue the site itself can make with margins that low. As brilliant as the idea is, seems like usage would have to be extremely high to make it sustainable.

And there are 100% free alternatives out there, such as the Creative Commons collection at Flickr. stock.xchng is another. Other royalty-free or low-cost image sources you guys know about?

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, photography, stock

Dylan Tweney comes out against Technorati’s rel= tagging scheme, and the requirement that tags be visible on the page (I’ve been irked by this requirement, but have gone along with it while waiting for something better to show up).

The problem with “microformats,” which Technorati is pushing pretty hard, is that they seem to be no more than poorly implemented metadata standards. … And encoding content as part of a linked page’s URL? How much more inflexible can you get? This is supposed to be an improvement over META tags?

This gets to the meat: “You want to make metadata visible? Write a browser plugin that lets you view META tags.”

Precisely. Data isn’t exactly “meta” if it’s right there on the page, is it?

We’re up for another big week of webcasting and multimedia training for mid-career journalists. The lectures/talks tucked into the meal times are open to the public and will be available as both live and archived webcasts.

Featured speakers are Dan Cox of World Online, Terry Moore of the Orange County Register, Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio, Bob Cauthorn of City Tools, Regina McCombs of Startribune.com, Dave Buonfiglio of Internet
Broadcast Systems, Deb Mullins of the Alameda Newspaper Group, and a panel of Oakland Tribune reporters and editors. More info.

Finally made the decision to switch to another webcasting package – now using Vara Software’s WireCast, which supports multiple layers, multiple cameras, has much better titling controls, and a bunch of other goodies. I have distant ties to Vara Software — its lead engineers were also the lead engineers at Adamation, who made the amazing video editing package personalStudio for BeOS and, later, Windows. The past keeps reverberating…

In the days of usenet, people found that it was nearly impossible to make bozos go away, but it was very easy to set up a bozo filter to eliminate them from one’s view of the universe.

Cory Doctorow is very excited about Feed Rinse — an RSS pre-scrub service that “Automatically filters out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in.” It’s a cool idea, but subject to “the Tivo effect”: by intentionally gravitating toward your own interests and shutting out everything else, you lose the serendipity of chance encounters.

Flipping through LPs in dusty bins is a very different experience from searching for MP3s on a P2P network. Not because the dust is missing, but because you greatly diminish the number of accidental discoveries. With Tivo, you have the same problem: Your plate is full of stuff you like, so you stop channel surfing, i.e. stop finding things by accident.

I may not be interested in reading your posts about baseball, but I prefer to skim over those rather than miss the opportunity to read your post about some freak baseball accident I never would have heard about otherwise.

These problems are parallel to the echo chamber effect, where people in online communities expose themselves only to information that reinforces their existing world view, rather than challenging it.

Technorati Tags: bozo, rss