Re-use music videos on youtube

Two days after Universal exasperated many of us with its same old chest beating rhetoric about services such as youtube and myspace, Warners have announced a much more constructive response.

Under the agreement, YouTube users will have full access to videos from Warner artists. They will also be permitted incorporate material from those videos into their own clips, which are then uploaded to YouTube. Warner and YouTube will share advertising revenue sold in connection with the video content.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14885094/

star finder gadget

want…please

Digital sky-scope auto-locates and identifies stars: “Cory Doctorow:
The SkyScout is a sky-watching digital scope that automatically identifies stars, provides directions to other stars, and recites mythology about celestial bodies:

Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the ‘target’ button. The SkyScout will instantly tell you what object you are looking at…

(via Red Ferret)

(Via Boing Boing.)

got a spacey idea…NASA will fund

Care of The Guardian, I heard of NIAC – NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts.

“The NIAC was formed for the explicit purpose of being an independent source of revolutionary aeronautical and space concepts that could dramatically impact how NASA develops and conducts its mission. The Institute is to provide highly visible, recognized and high-level entry point for outside thinkers and researchers.”
from here

Basically, they fund projects that sound as if they are ripped from the pages of the latest space sci fi novel. Past grantees have included the space elevator – no need for shuttles, just catch the elevator! Also, a revamp on the traditional spacesuit – looks like they are finally working on the girlie fit version.

psp makes sense now

I have had a psp since you could have a psp care of a fantastic going away present. Sadly, although a gorgeous machine it sat on my shelf…until Santa Alice bought me SSX tour for Christmas. Settings: music volume==0, ambient sounds==10, it now all makes complete sense. The screen is just big enough to fill your view with the same lovely mountain scapes as the console game although it can get a bit disorientating as the distance you can see ahead doesn’t seem as far. The music didn’t seem as great hence the volume==0 but Alice tells me that one of the selling points is that I should be able to load the psp with my own music and play it instead…I have a feeling however that it prolly won’t play well with itunes.

betty and cab live again on archive.org

I have had my head very much in organisation mode for the last 6 months or so. But I promised myself that in the new year I would make sure to re-connect with my favourite domain. And right on cue I find Betty Boop on archive.org. Check out the fantastic Cab Calloway rendition of St James’ Infirmary in Snow White for an inspiring bit of dance animation (compare it with the live opening sequence of Cab in Minnie the Moocher). All of the Betty Boop library is in the public domain and therefore available free of copyright. Which reminds me, the other new year’s resolution is to really spend some time on video editing this year. Maybe Betty goes to the moon?

etech05:day 1:firefox

Brendan Ike
Sorry folks – vagued out.

etech05:day 1:flickr

stewart butterfield: don’t ask him about the takeover :)

He is giving overview of Flickr.

His talk is on using websertvices as a strategy for a startup – open up and let go.

The Flickr API has 62 methods – atomic pieces of functionality.

They have found that in providing the API they have garnered a lot of trust from folks that would otherwise be nervous about giving important content to someone else (ie. photos).

Credibility particularly with the alpha geek community who have proven very influential, utililty, openness also meant that had to be more disciplined and of course it triggered a huge wave of creativity and created a massive community.

Downside: scalability issues – they lost control over the pace that things happened, they had to deal with other people’s bugs (a big issue).
More subtle issues: privacy/copyright, more support costs, a bunch of business risks – forced to confront issues before they were necessarily ready.

eg. micampte.it, flickr postcards, flickrgraph, 43 things, flickr world map (allthegoodness.com), mappr.com,

4-5% of traffic is API traffic.

webservices for start-ups good but scary.

etech05:day 1:keynotes

Rael Dornfest is opening the conference with an emphasis on the hands on imperative, the narrowing of the gap between customer and consumer. The consumer is taking action.

Why?
1. We’re 20 years into the PC era
2. Given enough eyeballs, all features are obvious
3. Advent of the LazyWeb
4. The gospel of Openness is spreading

So why remix rather than hack (the conference theme is remix).
Hacking is remixing, akin to thyming in rap, sampling in dance music, riffing in jazz and blues and ajamming in rock.

Remix your web
View source
Firefox and thunderbird
javaScript
Desktop integration v2.0

Remixing your music
step 1. rip
the music industry’s customers were trying to say something
the music industry wasn’t listening
the customers weren’t listening all that well
Apple was listening

Remix your TV
Any night is Thursday night
Replay offers the 30 second skip
Tivo leaves things open enough
Networks invent the off-by-one minute error
Tivo adds another tuner

Remix your network
apple untethered the laptop
commodity hardware

Remix your movies
BT scares just about everyone (except its users)
VOD on demand acutally provides video on demand time shifing moveis
netflix

Remix your data
scraping begat xml which led to apis
hacks led to standards which in turn led to business opps

Remix your text
blogging made journalism more efficient

remix syndication
rss allowed my netscape to compete with yahoo
rss reinvented syndication
rss flows in my yahoo

everyone monetises rss

remix your bookshelf
prject gutenberg
archivelorg
google print
safari

remix it
be liberal i what you accept, but critical in what you push out
hacks become frameworks become foundations
the raw material grows on trees

remix the browser (again)

remix brick and mortar
the cirle of packages
use amazon to search meatspace
in store pickup re-remixes the physical and virtual
if it ain’t online it is not visible

Etech is all about unreasonable expectations

Tim O’Reilly
What is on O’reilly’s radar:

Design Patterns – Christopher Alexander
Design for participation – a succesfful open source software project consists of small peices loosely joined.

Therefore: architect your software or service in such a way as to be used easily as a componet of a larger system: keep it modular document your interfacesa and use a licence that doesn’t hinder recombination.

USD : there is great benefit in sharing your dev efforts and pocesses with your users.

Syndicated e-commerce
on today’s web, you no longer need to build or own all the components of your application.
eg. isbn.nu
therefore glue together the small pices of others

The perpetual betA
When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are not longer software artifacts, they’re ongoing services.

therefore: don’t pacikage up new freatues into monolithic releaseds. rather fold them in on regular. basis. eg. flickr, google etc
pn: definition of beta seems to be emerging – if being constantly mod then in beta

Teh key to comp adv in networded apps is the extent to which users augment your datw with their own.

therefore: architect for tparticaption beyond design and dev: invite your users. users add value to shared data.

eg. amazon – they are getting more and more distinctive as they encourage users to add more and more information to the available commodity data. In contrast to say Barnes and Nobles which does not.
eg. flickr – the users are building the flickr database (commodity data – PN)

only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of explicitly adding value
therefore: make participation the defult, aggregating user data as a SIDE EFFECT of activity.

The long tail:
many of the limiting factors for distribution are absent on the internet. therefore the power of the computer to monetise niches formerly too small to be commercial. Eg. google adsense

software aboce the level of a singel device
the pc is not longer teh only access point for networked applications.

eg. isync allows you to have your data across all devices.

therefore do not design for a single device

social networking:
social networking are a by-product of social applications like email, IM, photosharing, even book buying
therefore: architect your app to capture and ashare the social fabric underlying your app.
eg. really simple chat
: etech.inroomchat.org/chatlogs

data is the next intel inside

(new conference: Where 2.0 june 29th San Fran)

packets and shipping containers
understand teh optimum packet size for our application domain and devise

o’reilly has re-packaged their books so that they are more web sized packages – eg. hackers series, Make etc

remix
when content is digital it lends itself to being broken down and remixed.

therefore: build your businesss model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic unit.

eg. safari U

what else is on their radar?
ajax – asynch JS plus XML
eg. john odell – walking tour

hardware hacking – car pc hacks, networked objects, fabbing, make
Saul is going to talking about collaborative hardware hacking

ruby on rails www.rubyonrails.com

visualisation: showing vast amount of data flickr colour wheel, baby names

VOIP – skype, asterisk

People – the p in P2P is people

open source biology

Wired tell of an Australian leading the work on provision of new bio technology under an open source licence. It includes a quote from John Wilbanks, the Director of Creative Commons’ new Science initiative, Science Commons.

A paper appearing in this week’s edition of Nature is antiseptically entitled: “Gene transfer to plants by diverse species of bacteria.” But the information that lies within may herald a revolution in biology.

The paper describes two new technologies: TransBacter, a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, a method of visualizing where the genes are and what they do. Behind the research, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, is a team of scientists who want to provide the technologies as a “kernel,” modeled on the Linux movement, as the beginning of perhaps the first practical offering in open-source biology.

mechanical building

facade outside
Originally uploaded by moniker.
facadeinside
Originally uploaded by moniker.

This is straight out of a China Mieville story. My friend Mel was recently in Paris and told me about the Arab World Institute. She has put up a couple of images of this amazing building that is covered in iris lens. Apparently the iris open and close in response to the sun.