Phototalk | Special Interest Blog

Video Blogging, Vapnik´s Support Vector Machines, Video-On-Demand and Bayesian Networks

In the last days C|Net has published a bunch of articles on Videoblogging and Video-On-Demand:

• "Netscape co-founder eyes video blogs" about the new startup of Mark Andreessen (24 H Laundry): "A blogging and social networking site for consumers that will include video [...], 24HL, as in "airing your laundry," is largely funded by its founders, according to one Silicon Valley venture capitalist. [...] Since retiring from Netscape, Andreessen has lived the life of a gentleman entrepreneur. [...] More recently, he, along with Netscape alum Mike Homer, launched the Open Media Network, which caters to broadcasters, independent filmmakers and average people who want to distribute their films on the Internet for free."
• On the edge, the former articles also mentions the "TiVo with search"-tools of Gotuit Media. More about this in "Dawn of a new ad age" at the bottom. Similar an article ("IBM's 'Marvel' to scour Net for video, audio") on Marvel, IBM´s new internet search technology for footage, which is based on MPEG-7: "The 'How Much Information?' survey conducted by the University of California at Berkeley determined that television stations worldwide produced about 123 million hours of total programming in 2002. Of the total, 31 million hours represented original programming, which translates to 70,000 terabytes of data.[...]
  The prototype system can scan through a database of more than 200 hours of broadcast news video and use 100 different descriptive terms to classify and identify scenes. IBM hopes to come up with a list of 1,000 descriptive labels by April.
  A query takes about two to three seconds. Marvel is based on the MPEG-7 data format, but it can search on any standard video format."
• "Video content set free on Web" about the new startup of J.D. Lascia, Ourmedia ("the grassroots media revolution"), which hosts video for free: ""We're still at an early stage of the multimedia-rich Web. The Web is not going to be Web logs and text; it's going to be people posting video and podcasting and taking part in the citizens' media that's just starting to explode." Ourmedia's ultimate goal is not to amass a huge collection of video, but to establish open standards that will make vast multimedia libraries and archives across the Internet accessible through any number of social networks, blog tools, portals and media-sharing sites. [..] "One of our goals is to create an open format for video so that there are no more format wars," Lasica said. "It's crazy right now. It's confusing to people when they can't play video, and it's very frustrating.""
• "Google readying Web-only video search", only a week old, but already widely quoted, about the old and new plans of Google-Video: "Longer term, Google is preparing a payment system for a premium video service that would let people pay to watch full video clips. Google is talking to several top-tier content providers, including Hollywood movie studios, to gain agreements for aggregating their video and selling premium or pay-per-view access. "The ultimate endgame is streaming video, otherwise Google can't get video advertising dollars," said one source. "They have to figure a way to get video into their world to capture those dollars."" Similar "Yahoo, Google turn up volume on video search battle".

Miscellaneous

Getty Images launched the "Getty Images Media Manager", available as WorkGroup Edition and Enterprise Edition (Link); JupiterImages reports the results for Q I/2005 (Link) and Google started Video-Blogging/Vlogging (Link here ["video blogging remains in an embryonic stage"] and also there).

Besides this, Phototalk celebrates the first anniversary (started April 11, 2004).

Posted by Andy

Questo blog è chiuso per ferie, fino all' 8 Agosto 2004

[© Grace and Katie]

Chiudo, per un circa settimana, questo weblog. Infatti, a mio modesto parere, per scrivere bisogna prima pensare e, i blogs spesso ti tolgono lo spazio per pensare.


(Hint for the person/CEO/BizDeveloper etc. who is constantly looking for "DigitalVision 2003 revenues", ""Image source" 2003 revenues" or "Index stock imagery 2003 revenues" and other good stuff-- Google hits are a tricky thing, especially with your really nice -- and static -- IP! So, no one has to work for Pixlogic, the company ("Visual Search") with Venture Capital from the CIA, just to know who you are...).
=:-)

BlogTalk 2.0: Presentations Related To Video- and Moblogging

The three presentations related to video- and moblogging at the BlogTalk 2.0 have been presented here earlier. Here are links to excerpts from two of them:

Jon Hoem: "Videoblogs as 'Collective Documentary'" (excerpt and here the full presentation)
Stephanie Hendrick / Therese Örnberg: "The blog as an immersive space: Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004" (excerpt)

The third presentation (the one we´re waiting for) called "Mobile Blogging: Who, Where, Why?" by Nicola Döring was withdrawn because "We just received an email from Nicola Döring, she is heavily involved in negotiations in context of her professorship.The program changed slightly for Tuesday" (Link).

Related/just discovered: "Introduction - Creating Streaming Video", 7 pages (MediaCollege).

The Best (and Worst) Video Feeds Online

Short Overview and Review: "The Best (and Worst) Video Feeds Online" (OJR.org).

New VideoBlogging/Vog Email List

Vlog 2.1:

At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging you can join a video blog email list. jay Dedman in Manhattan has set it up, and when I subscribed there were ten on the list. Its charter is broad, largely to facilitate discussion about video blogs with particular interest in things like compression problems and those sorts of things. Sounds geeky? I guess so, but compression and bandwidth is to vogging what leading and kerning is to typography.

See also the category "Videoblogs".

New Tools for Uploading Photos, Videos and Audio to your Weblog

Upload of Video Content:

A weblogging tool, Ecto, has a new feature: Movie upload. It offers users an option to indicate how an uploaded movie is used in the weblog (blog) entry. There are two options: Ecto creates a link to the movie inside your blog entry. The second option: the movie is then inserted right into your blog entry. [via Cinema Minima]
[See also "NoteTaker, Ecto and TypePad taste good together"]

Upload of Photo Content:

Mac users on OS X who manage their photos in Apple's iPhoto will definitely want to try PhotoToTypePad. This neat little extension for iPhoto lets you export an album right into a TypePad photo album. [Typepad]

Upload of Audio Content:

audblog (signup for TypePad users) and Audioblog (check out the Audioblog TypePad site) are two services for posting audio to your Typepad weblog. [Typepad]

Reuters launches Video RSS

Marvellous news for news junkies (Link):

Reuters offers now four TV channels with World News, Business, Entertainment, and Life News (Reuters RSS; Reuters Feedroom).

Headlines and short description of the clips are available in the Video RSS feeds. For viewing the clips you have to enter the Reuters website. This is a serious disadvantage: some photoblogs show their images in RSS readers in a small format, why doesn´t Reuters show the full videos in the RSS reader? |-D

(ya, know it´s not that easy)

[Update] Videoblogs enter Journalism

Minor update to "Blogs, Moblogs and now "Vogs": Are Videoblogs Ready For Prime Time?":

"The next step is "Vblogging," for video blogs, with images derived from digital cameras, webcames, mobile phones and palmtop computers, which are becoming ever more versatile and cheap. "Those with a desire and a little technology [will have] the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field," says Forbes.com." [Richard Ingham]

The scene of videobloggers still seems to be very small. A lot of people try hard to find informative websites (see some links here). Some newer links: Internetvideomagazine, Video-link.tv, Steve Garfield´s Video Blog including "Reality News by Citizen Journalists".

Update: "eyeBlog" for Point-of-View journalism:

"I just presented Eye-Contact Sensing Glasses and eyeBlog at CHI 2004 in Vienna, Austria. ECSGlasses and eyeBlog are a video recording and publishing system that responds to human social interaction. It uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker. eyeBlog uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it. Moreover, becasue eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments" [HML Blog]

Roblogging and Roveillance™

You´re still sticking to moblogging? That was yesterday. Gone. Now we got Roblogging:

pt + "roblog": "Welcome to the world's first and only "roblog". currently, 2 sony aibo robot dogs, an er1 / tablet pc based robot post, and a roomba-tablet pc robot automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human - phillip m. torrone - does as well. as always, the best way to predict the future is to invent it." He is mad about his automatic “moblog” picture posting machine.

How would Howard Rheingold call it? Steve Mann? These guys?

Mobveillance, equiveillance theory, coteveillance, coveillance... yesterday´s stuff.

As we see it: it´s related to surveillance, but it´s not a surveillance by third parties, it´s a personal induced surveillance with permission. It´s related to sousveillance, but it´s not watching third parties´ surveillance, it´s watching the people doing sousveillance; it´s some kind of retro activated sousveillance for enhanced surveillance. We call it Roveillance™. We have a new expression! Roveillance is the new medium of your choice for ClappingVeillance.

Phillip has also inventend the iShower: "so, in an effort to maximize my time, i was thinking that if i could waterproof a web cam, send the video and audio to my computer in the batroom and then get the audio back to the shower radio, i might have a good shower video conference system. so in stage one i am testing it out, the web cam is sealed up, and the audio is going okay. when i have time, i'll get the rest going. perhaps you want to tele-shower (shower with someone else across the globe). i'll need to work out the display component, but it's not a big deal. check out the first test."

A late adoptor generously explains: "Sometimes this variation of enhanced liquid reinverted sousveillance has been referred to as Showerveillance or Wetveillance in the literature. Armani Shower Gel Fragrance might sponsor this and Apple has added iShower to the product line." [The link is in your head]

“Digital cameras change history in Iraq” (The Modern Trinity of Enlightenment)

Todd Lappin at BoingBoing:

"Some interesting comments from a front page story in Thursday's Washington Post* about the role digital cameras have played in in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle. If Vietnam was the first televised war, Iraq will probably be remembered as the war in which personal media technology altered the course of history."

One might conclude: if television had been dominating close to the end of the Vietnam war, if digicams, emails and blogs (“The Modern Trinity of Enlightenment”) are the dominating and challenging powers after the official end of the Iraq War, hopefully phonecams, moblogs and videoblogs are the inhibiting powers before the next war (dewy-eyed and greenly, I know) or at least the altering powers at the beginning.
__________________________________________________
*Washington Post:
For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.
Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.
"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."
But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.

"Think of a video blog as a dream. Remnants of a whole"

Small update to this story: Vidblogs.com is a videoblogging website we recently discovered. Lots of links: "Vidblogs are films. They usually are between one and six minutes and contain lots of "real" footage from someone's life. Vidblogging is the ultimate public voyer experiment."

[via Red Ferret Journal]

BlogTalk 2.0 Program released

Disappointingly but unsurprisingly the v0.95 of the BlogTalk 2.0 program in Vienna, July 5 - 6, 2004, lists only three sessions associated to our mission:

Monday, July 5
10:30-12:10
Hoem, Jon: "Videoblogs as 'Collective Documentary'"

Monday, July 5
12:25-13:15
Hendrick, Stephanie/Örnberg, Therese: "The blog as an immersive space: Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004"

Tuesday, July 6
Keynotes
13:50-14:20
Döring, Nicola*: "Mobile Blogging: Who, Where, Why?"

and the prime time presentation Monday, July 5, 17:45-18:55, no one should miss:

Azhar, Azeem/Niederhofer, Max: "Does blogging suck?"

We imploringly do hope that more than 160 people visit Vienna this year.

_______________________________________________
*She "represents another academic approach (communications and media studies) to the phenomenon of blogs. She is psychologist and has an intensive relation to online communication and the research side of it." [Link]

Blogs, Moblogs and now "Vogs":Are Videoblogs Ready For Prime Time?

This subject had been discussed in depth at Slashdot.

We have lots of referrers coming in via Google requesting information about "videoblogging".

However we have to admit that this blog "Phototalk" obviously was not intended to be the first information and discussion source for videoblogging (so if you like to start something like this on a very regular basis with a non-commercial intention, we´ll grant you with your very own independent blog "Videotalk" here at talks.blogs.com: you are the boss of "Videotalk", have all the freedom to do what you like (multi authorship, your design etc. and - the responsibility). If instead you have already set up something like a discussion/information blog about video blogging, please let us know. We are very interested in this matter but - to be frankly - without the resources to act in both fields although both will share a more common ground in the future than today.

Here are some interesting starting points:

Adrian Miles (RMIT University, Melbourne; he is a teacher/researcher in new pedagogies in new media, hypermedia, and interactive video) is doing video blogging for 2 years. In his Manifesto called VOGMA (Video Manifesto) he writes:

1. a vog respects bandwidth
2. a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)
3. a vog uses performative video and/or audio
4. a vog is personal
5. a vog uses available technology
6. a vog experiments with writerly video and audio
7. a vog lies between writing and the televisual
8. a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media
9. a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem
10. a vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog

A vog is a VideoBlog (Adrian: "A vog is the video equivalent of a blog."). Please visit also Adrian´s Videoblog::VOG 2.0, Vlog 2.1 and "desktop vogging part one". In the latter he writes:

"Like blogs, vogs also tend to emphasise informal modes of shooting and cutting, and often develop a serial form where it is the ongoing history of the vog that helps contextualise any individual entry. A vog assumes that the natural habitat of networked video is a multiwindow environment and that the combination of images in time (montage) with multiple simultaneous views (collage) is a key trope of digital screen narration, expression and authorship (see for instance Manovich and Landow). Unlike much of what passes for interactive network video, a vog requires and assumes that Internet video is more than a digital stream which appropriates our browsers as televisual wannabes. A vog is an attempt to develop an interactive video vernacular for the network." [Full article]

Vlog 2.1 covers nearly all you to need to know, lots about:
-Vogging Practice
-Vogging Theory
-Vogging Tools

Jeremy Allaire reports an early Video Blog Experiment with WiFi laptops: "The experiment was a success. There were 27 video blog entries (of varying content and quality), and over 51,000 total views of all of these videos." He calls it "distributed video journalism."

Peter Van Dijck (1; 2) provides a great list of videoblogs . He has just started a Wiki about Video Blogging called Me-TV.org which after some time of reviewing we consider to become probably the source in this field.

Among others ("See Me, Blog me"; "The Video Blog Experiment") he reports an article (Gurdian) "Video blogs go mobile in 3G trial": “Mobile phone company Orange unveiled plans to offer customers of its soon to be launched 3G service the ability to file the next generation of blogs – video diaries." We are in contact with the Business Development of Vodafone but haven´t been able to figure out what they intend to do in this field.

In the Infoimaging (what Kodak claims to do) Section Forbes writes about "How Videoblogs Will Change Newsgathering": "The question that remains unanswered at this point is how many individuals and organizations that have never set foot inside a local television station will use Vblogging for newsgathering and disseminating community news and who will watch."

Leaving the theory behind us: how do we start with videoblogging in real life? With an equipment at reasonable costs? Timm Hall works with "... a Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera, Apple iBook, and iMovie. Welcome to the brave new world of lo-vi, guerrilla micro-vilmmaking":

"Well, it's finally happened. Hollywood has called. Just had a great talk with Bryan Singer's people about doing some 'second unit work' (whatever the hell that is) for X-Men 3, which is still in pre-production and not due to be released until 2006. Bryan is apparently a huge fan of this site, and has been wanting to meet me for some time. Go figure.
Still, I haven't decided if I'm going to do it. I really like my day job. They just got these cool new coffee machines that use these little sealed cups that you put into this drawer thing, then it goes 'whoosh'! and the coffee comes out and the little cup gets sucked away and you have a fresh brewed cup! I doubt they have anything like that in Bryan's offices." (Link)

If you want to start the other way round: take the PenCam. It´s a "Covert Wireless Colour Video Camera" and "Ideal for undercover assignments and discreet surveillance, the PenCam cleverly conceals a quality colour video camera and microphone inside a working pen. With up to 100m transmission range and minimal illumination, undercover assignments can now be carried out with ease!"

"The ultimate in undetectable surveillance..."

It´s just that Sousveillance thing again (1; 2).

The C | summit Cameraphones 2004:Announcing the OneWorld/OneDay Project

A little shy as we are we´ve proposed stuff like this earlier (last paragraph) but this is not the place for the We-told-you-so-speech. This project of C | summit Cameraphones 2004 is great:

"A presentation about a proposed non-profit project is based on the goal of documenting the beauty and passion of all human life for one 24 hour period on Valentines Day of the year 2005 by 100,000 cameraphones, photographers and videographers throughout the world. The project will coordinate access to celebrities for student film makers and photographers. We believe that this would become the most valuable reference for anthropologists in five hundred years, while driving adoption and U.S. uptake. We intend for this project to be bigger than Hands Across America, more artistically impactful than Burning Man, and more fun than the Macarena. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to charities benefitting the vision impaired. This will lead to an open group brainstorming about ways to tip the market for mobile imaging."

Meditation

Ran accidentally into Boring Animated Images; how long can you watch this?

Start

Each time you start from scratch.