Breaking news from our Better Late Than Never department: we sat down with Scott Shawcroft back in March to talk about Metavid for his Open Road Trip project.  He has posted a video of the interview and demo.  Check out some of his other interviews too, others from the bay area leg of his road trip include Larry Lessig and Rick & Megan Prelinger.

The Center for Responsible Politics runs a very well established site called open secrets. This site offers clear overviews of campaign finance information about politicians. I wrote a quick overlay to query their site and pull in their content. You can check it out in the bleeding edge of the site (under add overlay -> person overlay). We are just getting started so the functionality is still kind of limited but in the future we hope to integrate their dataset into other areas of the site. (as well as increase stability
The interface may undergo some alterations as well more on that in the near future

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Michael & Aphid will present metavid at cc salon. CC salon is a monthly gathering for people interested in Creative Commons, copyright, Free Culture, Open Source, Art, Media, and Music. For more information visit cc salon

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metavid will be presented at the UC DARNet Grad Res Info/Xchge on Friday, April 28, 2006. You can check out the schedule of events on their website

There should also be streaming video of the event ~

Here are some relatively short answers to what metavid is about.

Metaivd addresses the problem of undemocratic systems of engagement with political proceedings. We argue that in commercial content production there is an inherently undemocratic assumption in which there are “producers” of information and “consumers” of information.

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We’ll be at Craig Baldwin’s wild sat. night microcinema OTHER CINEMA on april 22. Here’s the description for the night’s events:

In the first of a pair of culture-jamming gigs, we host three incendiary media miscreants and a mixed bag of new (and old) tricks. In a mid-career retrospective of the Keatonesque Tom Borden, we witness his gutsy, occasionally scatological performances, spanners in the works of the commercial machine. Also slated is the Metavid project, a 30-min. show n’ tell by Michael Dale and Aphid, who have managed to hack the C-SPAN closed-caption window, inputting critical info on featured Congressmen in real-time. The jam-boree kicks off with a set of inspired and inspiring guerrilla tactical jokes from the Yes Men, the Biotic Baking Brigade, a Boston Tea Party-crasher, and prankster godfather Joey Skaggs. Broadcast live by Neighborhood Public Radio.

(the rest of OC’s spring schedule)

We recently relocated the code base to UCSC’s dFroge code management system. This will make code management a bit easier on the metavid developers. The dforge system is analogous to sourceforge in function, but is being hosted by UCSC. The underling source code for the UCSC system is gForge which is also open source. The site primarily hosts university projects but is open to collaboration from other non-university participants and the source code is publicly available for many of the projects hosted on UCSC dForge.

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We recently relocated the code base to UCSC’s dFroge code management system. This will make code management a bit easier on the metavid developers. The dforge system is analogous to sourceforge in function, but is being hosted by UCSC. The underling source code for the UCSC system is gForge which is also open source. The site primarily hosts university projects but is open to collaboration from other non-university participants and the source code is publicly available for many of the projects hosted on UCSC dForge.

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