I thought I would post a little round of nethappnings to be filed under related…

If you have not be subjected to the advertisments that have been poping up on varius weblogs lately check out the anti-net-neutrality propoganda. The commercial draws upon “creative commons like” animation aesthetics to position the corporate point of view as a grassroots campaign. I think another bloger summed it up nicely:

“it’s a typical propaganda cartoon that tries to hide a pro-corporate message under a visage of populism. It’s actively attempting to undermine actual activism by people like you and me, who don’t want to see the internet become the next equivalent of cable television.”

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I thought I would post a little round of nethappnings to be filed under related…

If you have not be subjected to the advertisments that have been poping up on varius weblogs lately check out the anti-net-neutrality propoganda. The commercial draws upon “creative commons like” animation aesthetics to position the corporate point of view as a grassroots campaign. I think another bloger summed it up nicely:

“it’s a typical propaganda cartoon that tries to hide a pro-corporate message under a visage of populism. It’s actively attempting to undermine actual activism by people like you and me, who don’t want to see the internet become the next equivalent of cable television.”

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The Beyond Broadcast conference is happening this weekend covering topics related to reinventing public media in a participatory culture. I highly recommend checking out the conference site http://www.beyondbroadcast.net/

They have gone to great efforts to make the entire conference very web accessible for virtual attendants, including public question space, irc channels, live video broadcasting and even a space in second life

The question space is particularly impressive, you can watch the webcast and add in questions for the panel to answer.

we have installed the mediaWiki wiki software. (The same software that runs wikipedia) We have started to look at ways to integrate the metavid base capture data into a wiki environment. Here is a sample page outputted from the metavid application. I still have to write some mediaWiki extensions to handle externally hosted images and perhaps figure out a ways to structure this data with either with templates or more extensions that makes the metadata accessible. Also I will add in cross links to the person information.

Great news!

The wonderful developers at Xiph have released a new version of Xiph QT Components which has support for Theora! Metavid encodes our archived content using Theora, and we’re very excited that there is now a bridge between our project and the applications and creative development frameworks that depend on Quicktime such as Processing, max/msp/jitter, Final Cut & whathaveyou. If you use any of these tools, consider this an explicit invitation to pull clips from metavid into your app of choice and remix, remodulate, resynthesize to your hearts’ content.
Feel free to use the comments thread on this post (or the wiki) to post any technical(or aesthetic) issues that crop up. (thanks Arek!)

Link to quicktime components.

Metavid will also have an interactive installation of presented in the danm festival The details of the BLINK Student Work Reception:

BLINK: DANM MFA Student Work Opening Reception

Venue: UCSC, Porter College, Porter Sesnon Gallery
Exhibition dates: May 5 - 7, 2006
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00 - 5:00 pm
With Michael Dale, Tyler Freeman, Bob Giges, “Gamelan Plesetan” (featuring Sapto Raharjo, Professor Rene Lysloff, DJ saKAna (aka no.e sunflowrfish), and special guests), James Khazar, Cynthia Payne, Michella Rivera-Gravage, Abram Stern (aka aphid), and Alan Tollefson.

Aphid and Michael will give a short talk about metavid at the graduate research symposium here on the UCSC campus. We should also have a poster available for people to check out. Event Summary:

The Division of Graduate Studies, along with University Relations, the Deans of the Academic Divisions, and the Graduate Student Association, is pleased to announce the 2nd Annual Graduate Research Symposium. This event will take place on Friday, May 5, 2006, from 3-5 pm, with a reception immediately following. The event this year will take place at University Center, and we are excited that it will be bigger, more all-inclusive, and more vibrant than our first gathering. If you were part of last year’s event, you may recall the excitement and energy associated with it.

Bong Dizon has an short article focusing on the first freedom of Open Source software; the freedom to run. Dizon argues that FOSS(free open source software) developers should focus more on usability and windows support for their FOSS applications.

“It should be remembered that true software freedom is not “free as in free beer” but “free as in freedom”. Freedom from complexity is an essential and inherent part of running a computer program.”

The articles somewhat confuses the concept of complexity hiding by narrowing the definition of complexity hiding to “ease of use” GUI interface interactions, when complexity hiding is already the core development ideology for software in general. The development we do on metavid for example is dependent on huge mountains of complexity being hidden for us in software libraries command line utilities and programming environments. And what metavid does is essentially hide that complexity so that I and others can easily do complex tasks such as collectively mediate audio video streams.

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