The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.

In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.

I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.

Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.

Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer…  This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.

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A few updates to metavidWiki have been rolled out recently, thought I would take a quick opportunity to point them out.

Search

Search now has a more “google-like” display with text links to “Watch Clip” and “Improve Transcript“. This should make it clear that you can play search results inline and gives the inline search results a larger native video resolution play window.

Remote Embedding:

The remote embedding functionality has been enhanced to include inline transcript with auto scrolling and transcript layer selection. This feature can also be used to select between language tracks. (our site currently only has a single language track) The transcript format is in CMML. So you could use the mv_embed library with other CMS systems to embed video with transcript selection.

Near Future

Our summer of code student Stjepan Rajko is hard at work on adding in compatibility with flash flv video clips. This will enable “html5 like” syntax with ogg video and could use flash video as a backup. Sort of a supper version of Mike Chambers hack with all the added benefits of mv_embed library: inline transcripts/translations , references to download the clip, embed it, playlists etc

Steel this film I and II have helped shape the debate on copyright policy. The first film focused on the raid against the pirate bay and file sharing culture. Part II took on the broader copyright debate.

Now they are making their interview footage from Steel This Film II available for remixing. Their site features ogg video with time segment requests (similar to what we do here on metavid) and synced transcripts for search. Footage is made available in ogg theora & high quality HDV via bittorrent. They encurge people to download and reuse the footage.

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This Thursday and Friday the politics web 2.0 conference is taking place in London. Metavid is presenting on Friday. From the site:

Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media - a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

The LiVE show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine features metavid in the shows collection. The pieces explored the meaning of “live” in the context of heavy mediation of day-to-day interactions. Karen Finley piece, titled “business as usual” highlighted a constant stream of deaths as a consequence of US aggression in the Iraqi region via unattended computers constantly printing out large stacks of the names of people killed in the conflict. MTAA & RSG’s Want consists of 900 video clips in which individuals declare something that they desire, which are then triggered by search requests from a peer-to-peer network. More information about all the pieces is on the site.

This years NetSquared featured projects includes metavid along with 20 other proposed or in-development net mashups for social change. Featured project developers and social innovators will meet up in late may for the net squared conference. More from the site:

The NetSquared Conference, will be on May 27 and 28, 2008 in San Jose, CA. As in the past two years, the two-day event will bring together innovators in social benefit initiatives, business models, funding for philanthropic initiatives, software development, and technology to advance social change around the globe using social networks and social Web tools such as blogging, podcasting, and virtual communities.

Google Summer of Code 08 will start accepting applications Monday, March 24, 2008. I have submitted a few metavid related project ideas under the xiph and wikipedia foundation organizations and offered to mentor them.

Google’s Summer of Code is a great program, as a student in summer of code 06 I worked on early video integration for mediaWiki. It was a positive experience and got me more involved with free/open source software. If your a student interested in open media I recommend you take a look at the many great project ideas for xiph foundation. There are lots of other great projects and organizations to work with as well.

We are pleased to announce that MetaVidWiki  (link) is now in open beta. We look forward to you comments, suggestions, and bug reports on this new free platform for community audio video participation.

We have put together a new extended screen cast demoing MetaVidWiki features available here on metavid. (also available on google video, and xvid copy here (23 megs) ). Editing on MetaVidWiki site is now open to anyone that can pass a audio or visual captcha test…

So check out the demo video, try some searches, and then try improving the archive by syncing a transcript or improving some text content

Simultaneously we are releasing the software that powers metavid: MetaVidWiki extension (v.01). It has been packaged and released for other cool re-uses of the code base. The Mv_Embed package has been updated to version .7 and released as well.

Read on for Technical Feature overview:

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As you may have noticed there the site is undergoing maintenance as we transition to a new server and new wiki based software system. Feel to check out the MetaVidWiki site as seen in previous posted screen casts. We are in the process improving documentation and cleaning up the wiki for wider sharing next week. Right now editing is restricted but will be opened up shortly. The existing (old) metavid site will remain accessible

update: There are a few issues that we have run into as the site comes online. We are working hard on getting everything ready for the “general public”. Watch this blog (and others) for a site launch announcement, and feel free to report issues on the wiki