Saturday, February 09, 2008
video247 Saturday, Panel 1: DIY Tools and Platforms
This panel focussed on new and emerged Web 2.0 services ad platforms that aim at furthering developing opportunities for DIYers to access, share and distribute their work. A range of models were presented, and all of them were thought-provoking. I'm going to shift to a bullet-point mode of reporting to hep speed up posting time.
Angela Gyetvan
• Angela spoke about Revver, a video sharing platform for hosting and promoting user-generated videos. The difference between Revver and say, YouTube is that Revver shares advertising revenue with posters (i.e., the more popular your video post becomes, the greater the proportion of the advertising revenue you'll obtain from Revver).
• Revver deals with copyright issues right up front by requiring posters to use Creative Commons copyright licences on their work; they also ask that posters not include hate speech, pornography, etc.
• Revver, right from the start, has focused on being a server for folk interested in producing regular web shows.
• Blip.tv is also geared more towards people producing shows on a regular basis, however, advertising can be turned off by the poster and advertising revenue is not shared with posters.
Dean Jansen?
Dean spoke about Miro.com. Miro is an open source internet TV platform. I found this service especially interesting because it really does work at becoming a visual media portal for users. For example, users can link teir RSS feeds to their profile, as well as searching across a range of existing video hosting platforms (e.g., YouTube, Blip.tv).
• Miro acts like a TiVO and automatically downloads videos you’re interested in and marks viewed shows for deletion etc.
• NRK 365 -- a public Norwegian broadcaster -- has made available a large amount of Hi-definition bit torrent files from their programs. Miro can also grab bit torrent files from peer-to-peer networks, such as the NRK 365 files.
Marc Davis
Marc is an advocate for focusing on--and making visible--process approaches to media production and distribution online. He presented a new service developed by Yahoo! called "Tag maps". These servcie aims at:
TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.(quoted from here)
I'll need to check it out to see how this is different to the Flickr-Google maps, mashup, Panoramio, or more ground-breaking than Microsoft's Photosynth.
Joi Ito
Joi spoke about the importance of paying attention to the ethical dimensions of the media we post media to the internet (e.g., posting unflattering photos or video clips of others). He raised a good point--that he himself tied directly to literacy--about the need for people to understand the normative dimensions of what it’s okay to do/post, in what country it’s okay to post what etc. He argued for the need to develop a better sense of copyright issues among everyday folk -- he claimed (and I agree) that a lot of people really don’t understand copyright laws and what these mean. Joi again linked this very much to literacy and helping people to read their media productions with an eye to copyright laws and suchlike.
This panel is certainly generating lively whole-group debate about surveillance nd privacy, about freedom and corporate control, bandwidth issues, about mobile computing (where the panelists all agree that the U.S. is seriously slow in developing computing and communications and media mobility).
Just as an aside, one of the audience members just mentioned this fascinating online services--dotSUB--which enables users to add subtitles ot videos in a wide range of languages.
