Hey now I maintain this patch of cyber real estate primarily to share links and the occasional tech tip with friends
Monday, December 14, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Semantics And Multimedia
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Semantics And Multimedia
View more documents from Peter Berger.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Internet radio has become a popular e...
Check out Virtual Radio @ www.download.cnet.com/VirtualRadio (by Dean Sherwin)
Excerpted from my daily feeds this from the folks at make use of dot com
Internet radio has become a popular entertainment source especially for music and podcast-like talk shows. I have found a great application that allows you to listen to Internet radio on the move without shelling out for an expensive smart phone.
VirtualRadio is an application for Java enabled cell phones which allows the user to listen to Internet radio stations on their cell phone. The app uses the GPRS internet connection available on almost all cell phones to download the audio at a rate of 32kb/s. The audio quality is very high and music is crisp and uninterrupted.
There are loads of different channels to choose from and categories (called groups) to browse through channels which interest you such as ‘Music’ and ‘Politics’.
The app is completely free to download and use, although GPRS costs apply and vary depending on your network.
Features:
- Listen to radio on your phone.
- Multiple Channels.
- Good quality audio.
- Works on almost any Java enabled cell phone.
Check out Virtual Radio @ www.download.cnet.com/VirtualRadio (by Dean Sherwin)
Friday, November 13, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
The Private Web
by
Steve Gillmor
on
November 1, 2009
As social media clouds become more resilient, we are trusting them more. Twitter lists are a robust signal that the company has moved from keeping up to encoding the value of its network. We won’t see many new stars as lists proliferate, but rather a better sense of how to model the new media forms that micromessages enable. Boiled down to vertical niches, lists are the instantiation of a way of looking at the Web, a kind of Yahoo 2.0 based on people aggregation rather than sites or topics.
But what value do these lists have in raw form? It feels like a Wikipedia page, where you learn not to click on hyperlinked words for fear of getting lost in ever-cascading tangents based on ever-more generic topics. Instead, you rely on the intelligence of whoever constructed the page, scanning for clues as to authority, serendipity, social characteristics worth capturing for yourself. Two problems: the list architecture is splayed all over the place, and we have no tools for harvesting the value.
Of course, we’re just seconds away from the onslaught of third party takes on the subject. Surely we’ll see interesting aggregations of the Top 100, the best, brightest, sexiest, etc. We’ll recognize the familiar names and ratify their positions in the new marketplace. It’s a marketplace that will have its own hierarchy, its own Oprah, its own politicians, police, and underworld. And with all that will emerge its own underground economy.
What is the Private Web? It’s the private place only we know about (or think we do.) It’s the place where our deepest fears and instincts combine to produce the hunches that drive our lives. As a parent of a teenager, I’ve seen my hunches evolve to reflect the rapid pace of social media and my daughter’s use of it. Twitter is nowhere on her radar, Facebook serves as a gas station where she pauses for fill ups, and video chat and IM are interrupted only for food, homework, and periodic audiences for the purpose of fundraising for road trips.
All of the most important parts of her life are conducted on the Private Web. This is not a good or a bad thing; it’s just what it is. I can sense her world but only by inference — more by the difficulty in understanding parts of it than any rational tool such as asking questions or withholding permission until information is volunteered. I feel like Steve Wonder, blind but with some heightened power of perception that slowly carves out information from the resiliency of the difficulty of it.
Take this exchange:
When are you going out?
In a bit.
[some narrowing to an hour, say 4]
Who are you meeting?
Uhh, Amy and mumble and whatever. [co-conspirator, someone I don't know, and no mention of whoever I want to know about, usually boys]
So when will you be coming home?
I don’t know I’ve done my homework [usually not] and it’s [whatever day it is] and I just want to have fun with my friends, Dad. Jeez. [Obfuscation of the length of the excursion to allow for audibles at the line of scrimmage to do all the stuff I should be concerned about]
Lengthy negotiation based on the hunches I’ve collected.
What’s important to understand is that my daughter already knows exactly what she wants to do and has modeled it to the best of her ability to predict the future, online and through the social media framework. Facebook tells her where the opportunities lie, texting confirms or augments those clues, voice is only used to ratify plans once the permission map has been drwan and pre-tested for potential disruption. These kids are really good at this stuff, and we are learning more from them than they from us.
Some conclusions gleaned from observations of the Private Web:
- It’s not about Twitter, it’s about what Twitter has triggered.
- Realtime is the best way to get what you want, before defensive measures can be deployed.
- Friends are important, and particularly a deep bench. If one friend becomes overexposed, you switch to a backup.
- Texting is the prime channel, then video, followed distantly by email and IM.
To unpack, last in first out. Texting is tied to a hard coded identity, credit card, device. This provides two-way leverage, where the parent (boss) can monitor and require timely feedback, while the child (you) can meter out pseudo-information to keep you happy while navigating largely unseen on the digital network. It is much easier to project a sense of action, reliability, and strategic positioning via social media when you can downplay the value of moving physically through space and time. Foursquare will hit a wall once adults (companies) discover the existence of these breadcrumbs. Foursquare will counter by virtualizing location.
Just as location will become more editorially enhanced, so too will the role of the team in social hierarchies. It’s much more useful to have interchangeable friends or partners, so that the parent (company) knows there will be some coherent continuity regardless of conditions on the ground. People profess to value collaboration, but the strongest connections in the social graph are between groups of overlapping friends who in aggregate add up to a rational team but don’t require hardcoded roles. Put in nightcrawling terms, it’s “OK, I helped you out last night, tonight you’re my wingman.”
Realtime, of course, just plain wins. You may get away with almost a few times, but once people are onto you, they’ll start serving the ball to the weakest point. Realtime is inexorable because our sense of timing adapts to each generation of realtime and soon gets frustrated with how slow it is. How many times have you interrupted someone’s argument because you know what they’re going to say? How many times have you skimmed a post or even a tweet for some clue that it’s worth whatever miniscule time you’re now tuned to? That’s why video is right there after texting, because a picture is still worth a thousand words. “If looks could kill…”
And first but not least, Twitter is so not the point but what it has created is. The key to the Private Web is notification, not the actual content. The social signals that enable or disable connections are the new PageRank. It’s not a link but the ability to see the metadata that describes a link’s immediate value that’s valuable. My daughter uses speed to get off the phone or out of range before I can pin her down for the next number to reach her at. The data is sitting there in plain sight but where it is is obscured. Understanding her social graph in realtime is what we want to know and what she wants to obscure.
The Private Web operates on deeper emotions and instincts than we are accustomed to acknowledging. Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? In the case of my daughter, how do I get to be who I want to be? The keys to the Private Web are shared, not at a location but via implicit and dynamic permissions to access the stream in realtime. Those who signal their understanding of this deeper value pool will implicitly advertise their value, and encourage us to request permission to share with them. Those deeper conversations will contain higher value as we trust those who share them to keep them private to the group who values them.
Twitter may not support conversations very well, but it provides clues to where the Private Web exists. These conversations live in the cracks between the public stream and direct messages, hidden either by obscurity or purpose. As they become more useful, the tendency will be to make them public, but in doing so they will lose that unique quality of trust and value. Instead, these private conversations will grow, until everyone is participating.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
doubleTwist Unveils An Alternative To...
From tech Crunch re Double Twist, an alternative to Itunes, with multi player ( non ipod) support
doubleTwist Unveils An Alternative To The iTunes Music Store, Powered By Amazon MP3
doubleTwist Unveils An Alternative To The iTunes Music Store, Powered By Amazon MP3
by
Jason Kincaid
on
October 6, 2009
Today, doubleTwist has revealed what it means by that: doubleTwist now includes an integrated Music Store, powered by Amazon’s MP3 Store. But unlike iTunes, this app will let you transfer your files to non-Apple devices. The store includes Amazon’s catalog of over 5 million songs, allowing users to purchase songs either as albums or individual tracks (there’s also plenty of free songs available). From a design standpoint, it’s clear that iTunes served as a big inspiration — if you’ve ever used the iTunes Store before, it will take you all of thirty seconds to figure out how to use this one.
In fact, it’s probably safe to say that the new doubleTwist music store is actually easier to use to download music than iTunes is, simply because there’s so much less going on. Upon launching the store you’ll see a handful of top albums and songs, along with a prominent search box at the top of the screen. Click on an album and you’ll see a list of the disc’s tracks, which you can click for a 30 second preview. To buy something simply enter your Amazon ID.
Of course, the store is easier to navigate than iTunes for a reason: there are no movie or TV downloads, no playlists or mixes, and obviously no App Store. But for music, it works like a charm. And there are more features in the pipeline, including recommendations, artist bios, and song ratings.
Once you’ve downloaded your music, you can drag and drop it into
whatever device you’ve connected to your computer. Unlike iTunes,
doubleTwist supports hundreds
All in all, this is a very impressive effort. Before now Amazon’s MP3 store has been primarily browser based (there are some mobile devices that support it but doubleTwist believes this is the first desktop based application to integrate the store). And there’s no doubt that the doubleTwist download experience is far better than navigating Amazon in your browser. doubleTwist is going to have a hard time convincing the throngs of iPod and iPhone users on iTunes to make the switch, but for anyone else using a device that’s not supported by Apple, it’s quickly turning into a very appealing solution.
doubleTwist’s Music Store is currently available in the Mac version
of the app, with the PC version coming soon. The store is currently
US-only, but doubleTwist says that UK, German, and French versions are
on the way.
| Website: | doubletwist.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Funding: | $5M |
doubleTwist’s mission is to simplify the flow of media to a wide range of devices and facilitate the sharing of user generated content across social networks.
The company is backed by Index Ventures and Northzone Ventures. Learn More
Thursday, October 1, 2009
DOWNLOADS
excerpt from my daily rss feed this article appeared on lifehacker on 10/01/09 By Adam Pash
Pollux Automatically Cleans and Tags Your iTunes Library
While this sort of automated metadata fixing is one of the five big features we want to see added to iTunes, it's not something we're expecting from Apple any time soon. Pollux isn't the first to tackle this territory, by any means, and in the past I've highlightedTuneUp as my favorite tool of this ilk, so the first thing I wondered was: How does Pollux stack up to TuneUp?
To find out, I pointed Pollux at a handful tracks that TuneUp has always had trouble identifying for me. The results: Pollux was able to successfully tag a few of the tracks that TuneUp was lost on. That doesn't necessarily mean that Pollux would have been able to identify all of the tracks that TuneUp was able to in the past, but it does bode well for thefree Pollux. (TuneUp comes in a limited free version, but requires some money for full functionality.) I also pointed it at some tracks TuneUp had successfully tagged and found it batting a thousand there.
Pollux works in a couple of ways: Either you can tell it to automatically analyze and tag any new files you add to iTunes (which makes it simple and unobtrusive), or you can select individual tracks, click its menubar icon, and click Tag Selected iTunes Tracks.
Pollux is freeware (donations accepted), Mac OS X only; for the money, it seems like the best tool of its kind right now.
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