One day I will get this right. They’re such a tempting subject — and so difficult to get right.
Here they are, run through the PhotoShop drybrush filter.
Andy Rooney’s Zune
Lovely spoof on AtomFilms.
Izimi: self-hosted user-generated content
Interesting service — izimi. The blurb claims that
izimi is the future of Internet publishing. izimi enables you to publish and serve files, photos, music and videos, in fact anything, straight from your PC to anyone with a browser.
* Why do you have to upload your content to other people’s servers in order to publish and share it?
* Why must you give up control of your files to a third party?
* Who dictates what files you can upload, how many, and how big they can be? If not you, why not?izimi places the power right in your hands, where it should be – it’s a truly democratic web. With izimi there’s no need to upload your content to any server: you decide what you’ll publish, there are no limits on quantity or quality (we won’t degrade your videos, photos or music), and you retain ownership and control.
Download the free izimi application to start publishing anything you like, to anyone you like. Use it for photos, videos, music, documents, anything – all it takes is a few clicks. izimi gives you simple URLs that you can use in email, IM, or any website, blog, or forum…
Only available to PC users, though. Wonder how the technology works: it sounds like P2P, but the FAQs say it isn’t.
izimi is made up of two elements: the izimi application and the izimi website.
The izimi application – the izimi application runs in the background on your PC and works a little like a web server. You choose what files to publish, you can add rich descriptions and tags to help other people find them, and you simply click publish. Izimi create a friendly URL for each item published. izimis web services operate a bit like a domain name server (DNS), pointing other users browsers direct to the publishers PC in response to requests for specific URLs. The izimi application on the publishers PC then serves the file to the user. In some circumstances certain firewall or router configurations wont allow a users computer to serve published media directly, and in these situations izimis web services become a sort of traffic controller to direct and stream content from the publishers PC to users.
The izimi website The izimi website (www.izimi.com) is like an index of all izimi users and their published content. At izimi.com anyone (not just izimi publishers) can search for people and published content, rate, comment, add friends, and do all the community activities commonly associated with social networks.
Hmmm… These guys may be good at software but they know nothing of apostrophes.
Viacom, YouTube and Joost
This morning’s Observer column…
Think of it as mud-wrestling, but at a higher level. Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars because YouTube (which Google purchased a while back for $1.6bn) continues to host clips of Viacom’s video properties. The documents launching the suit express moral outrage wrapped in three coats of prime legal verbiage. The gist, however, is clear: nasty bully Google is getting rich on the back of poor little artists and the companies that support them…
Catch ’em young
Seen in the Apple Store on Regent Street, early yesterday evening. He was probably waiting for his Dad to finish drooling over the kit.
The revolution acknowledged
Jeff Jarvis blogged Alan Rusbridger’s speech to the assembled staffs of the Guardian and Observer (for which I write). Here’s a snippet of Jeff’s account:
Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.”
This came in each of three all-hands meetings with the editorial and business staff held at a theater 15 minutes from the paper’s offices, the first such meetings since the Guardian went through its last metamorphosis to its medium-sized Berliner format. (I happened to be consulting at the paper yesterday and I went along for the ride. Rusbridger gave me permission to blog the company event.)
So that was the line that struck me: preeminent. I suspect it was the line that resonated with staff members a few hours later. Rusbridger said that some would find the content of yesterday’s meetings no-big-deal and others would find unease. But the message was clear, although it was shoehorned into much else in the presentation; you had to listen to hear it. He also said that the paper will serve the public 24/7; it does not yet do that. So the Guardian, he said, will be a 24-hour, web-first newspaper. To do that, the paper’s management needs — he called it the F word — flexibility. And that means that jobs will change. It’s all in a parcel…
The interesting thing about the Guardian is that it’s owned by a Trust rather than being a commercial company. Some people mistakenly think that this ownership structure makes the paper more cosy and resistant to change than a more straightforwardly commercial outfit. In fact the opposite it true: the Guardian has moved faster and more aggressive to embrace change than any other British publication.
Remember old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. We do.
Hennessy’s lucrative moonlighting
There’s a guy called John Hennessy on the Google Main Board. There’s also a guy called John Hennessy who is President of Stanford. And guess what? They’re the same chap! Dan Gillmor quotes what the WSJ wrote about this…
In the month of November, John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, made $1 million. It didn’t come from his day job.
Mr. Hennessy, an engineer who co-founded a semiconductor company, has used his talents, Silicon Valley connections and academic position to help win billions of dollars for Stanford. He has done well for himself, too. Mr. Hennessy’s November haul included a $75,000 retainer from Cisco Systems Inc., on whose board he sits, plus $133,000 in restricted Cisco stock, proceeds of $452,000 from selling stock in Atheros Communications Inc., where he is co-founder and chairman, and a $384,000 profit from the exercise of Google Inc. stock options. He sits on Google’s board.
That month makes up only one part of an income stream that many in academia consider without precedent for a university president. In the past five years, through exclusive investments and relationships with companies, Mr. Hennessy has collected fees, stock and paper stock-option profits totaling $43 million, securities filings show. That dwarfs his $616,000 annual compensation at Stanford, where he has been president since 2000.
Debunking the debunkers
Splendid column by George Monbiot on Channel 4’s idiotic film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’…
For the film’s commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited – such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.
Assignment Zero
Billed as An Experiment in Pro-Am Journalism
“One day stories with a thousand people on the masthead might become routine, and we’ll know how to do them. For now we just need hundreds, acting in the spirit of the enterprise, to help us take apart and put together a single, sprawling story. Assignment Zero is a starting point, a base line. Who knows where we will end up. But if reporting in the open style ever comes into its own–at our site or someone else’s–that might very well change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.”
So IT matters, then?
The use of information technology was “the major driver” of economic growth over the past decade, adding $2 trillion a year to the economy, according to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Fueled by “the phenomenal growth of computer power” since 2000, the use of IT has given new tools to businesses and improved productivity while controlling costs, said Rob Atkinson, a researcher and government adviser who heads the IT Foundation.
But the full impact of the “IT revolution” has not been recognized by government officials because of lingering skepticism from the dot-com boom the late 1990s and the bust that followed, he added. The 53-page report was an effort to catalog the IT industry’s impact.
Atkinson’s foundation is a think tank backed by such tech companies as Cisco Systems, IBM and eBay, and its goal is to push an “innovation agenda” in Washington. Atkinson said that doesn’t mean subsidies for specific industries but greater investment in research, use of the tax code to spur investment and “do no harm” policies that don’t hinder growth.
Hmmm… Full report is here. I bet Nick Carr has something to say about this. After all, he shot to fame with a sceptical book entitled Does IT Matter?. Just checked his blog [23:50 on 14.03.2007]. Nothing.