I apologize for the delayed post. A bit of travel, a lot of work, and family chaos.
Music Librarians Association http://www.mla2009.org/
Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the Music Librarians Conference about Music Search which relates to many of the discussions I have had over the last two days about data and metadata and The Semantic Web.
This teases my lecture about music search.
When you do a typical Google search you are looking for string matches, that is a simple match to a string of letters usually in the form of a word or phrase. There are almost always far too many matches for all but the most unique words or phrases to possibly explore so Google uses some mathematical sorcery embodied in its page rank algorithm to rank order the results by relevancy. Google doesn’t know if by U2 you mean the video, the concert tour, the MP3, the JPEG of Bono or a submarine. It would be nice if somehow the concepts, aka the categories of audio files or biography or concert or rockstar or vessels were contained within the web pages themselves and reported to Google’s query so that it would be able to cluster around such things. In a Semantic Web universe web pages not only contain keywords, they tell search engines what the context of the keywords are and if there are special vocabularies to consider.
News
To follow-up on my Moguls and Megacorps lecture, Viacom reported its Q4 Profits down 69%, Pioneer announced its laying off 10,000, most of the chipmakers reported decreased demands. We discussed the change in Facebook’s TOS last week and sure enough it triggered a firestorm of criticism, which has resulted in FB backtracking on the the policy of “keeping” user data in perpetuity even after it has been “deleted”. This inspires me to re-read Huxley’s BIG BROTHER.
Rhapsody subscribers landed at 775,000 by the end of 2008, up 29 percent from a year-ago figure of 600,000, but still far less than needed for success. Sirius XM is saved by John Malone and Liberty Media, the holding company we learned about last week. Could be a blocking strategy against Charlie Ergen and DISH Network’s takeover intent. Why do you think satellite radio is important to DBS? I believe that the only long term economic solution for the Music recording industry is bundled all-you-can-eat DRM-free, or light-DRM subscription services along with broadband and / or mobile services.
What Would Google Do?
As Mr. Jarvis Jarvis told us last week, Google is always in beta. What would Google Do? Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Over the past few weeks Google nixed at least 7 projects/companies/experiments.
Jaiku.com: Competition to twitter but was advertised as a multimedia activity stream. Google acquired this in October of ’07. Never reached critical mass. Why twitter and not Jaiku?
- Lively.com: 3D Vitual World
- Dodgeball.com: Location aware app that knows where your friends are. This was another acquisition only a few years old.
- Radio Ad Program: Based on dMark which Google also acquired.
- Print Ad Program: As we discussed
- Catalog Search: Searched print catalogues and was pretty handy.
- Notebook: I never heard of it before the news if its demise.
- A very interesting Digital Supply Chain company:
http://www.nstein.com - An online MTV-Like network
www.lp33.com
Have a great class tonight without me!
Don't forget to sign up for your presentation spot! Sphere: Related Content
10 comments:
Further to the discussion of searching and sorting the ridiculous amount of content on the web, I thought this site was worth mention.
www.videosurf.com
"Created by leading experts in computer vision, this video search engine uniquely analyzes content so that it can be searched by visual parameters, rather than with text. Users visually navigate results to find scenes or people, or even specific moments, they want to see."
http://www.wikihow.com/Surf-the-Web-Anonymously-with-Proxies
http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/anonymous.shtml
http://www.surfnetkids.com/
If you surf the web a lot, have children or work with children,http://www.surfnetkids.com/ these sites and searches are ones I think are of great value. Hope they are of interest.
Also, I attach these links to news items that I found interesting this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/23buzz.html
http://www.surfnetkids.com/
This is a link to some reels for Andrea Bassani - Santa Maria's work which contains parts of three shorts that I wrote, produced or co-produced and directed. Gun's Point and Choosing to Fly were both shot on the Red Camera.
http://web.me.com/andreabassani/AndreaBassani/Home.html
Hope that you enjoy the reels.
Very Respectfully, Vivian
check this out, veeery cool i think...
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks
Week Nine, Weekly New Briefs
In the new Wired I found several interesting New Media and Items.
This article discusses that Hollywood is alleging a link between Terrorism and piracy.
This is their statement, not sure what the documentation shows, but it is interesting if it is true and an interesting tactic if it is not or if it is an exaggeration.
"Moreover, three of the documented cases provide clear evidence that terrorist groups have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities. While caution must be exercised in drawing broad conclusions from limited evidence, further investigation is a timely imperative. These cases, combined with established evidence for the broader category of counterfeiting-terrorism connections, are highly suggestive that intellectual-property theft — a low-risk, high-profit enterprise — is attractive not only to organized crime, but also to terrorists, particularly opportunistic members of local terrorist cells."
The link to the whole article.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/hollywood-funde.html
From the magazine there is a great article on the Watchmen, with a question and answer with Alan Moore on Superheros, an article on Zack Snyder on Filining something that is "unfilmable" and a behind the scenes video on their site.
Moore
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa
This is the Zack Snyder piece.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_watchman
The Video of behind the scenes of the Watchmen
http://www.wired.com/video/culture/watchmen/13632821001
Finally an article from Wired's Geek Dad is something that Mark talked about last week, the Kindle and the Ipod/Iphone enabling us to not only read books, but to also listen to the ones we buy in our car or elsewhere. This is their summation, Wired: Highly-functional reader with a huge supply of available content.
Tired: Small screen, no magazines or newspapers (yet?).
This is the link.
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2009/03/kindle-iphone-a.html
Hope these are of interest.
Very Respectfully,
Vivian
Vivian Lee Arber
WHERE WILL WE WATCH??
It's the billion dollar question.
Especially in light of our last guest speaker on Mobile Media, I find it fascinating that no one knows what is next and everyone seems to think the grass is greener on the other side.
According to Video Business, the cable providers want to be on your computer.
"For the last year, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster and others have been in a mad dash to move their Internet TV and movie services from the PC to the TV, where most people prefer to watch. Now they’re about to face a new wave of competition on the computer, as cable networks and providers announce plans to deliver their content online."
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6642436.html?nid=2705
And yet there was a media frenzy this week from Wired to LA Times to THR, regarding ZillionTV which, per Content Agenda "is promising to revolutionize the broadband video-on-demand market, delivering free, advertiser-supported content directly to TV sets". Clearly they believe the money is already sitting in your living room.
The question remains - where will we watch?
- Tiffany
http://i.gizmodo.com/5164076/zilliontv-oh-jeez-hulu-and-roku-done-had-themselves-a-baby
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/
03/zilliontv-the-n.html
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/one-factor-that.html
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/
content_display/news/
e3iee48bd23f07a5c21654756ccfe6df0ce
This article is just generically valuable if you have an accident with your technology.
Hope it comes in handy.
http://www.switched.com/2009/03/14/11-quick-fixes-for-gadget-disasters/
Very Respectfully,
Vivian
This is an interesting article from Wired on the father of cyberspace.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/03/dayintech_0317
As well as this one on viral marketing of Ebooks by Scribd,
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/publishers-part.html
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