Digital Impulses

Well, I just purchased my ticket to Gnomdex 7.0, the premier tech industry conference for bloggers, podcasters, Vidcasters and all manner of Web 2.0/Social Media influencers.

Gnomedex this year is going to Rock!  See you there...

Canada Fulbright Chair Speaker Series: Steven Starr

USC
Annenberg School Center for Public Diplomacy
Room 207
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
1837 Hrs

I am sitting at USC in the Annenberg School for Communication waiting for the talk by Steven Starr to begin at 1900 hours. 

Cory Doctorow is holding an animated discussion with two gentlemen on the evils of DRM and what the MPAA and the RIAA in lockstep with the hardware manufacturers are planning to foist on the public in terms of DRM and your ability to do what you want with the media you pay for.

Cory just stated that if you update your Creative MP3 player to get the newest firmware, it surreptitiously disables the ability to record from the built-in FM receiver, all this under the guise of “added functionality”. This is precisely the reason I am here tonight.

 Here we go:
 (1903 hrs) 

• Steven Starr is the co-founder of a company called Revver.
• Revver pays MORE the MORE a media file gets played
• He just mentioned the sale of YouTube to Google
• Revver sets up technology to allow the distribution of media files
• They have developed ‘Super Distribution’, where media files fly through the      Internet, reporting back to Revver “Hey, I'm being watched! Send me an Ad!”. So people get paid on those terms.
• Revver splits ad revenue 50-50 with the media creator
• The Mentos and Coke creators got:
  • 5 – 6M views and
  • got $70K in Ad revenue that they split with Revver, thus
  • making 35K on a 2.5 minute video that cost
  • $100-200 to make
• Revver has a set of tools and technologies, with an API that allows you to create      your own site and become an affiliate of Revver that makes money as a      re-distributor who makes 20% of the Ad revenue
• Content creators can opt out of Ad categories that they do not wish to be associated with
• Revver released its BETA 11 months ago
• They do NOT allow copyrighted video
• Revver has been seen as a company that has taken UGC to the forfront of the ‘free media conversation”.
• Revver uses CC licenses. Every piece of video flies out with a 2.5 version CC license.
• Revver is NOT a video portal destination site, per se. They differentiate themselves as a tools and services company

All in all, it was a great talk, where a lot of very good questions and issues were raised on the legalities and dangers of content creation and rights retentions/ownership in the world of UGC or User Generated Content.

Keynote speech at ToorCon 8 by Cory Doctorow

Cory  Doctorow did his usual spectacular job when dekivering a Keynote.  The Keynote in question was delivered at ToorCon 8 the hacking convention in  San Diego, CA.

Click below to watch the video:

Day Against DRM

Today is "Day Against DRM" day.  Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing! has a post with all of the relevant links. 

For now, right-click on the following images and use them to post on your blog or anywhere else of prominence to do your part in celebrating International Day Against DRM

At the USC Annenberg School Center for Public Diplomacy

Tuesday, September 26, 2006 @ 18:37 P.M.

Bruce Schneier talk on Security and Terrorism @ USC

I am sitting in room 207 waiting for the talk to start.  At the front are some hacker types, setting up equipment for the talk and the Podcast of this event.

Bruce Schneier will be speaking here tonight, and I hope to get his book "Beyond Fear", signed.  Also I am looking forward to meeting Cory Doctorow.

Pictures and hopefully audio to follow as the evening progresses.

1854: UPDATE: Cory Doctorow and Bruce Schneier are here. THey are discussing alternatives to iTunes for people who use Linux.

1926 Update: Some Pics:

UPDATE:  OK, back home from USC.  Wow. What an excellent lecture given by Bruce Schneier.  Among the topics we discussed were:

• On-Star, the in-car help system offered primarily by GM and other car manufacturers has the ability to surreptitiously turn on the MICROPHONE inside your car and evesdrop on any conversations taking place inside your car.
• Hotel room keys are now networked into a central system,
• In Italy, trash has to be placed in clear, transparent plastic trash bags that reveal their contents.
• Everything is being recorded somewhere, at some time.
• Under the guise of a criminal investigation, Law Enforcement has the right to confiscate any and all security tapes from commercial establishments.
• There are companies that dedicate themselves to flying low-altitude aircraft that take pictures of commercial and residential structures that may need some kind of repair to their roofs or other parts of their property, and then SELL this data to roofing, construction and other repair business for the purposes of targeted advetising.
• Privacy has been dead for a long, long time.  It is mearly an illusion nowadays unless you become virtually Omish-like and attempt to remove yourself from the Grid completely by paying cash for everything, etc.

All in all, I am very glad I came to hear Mr. Schneier speak and I plan on coming to all of the talks presented by Cory Doctorow and the USC CPD.  Highly Recommended.

Incoherent: Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska on Net Neutrality

This is a little bit late, but Net Neutrality ranks as being one of the most important issues facing every day users of the Internet practically since the inception of the Internet itself and its direct descendant, the World Wide Web.

A serach on Google for the term "Net Neutrality" returns the following number of hits:

 

Nearly 30 million hits.

Obviously, this is a subject that has been discussed at great length on the Internet, most recently spotlighted by a rambling, incoherent, clueless screed by Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska, wherein he stood in front of Congress and lobbied against Net Neutrality. 

Here is a link to the audio: Download stevens-on-nn.mp3

To qoute Mr. Stevens:

"...There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

[¿]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

That someone like this, who is basically a paid spokesperson for the Telecomm industry, is the point person arguing against Net Neutrality is simply terrifying to me.  It really is. 

And to further complicate things, I suspect that 99% of the people on the street whom you ask about Net Neutrality would just blink at you and say "what the hell are you talking about?"

*Sigh*. 

Anyways, below are a list of sites you can go to to learn more about Net Neutrality:

• Google
• Wikipedia
• Save The Internet

Go there today and educate yourselves and write to your senators.  Get involved before it's too late!

Ubuntu, Schmubuntu

So.

I spent saturday evening and a good chunk of Sunday afternoon in separate aborted attempts to install Ubuntu on a 2 year-old Fujitsu Lifebook E2010 laptop that has a 2.4 Ghz processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk.

Pretty standard stuff and I was never able to get it going.  Having gone to the extreme of erasing my C: Partition in the hopes of easing things for the Ubuntu install (Ha! yeah, right.  No Joy.), I am now faced with the prospect of re-building my laptop yet again around Windows XP and then manually re-adding all of the apps that I need.

To be fair, I suspect that part of the problems I am seeing maybe related to the Ubuntu ISO images that are corrupt, so to circumvent that, I have gone ahead and placed an order for an UBUNTU CD that has been promised to be delivered to me in 4 to 6 weeks from today.

When that CD arrives, I will re-visit the idea of installing Linux on my laptop to being the process of familiarizing myself with alternatives to Microsoft OS's.

More to follow in my adventures having taken this fork on the road to end-user computer nirvana...

Gnomedex 6.0 Day # 2: Dave Winer: How To Make Money On The Internet

Dave Winer is on stage. He will be discussing How to make money on the Internet

Discussion Points:

• Seattle Post Intelligencer has Gnomedex on the front page
• It is easier to become a manufacturer than a manufacturer to become a user
• The roles have reversed: User are in charge
• That Model does not work, never has, never will
• Dell is largest PC maker in the world. a kid from a dorm room came to sell more computers than IBM
• Creativity is now distributed – CW is that only the very best people are writers. Now Bloggers write becuase they can.
• Blogging is the end of a long road
• We needed easier tools to write on the web and we wrote those
• Tools could be easier to use and they will be
• Newspaper industry is shrinking
• Info is flowing in different ways – Centralization is changing and quickly coming to an end…
• The “unconference”.
• Bill Gates was the college dropout when he started.  He was a user.  He understood what was possible with the technology becuase he was a user of it
• Ads on Website are last Century
• Our Websites represent our best work – we communicate, we share, we make gadgets for each other
• Manufacturers are learning a new way of thinking about products
• Edwards is a Presidential candidate that came here to learn about us and take our temperature
• Bloggers that run for office would be a “flip around” of an Old Concept

Discussion has started after 15 minutes:

• Microsoft guy is discussing what Dave Has said and agrees but says it will take some time to develop
• Users will push giant corporations aside eventually
• At 28, in 1983, Dave decided to develop software for the Mac because he thought Apple would survive
• Walled Gardens like Compuserve and Prodigy have disappeared

Too early – Not a lot of people are asking questions to participate in the Discussion.  Dave seems uncomfortable, but God, he is a simply brilliant speaker… He is reallyt articulate and self confident… I guess that comes from 25+ years of succeding in this industry, along with some failure…

 

 

Gnomedex Day #1: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is on stage.  This is Discussion Leader # 1. He is ranting about the fact that the Web 2.0 is not an Echo Chamber.

Discussion Notes:

• Digg 3.0 is HUGE, Size of the NY Times
• He thinks that a % of these comaonies like Digg and YouTube are going to make the jump to Mainstream
• Advertising is growing Dramtically
• Net Neutrality
• Michael Arrington is arguing that Web 2.0 will succeed.
• Arguing is getting hot.  Steve Gillmor just yelled at Arrington to speak up.  Arrington just demanded that a guy have his mike turned off.
• Geeks should not name things
• Steve Rafer and Arrington are heatedly going back back and forth about Web 2.0 is bulllshit.
• Success is defined as do you make money and are you making the Internet a better place?
• Edgio was launched for $75,000
• In ‘99 it would have cost $10,000,000
• Netscape is a miserable failure that has nothing left but to be a pale Digg Clone

Gnomedex 6.0: Day # 1

Gnomedex 6.0 has kicked off.  Chris Pirillo is on stage and so far so good.  Chris is on stage taking questions and someone just asked him for a TV to watch the World Cup…