NETWORK EFFECT

While we were in the green room last night, Micah Sifry from TechPresident, who was on our Brian Lehrer Live show (TWNYC - CH.75) last night (YouTube video coming soon), passed along an innovative website that is digitizing action on the floor of the U.S. Congress. MetaVid, funded partly by the Sunlight Foundation, provides the embed code for each digitized session, which can then be added to any blog or webpage, as well as capture close-captioning text to make the whole thing searchable.

“Metavid starts by capturing audio, video, close caption and ocr on-screen text from the cable broadcasts of the house and senate. It then compresses the video with the open source video codec theora. Metavid then inserts these video files along with the close caption text into the metavid database. Participants then build overlays to interact with the dataset in meaningful ways given their perspective be it art, research, or political commentary. We are currently in the “building infrastructure” for participation stage. The archive is web accessible and the interface for participation is under heavy development.”

Web-services will effectively level the playing field with government, removing it from the domain of media presenters, insiders, and flacks. We are just beginning to proceed down a path that will enable a higher form of democracy here and in other places around the world, and we’re picking up speed. Back in November, ReadWrite was also smart to point out the epiphany about to grip government regarding Web 2.0. Beyond standard wiki and blog interfaces, their article goes on to imply, the populace will benefit from reusable and mashable data available online that blows government wide-open. For you entrepreneurs out there, here’s your chance.

This has not been posted with a “futurism” tag.

In the wake of the recent Lane Hartwell\Richter Scales dustup, I have found it useful to watch Lawrence Lessig’s TedTalk given earlier this year, which was mentioned in the above referenced article’s comments section.

My opinion: The internet is, and should always be, the public domain.

It’s not like the writing isn’t on the wall or anything, but NBC appears to have smartened up by leveraging their kick-ass content and putting it in the correct wrapper. The key praise for NBC here is that they provide the Flash embed code, a la YouTube, which other quality content providers like Comedy Central and HBO do not (not yet anyway). Embed code allows bloggers to host the videos on their site without taking on the infrastructure costs of bandwidth. So now, NBC’s potential business model looks a whole lot like YouTube now.

To improve their service, NBC should allow users to respond to TV shows with some ideas of their own, all in the world of Hulu. YouTube currently does this for its UGC (User Generated Content) by allowing community members to upload video responses, but if Hulu were to extend this offer to each of its TV shows’ fan base, every series could be a work in progress, reflecting the truly collaborative nature of TV production. NBC could plant all sorts of projects on its site and could see what happens, not forgetting to reward key members of the community, of course.

Now anyone can be a news service, and is. The beauty of microblogs is that no matter where feeds are published, you can use any IM client to get your favorite alerts. Younger folks who literally live in their IM client can easily get news, but even if you are of the old guard and use email as your dashboard, gmail’s built-in IM client allows anyone to get their news alerts without navigating away from email.

Dave Winer and Steve Rubel have noted that RSS feeds should be attended to individually, some as “a river(s) of news” and others requiring special prioritization in your reader. Because Twitter updates are sent out instantaneously, those river-like feeds that do not require constant attention can flow right by in IM, provided that they have a microblog feed you can subscribe to.

Back in May, Twitterfacts posted some news shops that have their own Twitter feeds. I have found that they are all not being updated with regularity, but I can only assume that as subscriptions to Twitter reach critical mass, these orgs will find their new path.

Looking for Web 3.0? Go no further. We are entering a third age in which the government and healthcare gets blown apart (in a good way) and rebuilt from scratch. Watch the video for details of one project that is breaking ground in congress. But, this is really just the beginning.

We really don’t need no steenkin’ badges!