NETWORK EFFECT

Jonathan Coulton - ‘Still Alive’

Derek Tutschulte — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:01:47 +0000

Just listening to an archive of This Week in Tech and was reminded of the beautiful little song by Jonathan Coulter at the end of Portal.

Now picture yourself having really bonded with this video game, not to mention the personable central supercomputer, GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), that has become your nemesis in this world. In a darkened room, you’ve been submersed in the storyline for days straight. Now, you’ve broken through yet another exhausting and difficult challenge. You’ve beaten GLaDOS, and that’s where we pick up the story…

So Long Stage6!

Derek Tutschulte — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:33:27 +0000

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Free “HiDef” movies through your browser.

One funny thing about this site was that I used to own the domain name. Definitely a fish that got away.

Video Killed the Filibuster Star

Derek Tutschulte — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:14:29 +0000

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.

Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law Today

Derek Tutschulte — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:45:44 +0000

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.

Hulu Should Go Even More Social

Derek Tutschulte — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:02:44 +0000

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.

Microblogging Has Democratized Wire Services

Derek Tutschulte — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:04:14 +0000

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.

Open Government

Derek Tutschulte — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:00:50 +0000

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!

Free Burma from the Wall Street Journal

Derek Tutschulte — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 10:51:25 +0000

This is rich. Don’t you love paywalls? Just came across a Wall Street Journal article on Burma that is over at their site. It appears to be a plea from First lady, Laura Bush, about Burma. Looks like it could be an influential opinion piece at the right time. The only trouble is, the WSJ makes it only available to subscribers. It might have been a little more popular had it not.

WSJ, I suggest that if you are going to have a paywall, at least make enlightening human rights articles accessible to anyone, without registration.

Web 2.0 Comes of Age

Derek Tutschulte — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:32:38 +0000

The stars are aligning for business adoption of social media.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Click To Play

Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Derek Tutschulte — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:21:43 +0000