Harnessing Networked Media
New media “Master Bedroom Session”
@ Straight Out Of Brisbane 2006
Fri 18 Aug 1:00pm – 2:30pm :: Visible Ink, 54 Berwick St, Valley
Leap past the buzzphrases ‘social software’, ‘citizen media’, peer to peer’ and ‘web 2.0’ to discover the sophisticated range of online tools freely available today, and how these can be harnessed for your own creative projects.
An overview of these tools and enabling technologies will be followed by creation of online accounts which can enhance the research, pre-production, production and distribution phases of creative projects. Participants will create their own personalised media delivery services, their own automated distribution mechanisms, and examine exemplar case studies of creative individuals and groups harnessing networked tools.
Bring : Examples of your work for publishing online:
text, photos, audio, video ( all preferably on CD or digital storage medium)
Background Reading :
What is Web 2.0 ? ( buzzphrase to describe recent shifts / trends / changes in online publishing )
via Smart Mobs – The next social revolution :Mobile communication, pervasive computing, wireless networks, collective action – blog by Howard Rheingold, to support book of same name.
Social Software :
( one to one / one to many / many to many ) ( visual information flow online graphic
Mediasphere Context :
July hosted the worst week ever for TV ratings in the U.S., whilst simultaneously youtube.com boasted 100 million videos per day, and social networking site myspace.com laid claim to becoming the site most visited by the US population.
There are now more than 2 Billion mobile phones in existence, and as Mark Pesce notes “More people listen to the podcasts of Radio National than listen to the live broadcast,” and “more people read the Sydney Morning Herald online than read the print edition.”
“Myspace goes into the cell phone business. For $85/month you can take as many photos as you want with your Myspace-branded camera phone and upload them to your Myspace home page. (Take that, LiveJournal!)” (via)
Video storage site YouTube has just announced a mobile service for posting videos by phone. ( via unmediated ).
“YouTube members can create a mobile profile on the site and YouTube will create a unique e-mail address where they can send videos. Members can shoot clips with their cell phone and e-mail them to YouTube, where the clips are automatically posted under the users’ profile.”
Sony Ericsson’s new mobile phones will feature tight integration with Google and Google Blogger. Starting with the Sony Ericsson K610, K800 and K790, the new Sony Ericsson Google phones.. provide a pre-loaded blog application with a tight integration to the mobile camera and intuitive automatic set-up for consumers who do not already have a personal blog.
And back in January: Motorola is releasing handsets this quarter that will feature an integrated Google button, which, when pressed, will automatically take users to the popular search engine.
Sydney Film Festival video podcast of Mark Pesce talking about the challenges of creating and distributing good online content.
Online Tools
Learn html – why?
While Dreamweaver offers a free 30 day trial for home users, a recent addition to the webpage building world is Nvu ( pronounced N-View), which enables a similar jumping between visual editing and html code, is free and open source, and available on mac, pc and linux.
What is a blog? Via wikipedia:
A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”.
-Blog history by Rebecca Blood
Anatomy of a blog.
technorati, google blog search engine
WHY BLOGS?
Why is blogging of interest?
-lower technical & economic barriers to publishing & broadcast… – sophisticated publishing options ( eg auto-archive, categorise, search functions, embed media, combine other feeds, allows easy subscription… ) explain feeds? early adopters – one foot in future – RSS / feeds – subscription… – blogging hints at future publishing models for when mobile media ( phones, mp3 players, game consoles ) converges further with the internet – community & connectivity – many to many & stickiness ( compared to web & html – easy to cross reference, subscribe, comment, update ) – what they enable – podcasts, video blogs ( again subscription based ) – massively popular – meaning lots of niche areas & thoghts/media of fascinating people available regularly…
eg for me – exciting to read current musings of DJ rupture, and author Bruce Sterling etc etc
How does blogging work?
html – building blocks of the web… yet very time consuming for giant webpages…
CSS - can change the look of an entire site…
but if you want infrastructural changes – time consuming – which is where ‘content management systems’ come in…
of which the weblog // blogging system is one …
( distributed software…. serverside software… )
Examples of blog software – “>movable type, wordpress, textpattern, typepad, drupal, mambo… blogger, blogsome, livejournal, myspace…
Web Feeds / RSS ( subscription technologies )
What is rss? The BBC has a succinct explanation ofRSS feeds. Understanding feeds & the capacity to subscribe to automated updates from blogs, podcasts, videoblogs etc is necessary to grasp today’s internet.
syndication & aggregation ( link to in-depth technical reference PDF about ‘feeds’ )
Podcasting & Video Blogging
videoblogging guide
podcasting guide
Social bookmarking ( Research & publicity ) :
tagging
social bookmarking ( wikipedia definition ) ( del.icio.us )
magnolia
Firefox extensions ( research and productivity tools )
Article about these add-ons here.
Peer to Peer Distribution
bit torrent / shared bandwidth. Means can scale distribution to suit any demand, without suffering huge costs. Article by Mark Pesce.
News Filtering / Popularity Sites :
digg newsvine slashdot
Group blogs :
metafilter, world changing, boing boing
Video Storage :
youtube – popular video storage.
vimeo – better quality resolution.
blip.tv?
revver? offers $ for popular clips.
jumpcut has built in video editing inside it’s webpage & capacity to sell full resolution versions of clips uploaded as dvd or downloads.
myspace?
DIY Print Publishing
lulu.com offers easy publishing & distribution of books, that can scale according to demand.
Case Studies?
Fine examples of harnessing networked tools :
rocketboom – daily video blog with huge audience. 1×3 minute news video every day.
We Make Money Not Art : superb electronic arts round-up.
Jason Kottke’s blog – discussing writers and editorshereWorldchanging is a great blog about sustainability, with fresh perspectives.
Group-blogs – 3quarksdaily ( great filtered lists of intelligent articles daily )
podcast – pick from this directory…
Creative Commons
( alternative copyright licencing )
Want your own WIKI?
Overview & guide of Mediawiki, free wiki software, asused by wikipedia. Guide for using images in mediawiki.
Wikimedia Commons: a database of 728,588 media files to which anyone can contribute. In Wikimedia Commons we use the Ogg Vorbis file type for sound files and Ogg Theora file type for video files.
Applications that play ogg files
Examples of video online within a wiki – as animated GIFS~!
( no control of playback, big file size, poor video quality…. ) Also .ogg files ( which playback in VLC, Mplayer etc ).
Free Software for transferring files at home to a web server :
mac : fugu.
PC : WinSCP.
AjaxWrite : Free browser based word processor, which can import and export a variety of word documents.
Audio :
Audacity ( mac, PC, Linux, free )
SwitchPad ( PC ) converts audio files. Instructions on how to record a skype-netphone conversation – using 2 computers.
Wiretap ( mac – free ) – “allows you to record any audio playing on your Mac, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. ”
Freecorder – (PC ) audio recorder that can record skype calls ( $20 ) ( via Mark )
