Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
May 27
Posted: under Community, Multimedia, Online Video, Viral Fame.
Weezr’s Pork and Beans video turns the whole “viral fame” process on its head, taking in the personalities made famous in the last year or so by YouTube, and biting off their fame. It’s funny, self-referential and the tune burns (Full disclosure: I used to have “Hashpipe” as a ringtone on my old Sanyo. I [...] [...more]
Weezr’s Pork and Beans video turns the whole “viral fame” process on its head, taking in the personalities made famous in the last year or so by YouTube, and biting off their fame. It’s funny, self-referential and the tune burns (Full disclosure: I used to have “Hashpipe” as a ringtone on my old Sanyo. I like their riffs. Sue me.)
I’m not sure if this represents the final nail in the “Everyone famous for 15 minutes” meme, since time is no longer a delimiter for fame. 15 million pageviews? 15,000 friend requests on MySpace? How do we now categorize and describe inconsequential, perhaps accidental, fame?
On an artistic front, I really dig the throughline of Weezr’s stuff – they started out with the “Buddy Holly” video, biting off “Happy Days,” using the set & beloved character – and now they’re using anti-nostalgia, i.e. the ultimate in ephemeral phenomena, as visuals for their music. Oh yeah – and they’ve got a dedicated channel on YouTube now. Look for remixes and parodies of this springing up in the next week or so. Update: Oh God, they’ve started already.
Wired has a good take on this, including this quote:
“It was mayhem making the video,” Weezer guiartist Brian Bell explained. “We were performing with all these amazing YouTube celebrites, and I felt like I had walked into my own computer.”
Technorati Tags: viral video, weezr, web celeb, community, blog, fame, music video
May 26
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Community, Design, Digital Migration, journalism, Multimedia, Newspapers, Online Video, Uncategorized, Web Tech.
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more [...] [...more]
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now on the Typepad platform, and have finally taken the leap to WordPress. It’s not because Typepad was bad – although it was a little clunky at first, and I haven’t ever really been happy with their recommendations on how to deal with video – but more a case of me wanting to start exerting more control over the design of the blog, and its location. Basically, I’ve outgrown Hard News, Inc. So, rather than try to make the old “brand” learn some new dance steps, I’ve decided to start afresh over here at Artesian Media.
I feel a little sad at leaving the Hard News blog behind – it was my first foray into blogging on my own, although by that point, I had been a web editor and publisher for 10 years. I remember feeling euphoric at first – I was able to publish on my own, any time I wanted, about anything I felt like, without having to spend hours on the phone to coders in Bangalore! When I wanted to move items in a list around, add or change photos, change the number, size and location of the text columns, I just clicked on a few radio buttons, and zammo! Hit F5 and everything’s changed.
Since that time, I’ve seen the blogosphere really start to codify and fall into predictable patterns. Flame wars have their own cartoon graphics explaining their life cycle. Everyone gripes the same about trackback spam and script kiddies haxxoring your database and putting “U R Pwned” up in place of all your precious bits of Joycean stream-of-consciousness wisdom.
I kinda want to take the best bits of Hard News and migrate them over here – not only because some of them are (at least in my opinion) damn good, but also to multitask. I’ve always adopted the Army ethos of “Never ask your men to do something you wouldn’t or couldn’t do yourself.” Well, now that a great deal of my professional life revolves around taking traditional print journalists (as I was for the greater part of my career) and guiding them on their first steps on the multimedia path, one of the things that I try to do is to look at the technologies and knowledge that content producers are going to have to master, and then to force myself into their shoes for a stroll.
So yeah, part of what I’m doing here is using myself as a guinea pig, to see how difficult it’s going to be to try to migrate over about 3 years’ worth of content from Typepad.
Stay tuned, watch this space, and thanks for checking in.
May 21
Posted: under Uncategorized.
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May 18
Posted: under Current Affairs, Online (Multi)Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs.
Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there’s no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No! Then again, it’s only a matter of time before people start [...] [...more]
Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there’s no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No!
Then again, it’s only a matter of time before people start offering plug-ins to do the video commenting, and we get animated snowmen (like in the CNN Democratic debate last summer), World of Warcraft avatars or Second Life furries chiming in …
Anyway, check out Seesmic – the webnoscenti are saying that it’s the "next Twitter" – which I guess, means that all the early adopters will ooh and aah over it, as it suffers weekly outages from lack of scalability, while the rest of the webmob blithely ignores it in favor of seeing the latest Pirate Bay porno.
UPDATE: It appears that there is a use for this – Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, used it to interview Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford.
VIz:
Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss was
one of the Seesmic community members who asked questions to Steven
Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and
Cate Blanchett. Here is how Jemima describes the experience (you can see here all Jemima questions and reactions):
"It’s a simple
enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct
questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my
favourite heroines) and it’s quite a buzz watching them reply directly
to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too – like most
people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I
recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."
May 17
Posted: under Current Affairs, Film, journalism, music, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Online (Multi)Media, television, Web/Tech.
Can you say “Doomed”? Apparently, a report called “And Now for the News,” written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it’s got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities. Cuban made [...] [...more]
Can you say “Doomed”?
Apparently, a report called “And Now for the News,” written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it’s got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities.
Cuban made billions of dollars in the internet video game, and, while he’s acted the fool at various Maverick games over the years, nobody has ever accused him of either being stupid or lacking passion. So when he starts winding up the air-raid siren, it gets my attention.
From Cuban’s blog:
Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no
longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the
problems facing Internet video.
(snip)
Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned
two things. First; consumers won’t pay for content on the web, so it
will have to be ad supported. And second; it won’t be ad supported.
Oh, shit. (*stomach lurches*)
On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out –
click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of
advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over
the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been
lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising
for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a
typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for
web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30
minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields
approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.
Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs…by 88%?
In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this.
Sweetie, can you get me a hemlock cocktail, please? Easy on the ice. And see if there are any razor blades in the junk drawer?
88%? Are you freakin’ kidding me? That kind of revenue restructuring would be in line with what newspapers have experienced since classified ads migrated to the web (i.e. the “Craigslist effect”). And yeah, I know, there are some shellshocked newspaper reporters/editors who will nod wearily, taking schadenfreude satisfaction that the arrogant pacotillos in local TV are about to take the bollocking that print has taken these last 10 years.
Over at Digital Media Wire, Paul Sweeting explains the problem that video producers here in Hollywood face, seeing as how they’re making the same goddam mistakes that music labels made when the internet came calling:
There’s no reason to believe that video producers’ experience will be
any different. Like it or not, the web simply isn’t very kind to
publishers, packagers and distributors. It rewards enablers. Search is
an enabling technology–perhaps the ultimate enabling technology. And
as Google shareholders can tell you, it’s been rewarded. The challenge
for publishers is not to figure out how to force the web to reward
them. It’s to figure out how to capture the value created by enabling
technology.
In that sense, Cuban is right. It may not make sense for the networks
simply to make their schedules available for free on the Internet. That
doesn’t really create any new value; it mostly just drains value from
linear platforms.
What the networks need is to figure out how to capture the value
created by enabling consumers to access, select, aggregate, transform,
embed and share content–in a word, to use it. Anything else is just TV with buffering.
For scripted TV entertainment, well, I’m not sure what the survival strategy is yet. I do know that there is not much love in the ad world for a CPM rate hike for online video that would bridge that 88% gap. There’s just too much other product out there screaming for attention … not to mention the fact that the scripted TV content (and movie content, for that matter) is a melting sandcastle to the surging broadband tide. Trying to make back a $160 million budget from some exotic cocktail of online subscription, advertising and branded sponsorship … well, let’s just say that I’m glad I’m not writing the checks on that one. I don’t know how you can possibly monetize the budgets that Hollywood is used to.
And folks, we know – dammit, we know all too well – how the media megalopalies react to revenue reductions. For a time, they throw money at the problem. And then come the cutbacks. “We have to do more with less.”
It comes down to our old friends, supply and demand. If there is
demand for the kind of spectacle that you get in Iron Man or Raiders 4,
or whatever, there will be someone out there that will supply it …
but at the price point that the people on the demand side set.
Kiss those expense-account lunches at The Ivy goodbye. All the little perks that pampered writers, directors, producers and stars have gotten used to over the years. There is going to be a lot of screaming and whining hereabouts in the next decade or so.
I think that my clients over in newspapers have actually got a significant advantage in this arena. The future of video is going to be like the future of news: disaggregated and hyperlocal. Papers can do this. Papers ARE doing this.
I can’t figure out how to take a 2 1/2 hour piece of video – hell, video of any length, from a blipvert to the entire back catalog of the Museum of Radio and TV – and make it pay off a $320 million opening weekend return.
But I can teach you how to monetize short clips shot by reporters that go along with local news stories. That’s do-able.
One last thing: in the comments was this gem, sure to be included in my next series of trainings for newspapers migrating to video on the web:
I’ve never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They’re blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don’t want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.
May 16
Posted: under Current Affairs, journalism, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Web/Tech.
As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1. More and more, I [...] [...more]
As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1.
More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the “well, we’re just trying to be cautious” bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr’rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around.
So yeah, join the group, send some supportive e-mails, whatever it takes. Taking a picture in a public place is not a crime. Should not be a crime. Idiots that want to clamp down on people obeying the law because they feel justified … that is the bigger danger to our republic.
I particularly liked this question from the comments on the blog: “what if a bunch of art students sat down and sketched a public place? would that be a crime?”
This image of a shirt was posted on Flickr – go there and join the group, even if you don’t plan to show up
May 16
Posted: under Found Genius Artifacts, Mac v. PC, Macintosh Madness, Vaio=Garbage, Web/Tech.
OK, someone up in Computer Heaven HATES me. I managed to completely crash the Mac. as in, "The little pinwheel just spins on the screen, and none of the buttons, clicks to key-combos does the least little thing." Happened when I tried to close out of Firefox. The whole system just hung. Had to do [...] [...more]
OK, someone up in Computer Heaven HATES me.
I managed to completely crash the Mac. as in, "The little pinwheel just spins on the screen, and none of the buttons, clicks to key-combos does the least little thing."
Happened when I tried to close out of Firefox. The whole system just hung. Had to do a "Hard Quit" of holding down the power button until the machine went dead. And now that I’ve been trying to work with Premiere Pro to import footage from the NAS, the Mac has gotten downright cranky.
I did, however, manage to install 4 extra Gigs of RAM from Crucial - for those of you shambling around wearing Apple t-shirts and mumbling "braiiiinnnssss …. brrrraaaaiiinnnssss " – a much better option than buying memory from the gottverdammt total rip-off Apple stores.
Not that all that extra mem seems to have pepped the system up much. (sigh)
I guess this is a case of the "grass = greener over in the Mac pasture." FAIL.
May 15
Posted: under Home Office Technology, Mac v. PC, Macintosh Madness, Web/Tech.
I have bowed to the inevitable, and bought a Great Big Expensive Mac Pro. This is a dual quad-core machine, and I just got an extra 4 gigs of RAM from Crucial (NOT the Mac store – their prices are nothing short of absurd) so that I can really work on post-production on my short [...] [...more]
I have bowed to the inevitable, and bought a Great Big Expensive Mac Pro. This is a dual quad-core machine, and I just got an extra 4 gigs of RAM from Crucial (NOT the Mac store – their prices are nothing short of absurd) so that I can really work on post-production on my short film.
It struck me that every computer I’ve bought has been about 10x as fast as the previous machine. My first computer was the old TRS-80, with 4K (later 16k) of RAM. Programs were loaded in via a cassette tape drive, and later we all freaked out when there were actual floppy disks. Which, back then, were really floppy – the 5 1/4 size, and the big TRS disks were about 8 inches across.
Yes, children, you’re reading that right. Shut up and go play with your terabyte iTouches. 
Next, was a PC-AT that sped along at 4.77 mHz. This had dual disk drives, and a sickly green monochrome display. My sister Sara and I played some kind of lame "Adventure" game on it for hours and hours, wandering around in a lame dungeon and shooting arrows into green slimy blobs.
In the early 90s, I made the decision to go whole hog to the PC platform – at the time, a Mac SE30 was about the size of a boom box, a monochrome screen the size of my hand, and a tiny 30 meg hard disk. By comparison, my old Zeos desktop had 4 megs of RAM, a 120 meg hard drive and a 14" color display. Whee!
I still remember the cover of the old PC Magazine, back when the mag was fat as a phone book with all the clone makers who had been unleashed on the landscape, packing the mag with ads … the big splash headline said: "25 Megahertz Screamers Unleashed."
Yeah, a lot of things are quaint in retrospect.
Next, in ’98, I got a Dell laptop that ran at 233 mHz. This had a 3 gig hard drive and could actually connect to the internet.
In ’02, I got the Fry’s Electronics desktop – 2.53 gHz, 120 gig hard drive, dual DVD drives.
This Octocore has 8 cores, all running at 3 gHz, which specs out to 32 gHz. The hard drive is a puny 250 gigs, but I have a gigabit connection to my NAS (which has decided this week to play nice with the rest of the network), and a Superdrive. I’m still trying to reconcile myself to the change in the way that I navigate around from program to program, and I am really hating not being able to use my keyboard (typing on a regular keyboard hurts like a bitch after about 5 minutes – I need the split keyboard because of my 2XL hand size).
Still, Vista had made my life into such a living hell for the last year that I could not in good conscience keep banging my head against the wall. The crashes, the constant updates, the security holes, the unexplained way that multimedia content JUST WOULDN’T WORK no matter what I did …
If I am going to actually produce video content for the web, I need something that actually works. Vista did not. It just didn’t. I spent hours and hours on the phone with customer service reps who painfully tried to walk me through all the steps to troubleshoot Vista, and on more than one occasion, they just threw up their hands and said, "Well, we don’t know."
That can’t happen.
Or, when I was doing a presentation in Cucuta, I arrived in front of a room full of expectant journalists, tried to fire up my machine … only to stand there, sweating, in dismay, as the computer took more than 25 minutes to install what Microsoft called "Critical updates." For 25 minutes, the screen was blank as the disk light just lit up and kept on, and I head the clicking and grinding from inside the Vaio (and don’t get me started about the for-shit quality of the hard disks in the Vaio).
You try standing in front of a room that’s expecting to see demonstrations of how multimedia can change their lives when your computer won’t even wake up and there is no way to make it work.
So I have embarked on this adventure with the Mac. It is my hope that I can learn how to deal with all the quirks and differences with the Mac fast enough so that my productivity doesn’t take a massive hit. So far, I am not encouraged. Despite the promises of how the Mac makes things so easy, it is impossible to add a printer in any way that makes the slightest bit of sense to me.
May 09
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Google “snookered” on $3.2 Billion Deal At the Digital Hollywood Conference this week, speaker after speaker waxed poetic about the boundless future offered by the near-certain adoption of the WiMax standard in the next couple of years. Our mobile devices are going to be connected at 700megs/sec, all over, seamless service, replacing all wired, fibered, [...] [...more]
Google “snookered” on $3.2 Billion Deal
At the Digital Hollywood Conference this week, speaker after speaker waxed poetic about the boundless future offered by the near-certain adoption of the WiMax standard in the next couple of years. Our mobile devices are going to be connected at 700megs/sec, all over, seamless service, replacing all wired, fibered, satellite or twisted-pair alternatives. It’s going to be the great big game-changing move that finally delivers on the promise of “every piece of content ever produced, everywhere, all the time.”
Well, today in TechCrunch, comes a rather more textured view of the Big Fat Deal announced this week.
As I said before, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Sprint and Clearwire need the deal to try to salvage the billions they’ve already sunk into their money-losing WiMax networks. But putting more cooks into the kitchen with different WiMax aspirations is not going to help. Google wants more wireless broadband alternatives for its planned mobile apps and advertising. Whereas the cable companies want a way to compete against mobile phone operators encroaching on their turf.
I have to agree. This many players all fighting for the reins means that this stagecoach is headed off the cliff, pronto. The whole “don’t be evil” philosophy of Google, when it comes up against the philosophy of U.S. cellphone companies … well, that’s a clash of cultures like a partnership between a hippie day-care center and Visigoth torturers.
Meanwhile, it appears that some very, very basic pieces of the technology just AREN’T in place:
2. WiMax hasn’t proven itself elsewhere either. Even in Korea, which has had WiMax for two years and is supposed to be a broadband paradise, consumers are not clamoring for WiMax. There are only about 150,000 WiMax subscribers
in Korea, well below initial expectations.
3. Before you can turn Wimax into a mobile broadband service, you need mobile WiMax equipment. Cell phones, laptops, and other devices with WiMax chips in them are a long way away. Intel is ready to sell those chips, but device makers are not going to put them in their gadgets until enough consumers want them. And most consumers are going to wait for a WiMax network to show up that they can access both where they live and when they travel. So there’s a chicken and egg problem there.
(snip – and most compellingly)
6. WiMax is not a global standard. Here in the U.S., WiMax is built on 2.5 GHz spectrum. Overseas, it is built on 3.5 GHz spectrum. That makes it harder for equipment manufacturers to achieve the scale they need to make money from WiMax devices and network equipment.
I keep coming back to a very basic problem – the promise of WiMax is that it allows the signal to go 30 klicks, meaning that even out in the boonies, you can get fatpipe internet. OK, fine. The signal from the tower to your device will probably get through. 
But howinhell is a measly little handheld phone or laptop computer going to push a signal from you out to that big 200-foot high transmission tower? Huh? Riddle me that.
I had one of the very first cellphones ever commercially made. It was a Kenwood. It came in a backpack-like format, weighed about 10 pounds. Had a detachable handset and a 8-inch high, 1/2 inch thick, plastic-coated antenna. We rented those back in the day, used them to check in while we were hunting celebs & news thru the Hollywood Hills. The salesmen used to caution that “You want to keep that antenna as far from your head as possible when making a call.”
See, the thing is, the 1st Generation cellphone towers, those old analog ones that we put in starting in the late 80s, they were made to push and receive signals from phones transmitting at 3 watts or so. At 3-watt signal will travel a couple of miles, depending on the terrain and other interference.
The salesmen told me a dire tale I’ve never forgotten – they cell companies had made a handheld “brick” phone that put out about 6 watts, and gave it to a Fire Department in Indiana to test. After a fire, the Fire Captain was talking for a long time (I think it was half an hour, but not sure) on the newfangled phone. At the end of his call – ZOOOOPP! – his vision irised to black.
The high wattage of the phone had cooked his retinas.
Using a cellphone is like sticking your head into a low-power microwave oven. Current phones transmit at about .5 watts. That’s why we’ve had to build the cell towers all over the landscape – the lower transmission power means the signal only carries a couple of blocks, not a couple of miles.
So getting back to WiMax. 
How hot of a microwave signal do the devices have to put out before they can connect? Does this mean that having your laptop, you know, on your lap, is going to cook your harbls?
And man, the differing global standard is right there a deal-killer for me. I have seen how tech that only works in the U.S. is not viable in a global economy. And trying to establish a new, costly standard in the world that is incompatible with what is still the biggest market? Non-starter.
Maybe there’s some compelling reason that hasn’t yet been made clear to the rest of us civvies, but this deal sounds like a real dog, one that could strangle potentially interesting technology in its cradle. Which would suck, because as much as I hate the cellphone companies, I am REALLY hating on the cable/DSL service providers.
Technorati Tags: WiMax, cell phones, Google, internet, ISP, web, wireless
May 02
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Heads Originally uploaded by Wordyeti The expression on the guy to the far right – I think it’s Socrates – pretty much sums up how I feel today. [...more]
The expression on the guy to the far right – I think it’s Socrates – pretty much sums up how I feel today.
