Archive for December, 2006

This post from Nature.com about a virtual reality research study points to the efficacy of learning simulations for modeling difficult, dangerous, expensive or, as suggested by this article, unethical situations.

“Researchers have recreated in a virtual world one of the most extreme social experiments ever performed in the real world. The results suggest that virtual environments could provide a way to explore human nature in ways that ethical concerns could make impossible to do for real.” Story continues here…

In spite of iTunes becoming a video channel, the Google/YouTube merger last year and Apple’s anticipated introduction of an IPTV device at MacWorld in January, I don’t think we’re close to the end of the web video revolution. For instance the much anticipated Venice Project from Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis has finally entered public beta. This is a new P2P (peer to peer) solution that according to this post on Techcrunch is “a desktop client, not browserware. It’s only available for Windows machines, and the minimum requirements are a 600 MHz machine with 512 MB of RAM. That’s well below what any new PC has under the hood, but it will still keep out millions of users with older machines. And, of course, Mac users.” Ooops, web video done almost right.

Another web video solution that leverages BitTorent P2P technology technology, called Azureus, has a cross-platform java client that runs in the browser, and offers several content channels like Zudeo with programming from the BBC among others content providers. And there’s still more P2P video on the way from the likes of Gridfold that’s working to bring the P2P solution popularized by Chinese web video company Kumool to the US market. So many choices, so little time.

Why the sudden interest in blogging about web video? It’s actually not sudden at all, rather it’s one of the reasons I put my career as producer/director on hold and got involved in the Internet in the first place. From the time I learned about TCP/IP and talked with the senior engineers at McDonnell Douglas’ network operations center way back in the pre-Mosaic days I saw that the video-Internet convergence that’s defined 2006 was on the way, and I wanted to be there.

Though it’s taken a while I think that vision is finally on the way to fruition, with disruptive implications for studios, broadcasters, cable channels, home video companies, as well as educational video library owners like Discovery’s United Streaming, Scholastic’s Weston Woods and SSI’s Sunburst Visual Media.

Ready? Lights, camera… action!

In memory of the year that video ate the Internet I’ve got two clips for you today. First, here’s a non-PC glimpse of 2006 in review from JibJab. Need I say more? And not long ago I found this brief history of videogames on YouTube. JibJab it’s not, but if you want to see how far we’ve come in the past 30 years you’ll want take a look.

I’ve always felt succeeding in New York had a lot in common with video games. If New York really was a video game I think it would look like this from eBoy.com.

Digg is one of the more visible examples of crowdsourcing, but some people I’ve talked to recently just don’t dig it. If you’re among them, here’s a first-timer’s guide that makes it a little clearer:

“If you have ever felt like you had to dig around the Internet for good content, you might want to look at something called Digg (digg.com). Digg was started as an experiment in October 2004 by Kevin Rose. By December 5th 2004, the site was officially launched. After running for approximately a year, the site surpassed 100,000 users and as a result they were able to raise $2.8 million to help take the service to the next level. Shortly thereafter, digg.com grew to over 500,000 users and over 8.5 million unique visitors per month.

“The concept was to give people the chance to “dig” user submitted tech-related stories in order to get the most popular stuff in front of an audience that was interested in seeing the latest and greatest on the Internet. There are two main things that you can do on Digg. The first is to submit stories that you think the community will like and the second is to digg stories that you like.”

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