Category: Media and News

Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media

Image of Cover Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (translated by Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, c2006) is an unusual book that pokes into the lost histories of media technologies in order to start “toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means” (as the subtitle goes.) Zielinski starts by talking about the usual linear history of media technologies that recovers what predicts what we believe is important. This is the Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson type of history. Zielinski looks away from the well known precursurs towards the magical and tries to recover those moments of diversity of technologies. (He writes about Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium as a model for media technologies – ie. that we have bursts of diversity and then periods of conformity.)

I’m interested in his idea of the magical, because I think it is important to the culture of computing. The magical for Zielinski is not a primitive precursor of science or efficiency. The magical is an attitude towards possibility that finds spectacle in technology. Zielinksi has a series of conclusions that sort of sketch out how to preserve the magical:

Developed media worlds need artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges.  (p. 255)

Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media wolrds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress. (p. 259)

Establishing effective connections with the peripheries, without attempting to integrate these into the centers, can help to maintain the worlds of the media in a state that is open and transformable. (p. 261)

The most important precondition for guaranteeing the continued existence of relatively power-free spaces in media worlds is to refrain from all claims to occupying the center. (p. 269)

The problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analyzing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time. (p. 270)

Kairos poetry in media worlds is potentially an efficacious tool against expropriation of the moment. (p. 272)

Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure. Ist priviledged location are not palaces but open laboratories. (p. 276)

Hitwise: Web Intelligence

On jill/text I cam across an interesting graph about OpenSocial vs. Facebook showing the difference in market share. Hitwise provides statistics and analysis of internet usage. They get their data from ISPs, which sounds like it could be a privacy issue. See their Product Features for the services they provide that most of us can’t afford. See what they say about how they gather information in How We Do It or here is quote from their press release on Hanah Montana Most Searched for Halloween Costume:

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

They have blogs by their analysts, most of whom seem to be in the UK, that have interesting notes about trends like iTunes overtakes Free Music Downloads in Internet Searches.

As It Happens, Privacy, and the Mechanical Turk

As It Happens on CBC Radio just played a good double segment on “Google Eyes”. The first part looked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk task looking for Steve Fossett’s plane on satellite images. The second part looked at privacy issues around street level imaging from outfits like Google.

Mechanical Turk (Artificial Artificial Intelligence) is a project where people can contribute to tasks that need many human eyes like looking at thousands of satellite images for a missing plane. It reminds me of the SETI@home project which lets users install a screen saver that uses your unused processing cycles for SETI signal processing. SETI@home is not part of a generalized project, BOINC that, like the Mechanical Turk, has a process for people to post tasks for others to work on.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced yesterday that she has written both Google and Immersive Media (who developed the Street View technology used by Google) “to seek further information and assurances that Canadians’ privacy rights will be safeguarded if their technology is deployed in Canada.” The issue is that,

While satellite photos, online maps and street level photography have found useful commercial and consumer applications, it remains important that individual privacy rights are considered and respected during the development and implementation of these new technologies.

This is a growing concern among privacy advocates as a number of companies have considered integrating street level photography in their online mapping technologies.

In street level photography the images are, in some cases, being captured using high-resolution video cameras affixed to vehicles as they proceed along city streets.

Google, according to the commission on the radio, has not replied to the August 9th letter.

Where is the Semantic Web?

Semantic Web DiagramWhere is the Semantic Web? In the face of Web 2.0 hype, the semantic web meme seems to be struggling. Tim Berners-Lee, in the slides from a 2003 talk says there is “no such thing” as a killer-app for the semantic web, that “its the integration, stupid!” (slide 7 of 35.) The problem is that mashups are giving users usable integration now. The difference is that mashups are usually based around one large content portal like Flickr that then little sattelite tools feed off. The semantic web was a much more democratic idea of integration.

Google’s Peter Norvig is quoted in Google exec challenges Berners-Lee saying that there are three problems with the semantic web:

  • Incompetence: users don’t know how to use HTML in a standard way let alone RDF.
  • Competition: companies that are in a leadership position don’t like to use open standards that could benefit others, they like to control the standards to their advantage.
  • Trust: too many people try to trick systems to change the visibility of their pages (selling Viagra.)

In a 2006 Guardian report, Spread the word, and join it up, SA Mathieson quotes Berners-Lee to the effect that they (semantic web folk) haven’t shown useful stuff. The web of TBL was a case of less is more (compared to SGML and other hypertext systems), the semantic web may lose out to all the creative mashups that are less standardized and more useful.

IDC White Paper: The Digital Universe

Image of Report CoverIn an earlier blog I mentioned the IDC report, The Digital Universe, about the explosion of digital information. It was commissioned by EMC Corporation and is available free on their site, here. They also have a page on related information which includes a link to “Are You an Informationist?” and “The Inforati Files”.

The PDF of the IDC White Paper includes some interesting points:

  • Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.
  • Three major analog to digital conversions are powering this growth ‚Äì film to digital image capture, analog to digital voice, and analog to digital TV.
  • Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe. They are replicated over the Internet, on
    private organizational networks, by PCs and servers, in data centers, in digital TV broadcasts, and on digital projection movie screens. building automation and security migrates to IP networks, surveillance goes digital, and RFID and sensor networks
    proliferate.

Is it time to rewrite “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to think about about “The Image in the Age of Networked Distribution”.

Wikipedia Issues

Can we trust the Wikipedia? The Guardian Unlimited (among others) has a story, Read me first: Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practise to deceive (Seth Finkelstein, Mar. 8, 2007) about the latest Wikipedia scandal. A Wikipedia administrator who been posing as a tenured religion professor turns out to be a 24-year old with no advanced degrees. What is worse ,is that Wikipedia has hired him and has been promoting this administrator, suggesting him as someone for a New Yorker article that now has an editor’s disclaimer,

At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia admin-istrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions.

So what are the ethical issues and what does this mean for the quality of Wikipedia content? On the second question, an Editorial: Wikipedia with caution (Mar. 8, 2007, by Editorial Board) by the The Stanford Daily strikes the right note for me.

Most university-level students should be able to discern between Wikipedia and more reliable online sources like government databases and online periodicals. To be fair, some of Wikipedia’s entries are specific enough to be extremely valuable in studying or researching, but others are shallow, short, and occasionally completely inaccurate.

On the moral issue there is a tension between anonymity, which many people need online to perform their chosen roles, and deception. It could be argued that to preserve anonymity a Wikipedia administrator under the spotlight might have to mislead critics, but Essjay went too far, he tried to build his reputation through deception.

Time to learn your exabytes: Tech researchers calculate wide world of data

161 exabytes of information was generated last year according to a CBC.ca story, Time to learn your exabytes: Tech researchers calculate wide world of data by Brian Bergstein (March 5, 2007). That is way up from the estimate in How Much Information? 2003 that I blogged before. The study quotes John F. Gantz of IDC, but I can’t find the paper on the IDC site.

Wired News also has a version of the story, but again they link to the general IDC site.

Thanks to Matt amd Mike for this.

What we need from universities

DeLuca and Rockwell PictureWhat sorts of graduates does Canada need? Bill Gates in a opinion piece At risk: innovation (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail about a month ago argued for more computer science and engineering graduates arguing that our ability to innovate is at risk. This triggered a response, that Technology’s overrated and that what we need are more business students. Frankly I think they are both wrong, we need social content innovation. The innovations of the Web 2.0 (from blogging and wikis to Flickr and YouTube) are not technical innovations, but content innovations involving innovative ways for groups of people to communicate meaningful content. The areas of growth in information and communications technology are those areas that intersect with creative practices like digital imaging and computer games, as the resport Beyond Productivity points out.

What we need are more arts, humanities and social science students who are comfortable with communications technology and curious to use it in interesting ways. We need what Eugene Roman of Bell Canada calls “content scientists”. Companies like Bell have neat technologies, but need people to find ways to use them to create value. Toys are not enough, people need to play with them to give toys meaning and that is what arts, humanities and social science students do. Imagine a world where we made soccer balls but never organized a game – that’s what Gates, Martin and Milway will leave us with. Instead, as Chad Gaffield, the new president of SSHRC, puts it, Canada should support the human sciences which encourage understandings of people and developing talent.

In the picture above, I am with Gerry De Luca of Bell Canada after a meeting between Bell Canada representatives and colleagues at McMaster where we discussed the problems we face in teaching and research. Can we find an appropriate way for an enterprise like Bell to support the development of talented content scientists? What’s in it for them? This is not an easy problem in the content disciplines as industry engagement carries different risks than in science and engineering. When industry supports research in engineering the site of the engagement is a matter of patentable property ownership that is relatively free of controversy. When industry supports the creation of content it is a matter of copyright or expression, something that resists control or ownership. On the one hand there is too much content making most new content worthless; on the other hand content innovation takes freedom and rarely has a commercialization pathway when free. To support innovative expression you have to be willing to risk the tasteless, the controversial, the political, and the just plain bad. What entreprise would want to be associated with a chaotic explosion of content, even if there were a gem or two? Likewise, how comfortable are universities allowing industry engagement in content science.

CNW Group: Mediavantage

Logo for MediavantageThe CNW Group that has it’s Canadian base in Toronto has a new service called MEDIAVANTAGE that has many of the features of a multimedia news crawling, managing, and visualizing service. From the Flash intro it looks like users define keywords to track. Mediavantage then shows you results from different sources. It can send alerts and graphs result history.
Screenshot
The interesting part is that they track TV news and provide text summaries that look like the text off close captioning. Subsets of results can be shared by e-mail and PDF. This is a news mining tool for business that offers a model for what Web Mining for Research might look like.

Thanks to Terry for this.