Category: Open Source

Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

> Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin” href=”http://itp.nyu.edu/research/vc”>ITP Research >> Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

Keeping the conversation alive in media blogs

Video Blogging, Vlogging or what ever you want to call it was born into a tradition of self publishing on the internet and benefits greatly from the infrastructure developed for blogging. The tools to create media and now to distribute media online are accessible and affordable. Furthermore, video blogging is often considered participatory and socially interactive. Much of this is due to what blogs have done, enabled true two-way conversation through comments and loose networking through trackbacks.

Unfortunately, while video blogging benefits from these, it doesn’t really do much to improve or enhance this capability with video.

At ITP Research, myself and a couple of others have been working to change this or at least push commenting and trackbacks a bit further. We have created a Video Commenting plugin for WordPress that allows people to leave comments in-time with a video. This, we believe is one of the first steps to allowing conversation to happen around video and furthermore enable richer conversation with video.

Check it out, download it, modify it, use it… Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

From the site:
It’s really exciting to see the number of blogs that exist today, thousands of voices are talking about every possible topic. Blog syndication and commenting allows readers to subscribe, discuss and carry the conversation further, however, with the different forms of media becoming a normal part of many blogs there’s a need to keep this open communication open. Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.

P2P on Mobile Phones

Symella, a Gnutella client for Symbian Smartphones
Listening to a presentation about this now. Pretty interesting but will have to wait to get back to NYC before I can try it (data isn’t working in Europe for me).
From the site:
Symella is a Gnutella client for Symbian smartphones. Gnutella is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing network system with many clients (and servers) available on various desktop operating systems (for desktop Gnutella clients check out this site).
It is used for exchanging files, especially music, MP3 files. Because mobile phones have limited bandwidth and small memory cards, this client focuses only for downloading, not sharing. It is available on Series 60 and Series 80.

ion – and iondb – v. nice!

People With Ideas ion 1.0 RC3 and iondb.com
Just had a short opportunity to try out the new ion and iondb. Haven’t had a chance to get some heavy usage but right off the bat the webstart is great! The db is fantastic as well, sharing what you are watching with others is one of the first steps to making video on the internet more social and community orientated. Keep going!

One of these days I will contribute a bit back to this project.

ITP End of Year Events – Thesis Presentations and End of Semester Show

ITP Spring Show 2006
A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP.

This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP.

ITP Thesis Presentations 2006
ITP’s graduating students will be presenting a wide variety of highly creative and interactive projects that they have constructed over the course of their final project seminars.

Students have been encouraged to undertake projects that bring together the conceptual and design issues that they have engaged in during their two years of study at ITP.

Projects will include installation based work, digital video and audio pieces, interactive 3D, games and educational applications, to name only a few.

ITP will be providing a live webcast of all the thesis presentations.

I/ON TV

People With Ideas – Blog Archive – 10-foot “Potato” UI fun
The guys at Open Network Television are hard at work on more great features for their video aggregator I/ON. This time it is a television interface for those of us with Mini’s or Windows Media Center’s. I can’t wait to try it out on my Mini as STB and hope to have some time at some time in the future to start hacking around with the source.

My New (old) STB

This is a completion of a post that I started in March of 2006:

Then:
So.. I bought a shiny new Intel Mac Mini solely for use as a set top box. First of all, I love it! Second, a lot of work is needed for this to compete with TiVo, MyTH or even Windows Media Center.

So here is what I have, 1 Dual Core Mac Mini with SuperDrive and a great EyeTV tuner/PVR device…

Now: What makes this truly extraordinary (at least in disruption of the pattern of my life):
At some point last year, the cable was unhooked and never got hooked up again (except for about 15 minutes during the 2008 election). This isn’t to say that I don’t watch TV anymore, I do, I watch Heroes, Lost, ER and a bunch of movies. The difference is that I watch it on my terms, not the terms of the networks. I get none of this TV from regular cable, instead I watch these shows through their respective websites (NBC, ABC) or through Hulu and now NetFlix’s online on-demand service (which is soooooooo much better than DVDs via mail as I don’t know what I want to watch next week today).

No longer do I come home and zone out to reruns. No longer to I switch on the TV just to have something to do..

A couple of additional thoughts:
I am pretty sure that scheduled TV will always have a place and people will always want programming in that form. I don’t think TV will go away (at least any time soon). I do think that (if the cable industry doesn’t buy our government) that it will eventually subsumed into the internet (despite all of the fear mongering about clogging the tubes).