inlococogitatus

So after long time away, have finally cleared out all the link spam and updated the blog package online. Still a bit awkward to use, but there you go. Will post some of my writings from classes this past year at sims (er, the iSchool).

In case any of you that follow video and such did not catch it, Yahoo bought JumpCut - it was announced on Tuesday. The lesson here is if you have any idea that seems relatively straightforward and you can find a few Flash hackers to help implement it, you can still make piles of money - it’s the bubble all over again! Sony’s recent purchase of Grouper for tons of dough ($70 per user) is another example.

Tomorrow is the big Hack Camp at Yahoo! Should be interesting to see what folks come up with. The internal hack days have produced a few surprises, along with some nice ideas. At the same time, I will be there - maybe I am getting too old, but the idea of camping out with a bunch of other propeller-heads just does not sound that appealing.

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 I spent a chunk of the summer in Switzerland, visiting family and friends. For a few weeks we were up in Comologno at the ancestral home of my wife’s family. As much as I was enjoying the disconnection from TV, telephones, email, etc., I ended up thinking about some of my current work in the context of life up there. When you go up to these little villages, it seems at first like you are stepping back in time. Not long ago the majority of people who lived way up in the Alpine valleys lived off of farming and some handcrafts, and you still see a lot of cows, goats and handwork. People are often cut off for days or even weeks when snows close the only road in and out of the valley, and life in general seems to move at a different pace. At the same time, when you sit down for coffee with folks who live there year round, the discussion comes around to contemporary themes - some friends of ours were complaining that DSL service only came up to Russo (a few villages down the valley), and so they were stuck with dial-up internet access. 

Today, tourism is the main source of income for the towns. In Comologno, they have restored one of the mansions built by a wealthy family, and have turned it into a hotel - the Palazzo Gamboni. Everyone likes the hotel, and in the evenings locals mix with the tourists down at the Palazign (the best (well, only) bar in town). But they need to draw more tourists to be successful, and although there are tourists agencies all over promoting them, it is hard to stand out from the crowd.

What makes the Onsernone valley special to me are all the stories. Aline Valangin wrote many based upon her stay during the war years, and Max Frisch also lived in the valley for a while. My great aunt by marriage is of the opinion (at least after a few glasses of wine) that the main character in Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene) is loosely based on her late husband. Sit with the old-timers in Palazign and you will hear stories about life, the towns, the people and their remarkable resilience in the face of a world determined to move at a faster pace. These stories are what keep me going back, and if they could more easily tell their stories to potential tourists, it would certainly draw more people up here.

So what does all this have to do with semantic multimedia? Much of what we have been thinking about is ways to make it easier for people to be media creators, rather than just media consumers. We are looking for ways to more easily gather anecdotes and annotations (e.g. the stories behind old photos, or the villagers’ stories of life with Valangin and Frisch), and to support community curation of assets like these, so that we can synthesize multimedia narratives. There are lots of people working on this - Jane Hunter et al. with the Indigenous Knowledge Management Project, various EU projects, and some of my SIMS colleages. I also got to talking with my old friend Alex Cetkovic, now teaching in the New Media group at the Art University in Zürich, and he was telling me about some interesting projects in Italy dealing with architecture, design and storytelling.

Back in SF and hopping almost daily over to Berkeley, it feels like a long way from the evening discussions in Palazign with Rita and Hans-Ruedi over a glass of Nocino. But I keep thinking about them and the folks at the Palazzo. They are relatively technology savvy, and understand that effective media is a useful marketing tool. Nevertheless, gathering stories and media into some usable multimedia form is beyond them at this point. I think we can make a difference for them. If we can make some of our ideas work, it will make a difference not just to the gadget toting Gen-X and Gen-Y crowds, but as well to to people in (wonderfully) far away places. I find that appealing, and inspiring.

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So the announcement went public today, and Yahoo Research Labs Berkeley is official! I am very excited to be joining Marc, Ryan and a great group of researchers to pursue cool new tech with media and multimedia. I’ll be working primarily on the data model for the meta-data architecture that supports annotation and intelligent query for media like videos, music, images, etc. Am looking forward to a fun mix of multimedia and semantic web technologies to make it easier and more fun to play with media on the web. I am working full time this summer, and then will work part time while I pursue my masters’ at SIMS.

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William Gibson writes in God’s Little Toys about the death of copyright, although he probably would not characterize it as such. I like his fiction, and I think much of what he says in this piece is accurate. Still, if all expression becomes cut-and-paste redux, where do we draw the line between protecting the output of an artist (like Gibson) so they can earn a living, and the expression of the derivative "artist"? Plenty has already been written about the epidemic of plagiarism among students, and about the problems of assuming the internet (i.e., the online cut-and-paste source) is a complete or authoritative source of information. I heard a great story about a young journalist who did her research using only LexisNexis; when researching a story about Nixon’s death, she was largely unaware of his Watergate misdeeds, because they happened before the online event horizon. The point is that when content creation is just (electronic) recombination, you lose not only genuinely new voices, but a whole host of other voices that are not easily cut and pasted. This does not bode well for students, journalists or artists.

To be clear: I think that recombination is very interesting. In the MSMDX project at SIMS, we are exploring ways to enable community annotation of media precisely to support recombination and other creative forms. It is much easier to create a nice montage of beautiful media snippets than it is to create beautiful content from scratch (for any medium, but especially so for audio and video). If we are to believe the pundits, we will have enough bandwidth in a few years to enable widespread re-editing and sharing of video. As available bandwidth increases, the pressure on the broadcast television and film industry will increase as well, and perhaps legislation will, as Gibson asserts, come after the fact of new realities determined by technology. Gibson mentions broadcast television as an example of the process. Television is the major - when not exclusive - source of information for the "developed" world, but broadcast television has as its primary function shaping a uniform consuming public. Many net publishers are following this model as well (isn’t convergence great?), defining disaster and fashion as news. 

Another earlier example that is germane is the advent of music recording. Before it became possible to purchase phonograph recordings of music performance, many more people could, and regularly did, play an instrument. The new technology converted the audience (and so music itself) into a passive experience. While there are certainly plenty of genuinely creative people playing with recombinant media, the effect of cut-and-paste media libraries affects many more people (like today’s students) by turning them into plagiarists, and poor ones at that.

If the effect of technology is to reduce the value and incidence of original creativity, it can hardly be seen as a benefit to society. There are of course those who want to mass-market throw-away products and politicians, but their disputing my conclusion simply underscores my point.  For me, Gibson’s glib, fatalistic attitude is somewhat dismaying.

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