Planet Miro

Today we were very proud to launch the PBS NewsHour translation team, part of their Open Election 2012 project.

The first video we’re working on together is the State of the Union speech– help us translate it!

Translate the State of the Union Here

Later today we’ll be releasing Miro Community 1.8, and we’ll be upgrading the hosted sites starting at 21:30 EST.  We don’t expect any downtime, but we’ll update this blog if anything unexpected happens.

Update 1/24/2011 21:36: due to a last-minute bug, the release has been postponed.

TheMiroFolks: s@SymplyOS yes, please do!

TheMiroFolks: "The group behind the largest online protest in history is @fightfortheftr, which began in October." - SF…

Yesterday we joined the largest online protest in history, adding our site to hundreds of others that went dark in a statement against SOPA and PIPA. We blew up twitter from 106,500 mentions of the term “SOPA” to more than 3.5 million today (cool visual here). Politicians took notice, and even Orrin Hatch removed his co-sponsorship despite receiving almost $1.2 million from large media companies and pro-PIPA groups.

As you likely know by now, SOPA and PIPA attempt to combat piracy at the expense of massive changes to the way the web works. For a refresher on the problems SOPA and PIPA pose, check out these great multimedia explainers or this breakdown from the Washington Post. You can also read about the bills, including viewing their full text, on OpenCongress: SOPA and PIPA.

The blackout effort was designed to educate users about the power these bills have to completely shut down sites that may contain one problematic page or link among thousands. While public opinion has turned on this legislation and support for SOPA is waning, the fight is far from over. The PROTECT IP Act, a.k.a. PIPA, is still up for a Senate floor vote on January 24. Though SOPA itself may be shelved for the time being, we’re likely to see it, or perhaps a more palatable form of the same problematic legislation, reappear in the future.

That’s why we need to keep up debate and discussion of the underlying issues driving SOPA. While some assert that lawmakers and content creators simply don’t understand the way the internet works, it’s also arguable that supporters of this bill do understand what they are potentially creating: a “consumption-only internet” that “locks down this emerging ecosystem” of openly available, user-driven content. Maplight offers a breakdown and infographic demonstrating the disproportionate financial support coming from the entertainment industry compared to funds from Silicon Valley opposing the bill. These purveyors of traditional forms of content and content delivery have yet to comment on changing public opinion towards SOPA, with MPAA CEO Chris Dodd instead opting to bizarrely slam blackouts that simulate the potential outcome of a censored internet as “abuse[s] of power.”

The Open Video Alliance seeks to support free expression over heavy-handed copyright regimes that trump creativity and shared cultural resources. At the time of last year’s Open Video Conference, tech entrepreneurs and activists were just beginning to respond to PIPA. Meanwhile, we covered topics at the conference like alternative copyright education (session notes here) and defensive patent licensing (session notes here) — constructive alternatives to protecting creative work that keep the web open for makers of all kinds.

Check back over the days to come for more information and statements from Open Video Alliance members on SOPA and PIPA. Join us in the comments and on Twitter with your thoughts on this legislation and suggestions for action.

TheMiroFolks: getmiro.com is striking against SOPA - so proud of our friends at Fight for the Future today! go team! http://t.co/uidTGdSx

TheMiroFolks: RT @MitchellMcKenna: @dragojevic I see Vimeo feeds now work again in Miro 4.0.4! Awesome work, big kudos to @TheMiroFolks!

2012-01-10T19:35:26Z: z3p: deardiary: Vimeo, you're breaking my heart

TheMiroFolks: RT @_athome_: I just donated to help #Miro, you can too at http://t.co/v6bBoEjs via @themirofolks

TheMiroFolks: Miro / PCF is looking for a Lead Designer! http://t.co/XlnSu6i Know anyone wonderful?

TheMiroFolks: @the1joshuab It's not in our program at the moment, but I have just filed a ticket. You can follow the pr…

TheMiroFolks: @grizzo94 Thanks for the feedback. If you're experiencing a bug, you can report it at http://ht.ly/5J4FU

TheMiroFolks: all Miro domains are moving off of godaddy, because of their SOPA support. http://t.co/rYCoJ4tm #SOPA #PIPA

TheMiroFolks: @davidmead Thanks for using Miro!

TheMiroFolks: Interested in working for Universal Subtitles? We're hiring a South & Central American Regional Coordinat…

TheMiroFolks: @spherecat1 Let us know if you have any more questions. Thanks for the feedback!

TheMiroFolks: We are hiring in Malaysia or the Philippines for a Video Lingua Coordinator - http://t.co/L6usPGID - please pass along!

TheMiroFolks: updated Miro for OSX Lion is coming in the next few days...

TheMiroFolks: We are hiring a Lead Designer for Miro / PCF, come make beautiful open software with us! http://t.co/yKzggj7 (plz RT!)

TheMiroFolks: RT @OpenCongress: Pleased to announce the launch of OpenCongress v.3 -- now the easiest way to organize a…

TheMiroFolks: RT @universalsubs: #UniversalSubtitles accepted the FCC Chairman's Accessibility Award this morning! (20:…

TheMiroFolks: @valeryan24 thanks for updating the french translation, we will sync soon!

TheMiroFolks: Gigaom: sync your own videos to the Kindle Fire with Miro http://t.co/qAr6Jagq

TheMiroFolks: @_athome_ Thanks! It's actually a known issue, so follow this link to check out solutions: http://ht.ly/5EJmo

TheMiroFolks: Our intern, Emily S., left the nest this week. She's been a great addition to the PCF team and we wish he…

TheMiroFolks: We need help translating getmiro.com on launchpad! http://t.co/IKJmCTjh

TheMiroFolks: convert and sync videos to Kindle Fire with the newest version of Miro! http://t.co/WDMkGT8V

TheMiroFolks: Miro is giving away free Flattr gift cards to the first 1,000 people who sign up! http://t.co/6USemrmU

TheMiroFolks: @curiousjohn haha, yes.... that was a test of attention to detail!!

2011-12-29T18:52:20Z: z3p: deardiary: Ubuntu packages of 4.0.4 are now in the miro-releases PPA: https://launchpad.net/~pcf/+archive/miro-releases

we also put together this simple site explaining how it works: Sync Video and Audio to Kindle Fire

Universal Subtitles is a collaborative and award-winning platform for subtitling and translating online video. We’ve created an elegant subtitling tool that you can embed into any webpage, for almost any video. And we’re building an online community to subtitle and translate the world’s most popular and significant videos.

We’re looking for a web developer who is either (or both):

1) An experienced Django developer (preferred) or…

2) An experienced developer of web applications with strong fundamentals and a track record of quickly learning new frameworks.

If you’re awesome and you’re excited about our project, we want to talk to you. Though the need we have right now is for someone who can rapidly build user facing features on our subtitle collaboration site, and we think knowing Django inside out will help.

The project is free and open source, available under the AGPL license, and our organization is a 501(c)3 non-profit. Our supporters include Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation. And our tool has been used by the New York Times in their Egypt coverage and by Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) in their ongoing effort to translate their award-winning educational videos.

This is an ideal gig for someone who wants to build software to create social change. You’ll be building features to help an active and growing community do world changing work, as well as a a free, open source JavaScript/HTML5 widget that can go head to head with any competing Flash, iOS, or desktop subtitling app.

Things that make you an even stronger candidate, from our point of view:

* Ability to make reasonable UI/UX decisions on the fly as you code
* Good communication skills for working with developers in other organizations (partners, clients)
* Project management experience

To apply, send a resume (txt or rtf) to jobs@pculture.org

We need your help to keep Miro alive. To those of you that have already donated this year– thank you so much. If you haven’t given yet, here’s why it’s urgent.

Over the past year, PCF, the non-profit that makes Miro, has had some big successes. We’ve won a Tech Award for advancing equality and an award from the FCC for innovation in accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing. Miro has taken huge strides forward, adding full music support, Android syncing, and much more– Miro is now used by millions of people every month!

We believe deeply in the power of open tools. But our very small budget depends on donations from users and we are facing serious shortfall going into 2012. Can you make a donation?

Yes, I can donate to Miro

After you give, you’ll see a list of new features that we are considering: please vote on what you’d most like to see in the next version of Miro.

We are already hard at work on a major update to Miro that will bring exciting new features and major performance improvements. Miro is built by one of the smallest software teams in the world for a project of this scale, just a few very underpaid developers. But even with our tiny (and incredibly talented team), it does take some money to build and offer Miro for free to everyone.

Our request this month is very real– we just can’t afford to keep making Miro without more user support. If you can make a donation of any size today, it will help ensure that Miro can live on into next year and beyond.

Donate Here

Thank you for reading and, as always, for using Miro. And please, if you possibly can, make a donation today.

I almost can’t believe it, but Universal Subtitles has won three separate awards in the past 4 months! I am just so proud of our team, especially since some of the best stuff that we’re working on hasn’t even been released yet (January is going to be very exciting).

I’m also very pleased that each award honors Universal Subtitles for slightly different reasons — equality, accessibility, and intercultural innovation. It speaks to our hope that by making subtitling common instead of rare, we will all benefit, each in different ways.

 

2011 Tech Award for Advancing Equality

 

FCC Award for Advancement in Accessibility

 

Intercultural Innovation Award

Amazon is requesting that we reboot some of our servers for further maintenance, which will result in another small period of downtime.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Due to maintenance by Amazon on our databases, there will be a small period of downtime this Monday morning.

We’re switching over to a new loadbalancer this evening.  Hopefully this will occur without any downtime, but there may be a small period (less than 5 minutes) where sites are inaccessible.

2011-11-03T14:02:17Z: willkg: z3p: does the miro team use the deardiary stuff anymore? i don't think i've seen that on irc in a while.

2011-11-03T14:02:36Z: willkg: z3p: the deardiary feed broke in the planet and rob is asking me how to fix it.

What an incredible weekend. Nearly 400 people came face-to-face to work on the biggest issues in developing an open media ecosystem.

It’s going to take some time to unpack the Hadron Collider-style interaction and collaboration that took place at #ovc11—so let’s get started!

Documentation

Each session shared a collaborative space to ease note-taking and future work. Links to all the session notes are listed at: openvideoconference.org/notes

A lot of rich material was created, covering a range of topics. For example, there’s enough to get started on serving your own YouTube style Video CMS, building an open video editing platform, or syncing up video with interactive web elements.

You can read up on advanced video forensics, and the struggle to remain anonymous in a world of overwhelming surveillance. Learn about your rights as a mobile device owner and the limits to free expression online. There are now ways to keep your film alive past its release date, keep it preserved past your lifetime, and compensate your work through new experiments in digital currency. If you’re an educator, there are now advanced ways to use video in the classroom. Also, for good measure, a few strategies for counterbalancing hate speech on the internet.

Communication

We’re asking participants to give feedback on our short survey to make next year even more awesome.

As always, email us if you’d like to kick up a project, tweet with hashtag #openvideo, and look forward for updates on next year’s Open Video Conference!

We’ve had an outage with some of our sites.  It affected older sites, as well as some with custom domains.  All sites should be up now.

We will be performing some maintenance on the Miro Community servers starting around 10 PM Eastern.  It may result in a minute of downtime.

2011-09-22T18:14:21Z: bendk: deardiary: gstreamer audio on windows is finally working!

The Open Video Conference is an event about technology. But it’s also about how technology affects the world around us. This event convenes people from all over the web video space. Some attendees are developing essential technologies for video; others are ensuring universal access to high-speed broadband; still others are using video for social change. All are actively building the future of the medium.

It may seem strange to house such a diversity of perspectives under one roof. But open video is just as important for technology companies and entrepreneurs as it is for creators, educators, and human rights activists on the front lines of change.

Since 2009, the participants of the Open Video Conference have been threading a needle through a fairly big story. The first OVC took place at the precise time that images of Iranian election protests were reaching Western eyes through email, blogs, and platforms like YouTube. Today, cameraphone images from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere appear on screens around the world.

We’re still weaving this story. In just three short years, we’ve seen big shifts in network policy, broad transformations in public life, and constant changes in technology. The media is more read/writeable than ever before, but we’re far from the full potential of web video: a day when every person on the planet can express their world through moving images. Video will be most powerful as a medium when it’s as copy-pastable, accessible, and ubiquitous as text.

There’s much work to be done here on technological, legal, and practical fronts. A careful observer will find urgency even in quiet places like libraries—consider that in 2011, the Library of Congress still relies on RealVideo as its primary video technology (if this makes you shake your head, this is definitely the event for you).

This year’s event is designed to be more hands-on than years past. You’ll find few talks and panels. Instead, you’ll be meeting people, making things, and laying plans. There are over 30 working groups scheduled for you to explore and participate. And if you’re inspired at any time this weekend, you’ll find plenty of time and open space to start something big.

As you’re hacking, writing, filming, or meeting future collaborators this weekend, consider some of the emerging issues in web video. How will we retain control and sovereignty over our digital lives, when the devices we carry are increasingly restrictive of the apps and services we can access? How will we protect identity in a world of thorough surveillance and networked facial recognition? What are the new power dynamics in a world where anyone can make and share video?

These are just a few of the threads you’ll find in this expansive story. We hope that your experience at this year’s OVC will be productive, thought-provoking, and fun.

This is the foreword to the OVC 2011 Program written by conference directors Ben Moskowitz and Chris Wong – download a copy of the program here.

This weekend at OVC you’ll have the chance to meet up with plenty of entrepreneurs and startup developers in the video space. One pressing issue facing the future of video startups is the potential threat of the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

PIPA is designed to limit sites that are typically used only for infringing upon copyrighted works. However, a diverse array of tech entrepreneurs and human rights groups have critiqued the bill as too vague and thus potentially too far-reaching about what constitutes a site “dedicated to infringing activities.” This could lead to an unfair burden placed on businesses and sites that have many uses aside from “rogue” activity.

Web entrepreneurs are currently gathering signatures for a letter to Congress voicing their concerns. If you represent a video startup and are concerned about PIPA, consider adding your name to the letter.

This is just one of the ongoing debates that make our meeting this weekend so timely. We look forward to hearing our diverse group of participants weigh in on issues like these at OVC 2011.

12:05pm EDT Currently experiencing unexpected downtime on some newer sites. We are working to alleviate the problem.

12:30pm We continue to have intermittent issues with some sites, and are working to fix the problem.

We’re pleased to announce that Flumotion, a supporter of this year’s OVC, will be streaming the Open Video Conference. Our six keynotes will be streamed live via Flumotion’s Online Video and Radio Publishing Platform on open formats, with fallback to Flash, Windows Media, and Silverlight. The streams will also be available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices. All these streams will be available on the front page of the OVC site as well as on Flumotion’s site.

We’re happy to have Flumotion among our supporters. As active supporter and early adopter of open technologies, the new Flumotion platform enables the creation of HTML5 video players or live as well as on demand streaming. “The annual Online Video Conference is the perfect occasion to showcase our new HTML5 developments as well as our continued support of open technologies”, explains OVC conference speaker and Flumotion Co-founder Thomas Vander Stichele.

The OVC starts this Saturday at 9:30 AM with a keynote from Jillian York. This keynote will be streamed by Flumotion along with the following OVC events:

Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels (Saturday, 10:00)
Cindy Gallop: Make Love, Not Porn (Saturday, 5:45)
Keynote: Gigi Sohn (Sunday, 10:30)
Brewster Kahle and Tracey Jacquith present the 9/11 Archive at Archive.org (Sunday, 11:00)
Keynote: Marvin Ammori (Sunday, 5:00)<

We’d like to thank Flumotion for their support and for offering these streams for those that can’t make it out to the event. Be sure to use the hashtag #ovc11 to join in on the discussion on Twitter.

It’s truly astounding how much has happened in the world of online video since we last gathered in 2010. We saw how citizen video became a critical element that galvanized the sweeping social changes across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and the rest of the Arab World. We also watched what happens to public speech when it becomes too thorny to be hosted by private networks, as demonstrated by the take down of Wikileaks’ data by Amazon and Tableau.

As a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and now the new director for MIT’s Center for Civic Media), Ethan Zuckerman is one of the foremost experts on internet civil discourse. Last year he addressed the difficult tensions and compromises that exist with the current private hosting infrastructure for online video.

Unfortunately Ethan couldn’t join us this time around, as he is busily writing his book and transitioning to MIT. Instead, he was able to spare some time to record a video message to OVC 2011 participants where he discusses the impact of current events on these ongoing issues. Have a look!

We’re just a few days away from the Open Video Conference, and by now you’ve undoubtedly checked out our packed schedule of amazing events, sessions, speakers, and exhibits  – if not, then take a look at our newly updated program here. It can be hard to find time for all the sessions you want to attend, so we’ve mapped out a few possible ‘pathways’ representing the numerous disciplines and fields our attendees will be coming from. Read on for some tips to find sessions that best suit your interests and expertise, whether you’re coming to us from the the world of policy, business, tech, cinema, or many others.

Policy
Visual Privacy? Visual Anonymity?
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
The Many Faces of Open
A Defensive Patent License
New Currencies and Compensation Models
Making the Map
Designing a Next-Generation TV Interface
Mobile Content Neutrality
Is the Web Safe for Expression?
Robolawyers for the Web: DMCA Automation

Legal
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
A Defensive Patent License
Developing the Vimeo Rights Platform
Making the Map
Is the Web Safe for Expression?
Robolawyers for the Web: DMCA Automation

Entrepreneurs
Using Open Source in a Commercial Context
Roll Your Own Video CMS
New Currencies and Compensation Models
Making the Map
Intro to Popcorn.js and Plugin Sprint

Programmers
WebRTC: Realtime Communication and HTML5
Fun with WebGL, the Audio API, and more
The Missing Link: Flash to HTML5
Standards for Accessibility
Standards for HTTP Adaptive Streaming
Standards for Browser Video Playback Metrics
Open Video Editors
Scalable HTML5 Players Skill Share
Intro to Popcorn.js and Plugin Sprint

Designers
Designing Storyworlds
Roll Your Own Video CMS
Making the Map
Designing a Next-Generation TV Interface

Filmmakers
Designing Storyworlds
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
Connected Documentary
Making the Map
Database Driven Narratives

Artists
Alternative Copyright Education
Making a Remix Maker
Making the Map
Database-Driven Narratives
Capturing Oral History: Best Practices
Is the Web Safe for Expression?

Archivists
Video Archives: Life after Production
Capturing Oral History: Best Practices

Earlier today, we introduced Jonathan McIntosh’s lightning talk, which comes emerges from his OVC 2010 remix of Donald Duck and Glenn Beck, “Right Wing Radio Duck.” Jonathan will also be one of the session leaders heading up the working group Making a Remix Maker, scheduled for Saturday at 10:30.

Jonathan will join Martin Leduc and Boaz Sender in a working group focused on building intuitive, accessible open source tools to make remixing easier. This session builds on the “Gendered Advertising Remixer Application” (GAR), created by Jonathan and Kaltura at last year’s OVC.

The GAR used drag-and-drop interface to allow users to easily participate in one focused remixing task – swapping the audio and video of toy ads directed at boys or girls. The project uses remixing to highlight the stereotypically gendered approach of ads directed at young children, and importantly opens up this investigation to all kinds of remixers, whether or not they’re familiar with digital video editing tools.

Making remix accessible is important because, as the session leaders highlight, “Making video remixes involves a lot of skills that have nothing to do with editing.” A critical eye for media and a sense of the underlying, potentially surprising themes and connections between disparate pieces of media is as essential for creating an incisive video remix as technical skill.

This session will also open up a discussion about the future of remixes — including the possible downsides of making simple tools such as the loss of important tech skills in the remix community, or the potential for the commodification of remix culture. This session will be a valuable place for remix artists, media critics, designers, coders, and many others with a stake in remix culture to share their perspectives.

We’re really excited to see the results of this session. Registration for OVC 2011 ends today, so be sure to register now.

Last year Jonathan McIntosh managed to bring the Open Video Conference to Glenn Beck’s attention with his video “Right Wing Radio Duck”. This remix mashed up bunch of vintage Donald Duck cartoons with clips from Beck’s radio show to tell the tale of one average American duck’s post-recession descent into paranoia.

The remix quickly went viral, attracting tweets from the likes of Roger Ebert, John Cusack, and even Bill O’Reilly, and its own remixes. It also came to Beck’s attention, who, as Jonathan says, “devoted a full 10 minutes of his show to denouncing the video while spinning an elaborate conspiracy theory about how it was plot against him involving ‘communist unions,’ the stimulus package, the NEA and the White House.”

In response to Beck’s investigation, Jonathan responded with a Popcorn.js project that dynamically sourced the origins of each clip used in the video. This, he says, “allows viewers to follow media fragments back to their original source to see them in their original context,” and make up their own mind about Beck’s criticism of the video.

As part of such a major moment in OVC history, we’re excited to announce that Jonathan will be delivering a lightning talk at 10 AM this Saturday — just one of the great speakers that will help us kick off the weekend’s festivities.

Jonathan says he’ll be addressing “how remix video fits into the larger open video and participatory culture projects” at his talk. OVC attendees can also expect a brief report on the best responses to “Right Wing Radio Duck” — including this video, which Jonathan cites as one of his favorites, where Mickey Mouse gets embroiled in the remix conspiracy — and the premiere of a new short remix he describes as “humorously addressing the gender imbalance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Aside from the lightning talk, Jonathan will also be one of the facilitators of Saturday’s session Making a Remix Maker — stay tuned for more updates on this session later today.

Don’t miss this great speaker — today is your last chance to register online for the OVC!

Today is the last day to register online for this weekend’s Open Video Conference!

Be sure to register by the end of the day, otherwise you’ll be missing out on a weekend packed with cool stuff like:

Amazing Keynotes…

• A keynote from Jillian York of EFF
• A lightning talk with Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels
• Cindy Gallop’s thought provoking talk on Make Love Not Porn
• A keynote from Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge
• Brewster Kahle and Tracey Jaquith on Archive.org’s 9/11 Archive
• Marvin Ammori on threats to open video

Great Exhibits…

• An exhibit from Archive.org’s 9/11 TV News Archive
• A jailbreak station – we will help you jailbreak your Apple device!
• Ridley Scott’s collaborative documentary “Life in a Day”

And all our awesome working groups and sessions, including:

• An intro to Popcorn.js
• Making the Map of the open video ecosystem
• Visual privacy and the SecureSmartCam
• A discussion of the Rebecca Black phenomenon

Those are just a few of the events taking place this weekend, so register today!

Who makes video? Who licenses video, and on what terms? Who aggregates and distributes video? How are different kinds of video encoded? How does video travel across the Internet and other kinds of networks? What roles do backbone providers and content delivery networks play in the process of transmitting video on the Internet? How much control do ISPs have over users’ ability to access video? Who is capable of exercising political control over video? And what can you do with video once it gets to a device? It’s impossible to answer these questions from a one-dimensional perspective. Rather, the open video ecosystem should be thought of as a multi-layered environment. But, with more content creation, network capacity, device options, and sharing platforms than ever, it can be difficult to grasp the the way that these layers interact.

Open video is based on the concepts of sharing, including source code, ideas, applications, best practices and standards. This movement promotes collaboration and open communication, free expression and innovation in the online video space. Simple as this sounds, the open video ecosystem can be a difficult landscape to traverse. It is comprised of multiple layers, involving the (un)coordinated work of various entities, including content creators, Internet service providers (ISPs), content distribution platforms, aggregators, and ultimately, the end user. Advanced technology, which has opened the door for comprehensive innovation in layers such as content creation and bandwidth, and the often overlapping nature of key players, continually adds new dimensions to the ecosystem.

As the Internet becomes a ubiquitous part of our lives, it’s easy to take these complex technologies and networks for granted. This has led to consequences such as regulatory asymmetry and undue reliance on traditional media models. At the same time, technologists often don’t understand the reasoning or hierarchies behind policymaking. By visualizing each layer and its context within the whole video landscape, a map of the video ecosystem will help to close the comprehension gap and create new avenues for collaboration and participation.

At this year’s OVC, we’ll try to make sense of it all. Marvin Ammori and Nicholas Bramble will lead a multi-part workshop to make a comprehensive infographic. They’ll be joined by sketchnoter Amanda Lyons (VISUALS for CHANGE), who will lend her artistic ability to help lay the foundation for the map, and a cast of experts from across the regulatory, software, and content spectrum, including policymakers, video makers, distributors, investors, and developers. The graphic will illustrate how different layers of the open video ecosystem, from devices and bandwidth, to software and standards, and filmmaking and distribution, fit together—and what kinds of legal, competitive, or creative constraints are in place at each layer. In creating this map and refining our understanding of the economics and the infrastructure of the open video ecosystem, we will develop a better sense of how to interact with a variety of public and private design levers important to the future of open video.

Plus, it will look cool.

Register by Wednesday for OVC 2011.

We’re excited to announce that the Pace University Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems has joined help support this year’s Open Video Conference. As one of the first comprehensive schools of computing in the country, the Seidenberg School is at the forefront of the computing field. The School prepares students in computer science for lifelong participation in a new and dynamic information age through hands-on development of innovative projects. We’re very pleased to be able to draw upon the expertise of the Seidenberg faculty and student programmers who will be in attendance at OVC, and we know that many of our attendees will greatly appreciate their help with designing and programming their next generation video tools.

Don’t forget to register to join us – the last day to register online is Wednesday!

According to some statistics, 12% of sites on the net are pornographic. 25% of all search engine requests are pornographic. And 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic.

Porn is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of online video, and we’re delighted that Cindy Gallop will be talking about what it means at this year’s Open Video Conference.

Cindy Gallop delivered one of the most talked about TEDTalks in history at TED 2009.

Speaking very frankly, and from direct experience, she argued that hardcore pornography has distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex.

At TED 2009, Cindy shared with attendees her plan to fight back, with the launch of a website to educate people about the nuances in human sexuality. At OVC, she’ll start to share the next part of her project: MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, which launches in early 2012.

How do amateurs, independent and niche producers fit into the ecosystem? How can porn be a diverse and sex-positive experience? What’s porn’s place in our media space?

Cindy is not anti-porn, or about judging what’s good or what is bad. Her project is intended to stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography.

This talk will be frank. This talk will be honest. It will be graphic. But we think Cindy speaks to a hugely under-recognized issue, and does so in a funny and thought-provoking way.

In just three short years since OVC kicked off, the horizons of what can be done with HTML5 video have expanded massively—and the potential for open video is only continuing to grow.

One great project that we think illustrates this potential is the work of filmmaker Kat Cizek and her team on the Highrise project—a multi-year multimedia documentary effort from the National Film Board of Canada that examines the experiences of those living in high-rise residential buildings all over the world.

The first Highrise release, Out My Window, was designed for the web—enabling viewers to freely browse the stories of many international high-rise residents and explore their environments in 360 degrees.

Now, the team is assembling the world’s first open-source HTML5/WebGL documentary, One Millionth Tower. The project uses a virtual landscape to re-imagine a dilapidated highrise neighborhood in suburban Toronto, giving users the opportunity to interact with the environment and reshape the neighborhood. While the real-world site on which the virtual environment is modeled is a hyper-local story for Toronto, the online experience makes it a global, or as the filmmakers call it, “hyper-glocal,” experience with relevance to similar communities worldwide.

One Millionth Tower is based on a number of existing open source technologies, including Mozilla’s Popcorn, Mr. Doob’s three.js javascript library for WebGL, Google Map and Streetview data, and much more. Open source fits the philosophy of the project, with its basis in participatory urban design and collaborative documentary production.

We think One Millionth Tower is a great example of the new possibilities emerging in the world of open video. It’s a perfect illustration of the ideas we’ll be working on at OVC, bringing together innovative new approaches from filmmakers, technologists, and many others.

The conference starts next weekend, so be sure to register today!

We’re pleased to announce that Gigi Sohn will be delivering a keynote address at the 2011 Open Video Conference. Gigi is the president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that works to defend citizens’ rights in emerging digital frontiers. She serves as the chief strategist, fundraiser, and public face of Public Knowledge, and has made numerous media appearances and published articles highlighting emerging issues in the public’s access to content.

Gigi has long been recognized as a pioneer in identifying key issues facing digital media. Prior to co-founding Public Knowledge, she served as Executive Director of the Media Access Project, and as a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit, where she developed the Foundation’s first-ever media policy and technology portfolio. In October 1997, President Clinton appointed Gigi to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi one of its Internet “Pioneer Awards” in 2006.

At this year’s OVC, Gigi will be speaking about timely questions of internet accessibility, including the threats that capped and metered internet access pose to the open web. We’re thrilled to have her expertise and insight as we examine these issues at the conference.

Be sure to register for the OVC today to get a seat at this talk and all our other events and working groups.

Last week, the Internet Archive relaunched their 9/11 News Archive in a conference at NYU. We’re pleased to announce that Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and senior engineer Tracey Jaquith will be holding a talk at the OVC on this project and what it means for the future of archiving video.

The 9/11 News Archive is part of the Internet Archive’s effort to preserve and digitize video over the past ten years. While streaming services like YouTube and Netflix have quickly raised the public expectation that video will be readily searchable and available online, these are relatively recent developments. Over the course of the decade, the Internet Archive has faced a number of technical difficulties and hurdles in their effort to create a digital library of video that can be effectively searched, cited, and quoted.

At their talk at OVC, Brewster and Tracey will be discussing how the 9/11 News Archive addresses these important issues in video archiving, as well as detailing some of the technology used and the challenges faced in digitizing the archive.

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive in 1996. An entrepreneur and Internet pioneer, Brewster invented the first Internet publishing system and helped put newspapers and publishers online in the 1990′s.

Tracey Jaquith was a founding coder and the system architect for the Internet Archive 1996-2000, writing multi-threaded servers and crawlers, as well as parallel processing code. She returned in 2004 and is focusing on archiving and video.

The 9/11 News Archive compiles 3,000 hours of television news from the week of the 9/11 attacks. The archive itself will be accessible in an exhibit at OVC through a unique touchscreen interface.

We’re honored to announce that this talk will be scheduled for Sunday, September 11 at 11:00 AM.

Register today.

Getting a job at PCF was a bit of a surreal experience. It was in July of 2007. I had just had a major health crisis, wrote a compiler, finished grad school, and got married. I bumped into Chris at a contra dance in Concord and on a lark and out of the clear blue sky, my wife asked if he knew anyone hiring Python developers. That's how I ended up at PCF.

That was a little over four years ago. It's been a really great four years. Working for PCF is pretty close to a dream job for me: I learned a ton of stuff, I worked on a lot of awesome software, and I worked with and met a lot of amazing people. The hardest part of the whole thing was that there were too many opportunities and I had to pick and choose between the ones I had time for. For example, I would have loved to continue working on the extension system, the fullscreen 10' interface, the text-based interface, DLNA support, dbus interface, ....

Thus, with so many things left undone, I'm kind of bummed that I'm leaving. Friday is my last day.

Next Tuesday, I start work at Mozilla in the webdev crew on the SUMO team.

It'll be weird to leave the desktop application world behind for the wild wild west of Internet applications. Having said that, you could say I'm returning to web development after a 10 year hiatus. A ton of stuff has changed since then (\cheapshot{except possibly Internet Explorer}). This time I'm working with people who know the HTTP related RFCs way better than I do. That's both exciting and daunting.

So if you're having Miro problems and send me an email, I'll probably direct you to someone else. Miro is a fast moving project and my knowledge of its dark secrets will ebb quickly.

The times they are a changing!

[Comments]

Miro status

• 4.1 roadmap
• We're working on Miro 4.1.

Will:

• talked with Janet about translations
• worked on gtk/gstreamer overhaul

Geoffrey:

• working on sharing feeds and podcasts--now merged
• fixed some bugs in Miro

Janet:

• testing devices
• talked with Nick about working out what 4.1 will look like
• worked on figuring out the future of the build boxes

Jonas:

• worked on WinSparkle-related changes

Kaz:

• fixing problems with the metadata extractor

Ben:

• away for a few days
• working on getting the gtk/gstreamer overhaul stuff Will did running. gstreamer on Windows seems to require directshow and that somehow requires 3d support which sucks on VirtualBox.
• will continue working on gtk/gstreamer overhaul
• will continue working on itemfilter branch

Order of business:

• We might do a 4.0.4, but only to fix issues with Miro Mobile.
• Talked about future of build boxes. Janet's been working on a wiki page for it at: http://develop.participatoryculture.org/index.php/BuildBoxHosting
• Talked about process questions:
  • moving the Miro repository to Github
    • Will and Paul will work on moving the Miro repository to Github
  • Ben wants to start doing one-on-one developer chats
  • we want to change workflows to require more peer review
    • Ben will create a peer review qiki page
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

[Comments]

Many of our attendees at this year’s OVC come representing great projects of their own. One project that we’re excited to see develop is Zeega, a tool that facilitates the creation of participatory documentaries without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Kara Oehler, one of Zeega’s founders, and its new lead developer, Joseph Bergen, filled us in on Zeega’s origins and where it’s headed.

How did Zeega get started?

Zeega was founded in 2010 by journalist Kara Oehler, media artist Jesse Shapins, and creative technologist James Burns. The team first started working together while developing Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary co-created with radio producer Ann Heppermann and funded through the Association of Independents in Radio’s MQ2 initiative with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

We queried Google and census data, and found that more than 10,466 streets are named Main. With this database of streets as its starting point, we built and designed www.mappingmainstreet.org, an online platform that combines NPR documentaries with photos, videos and stories contributed by others.

We see Mapping Main Street as a new form of documentary that combines all these different elements into a website that “plays” like a video, but that is constantly changing through user input and interaction. We built Mapping Main Street from scratch while also producing stories for NPR. But ultimately, to pull it off, Kara had to put her stuff in storage and live out of her car for the summer. Afterwards, we decided people shouldn’t have to give up their homes to make collaborative documentaries.

What kinds of stories can people create with Zeega?

Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps via APIs from across the web. But Zeega is not just an online documentary toolkit. Integral to the project is the ability to bridge physical and digital worlds. Zeega will be a community and framework for creative invention, making it possible for people to pioneer new forms of storytelling that have not yet been imagined.

So far, we’ve undertaken a few early-stage tests into HTML5 video through Sensate, a new journal for experiments in critical media practice. Jeffrey Schnapp and Kara Oehler developed a mash-up called “the first spoken arts record you can dance to.” The project uses the first 5 minutes of the 1968 LP Medium is the Massage as a baseline that is annotated with video clips dynamically drawn from across the web. Joana Pimenta’s Revere Double Exposure uses Zeega to combine archival materials from the Revere Beach Historical Society with contemporary recordings and Google Street View. In both cases, all media plays back natively through the video tag and the editing was done through Zeega’s web-based interface.

How does Zeega make it possible to bridge physical and digital media?

Before Zeega, Jesse Shapins and Kara Oehler were working on Yellow Arrow, a seminal project in locative media that involved cities, stickers, mobile phones, and participants in over 450 cities in 39 countries, transforming the urban landscape into a “deep map” that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces. Participants placed uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, Yellow Arrow authors connected a story to the location where they placed their sticker. When another person encountered the Yellow Arrow, he or she sent its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately received the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extended this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world. Mapping Main Street had many of the same characteristics – in order to participate in the project, people had to physically go to a street named Main Street and document it, either with photos, videos or audio.

So far, Zeega has been developed through a series of experiments with documentarians, libraries, educational institutions, architects and others. Through a course at Harvard called the Mixed-Reality City,student Kat Tang wanted to create a project where people could stand outside of a building and hear the interior or inaccessible sounds of that particular space. She designed a system where people would see a sticker on a building with an invitation to text a unique code to a telephone number. When someone texts the code to the number, he or she gets a phone call back with an audio recording that Kat made inside that building. When one hangs up, he or she gets a text message that explains the audio recording. (While the project is meant to be experienced on location, you can test it from anywhere by following these instructions). Kat used the web-based Zeega interface to create this project by simply defining the sequence of interactions and adding her audio recordings and texts. She didn’t do any programming. And now anyone can create similar projects combining stickers, audio and text via mobile phones to tell stories on location.

What’s next for Zeega?

Zeega received a grant from the Knight News Challenge this year. Right now, we’re hiring for a Director of Projects and Community Partnerships and shortly, we’ll be announcing a call for journalists, news organizations, artists, community groups, filmmakers, librarians, scholars and others to create Zeega pilot projects. To sign up to get updates and become a beta tester, visit our website: zeega.org.

What are you looking forward to at this year’s OVC?

Zeega’s new lead developer, Joseph Bergen, will be lurking around the OVC this year. Says Joseph:

“I’m really looking forward to the interactive and creative sessions being offered at OVC. It will be really great to see how Zeega fits into the larger picture of open media on the web, how we can improve it, and how we can best contribute to the ever growing, and increasingly diverse community. However, probably the most compelling part of the whole event will be meeting, talking, and listening to the people who are thinking about, creating, and innovating in the field.

I’m a very hands on type of person, so I’m looking forward to their “less yak, more hack” philosophy and taking part in the working group sessions. specifically ‘The Connected Documentary’, ‘Alternate and Augmented Reality Storyworlds’, ‘Database-Driven Narratives’ (pretty spot on).”

We’re really looking forward to the Zeega team’s participation in this year’s OVC. Register today to join in on the conversation at all our great sessions, activities, and events.