1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

First, a great presentation given by Paul Gillin at the Inbound Marketing Summit yesterday. Covered very quickly with dense references the shifts in mainstream media:

Second, Video WTF?, a great new site from the Participatory Culture Foundation (who also bring us Miro and and Make Internet TV) which will be helpful to those of you (us?) who are making the future of media:

VideoWTF: Questions and Answers About Video Production, Video Camera, Editing, Publishing, and et cetera

Miro 2.0 is Here, and it's really really awesome

They’re right, Miro is awesome, and it’s an open source project which you can help contribute to, whether you’re a coder or not.

Also in the email:

How can you help the most?

• Send this message to your friends! Since we can’t afford to buy our way into their hearts, we need you to tell them about Miro and why open media is important.
• Translate! Only about 40% of Miro users are in English speaking countries. We need your help to translate Miro, our website, and the Miro Guide. Details are on our Volunteer Page.
• Test and code! Got chops? Join in.
• Help new users– you can answer questions and join the community conversation here: Miro discussion forums.

And don’t forget to download Miro 2.0!

You can also subscribe to their video podcast in Miro, using this as a channel:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/main/podcast/

(If you don’t use Miro, just copy that url into your podcatcher of choice).

They’ve also just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, which provides guidance to video creators. The goal of the code is:

to clearly establish what constitutes fair use in online video, and to reach out to creators and copyright holders alike to create a common awareness of what kind of quoting is legal and illegal. This can only be accomplished through participation — by spreading the word to your users, you can help to protect this emerging culture.

It’s well worth reading through whether you’re a video creator or a copyright holder.

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.

The video below is from the “There’s a New Conversation” event in NY on Feb. 13th this year, which was put on by The Conversatin Group. It’s Jake McKee, formerly Global Community Relations Specialist for Lego, talking about how Lego learned to engage with its adult fan community during his time there.

It’s a great case study of how he overcame internal resistance and convinced Lego to connect with and benefit from fan communities rather than trying to control them or shut them down. If it were up to me this would be mandatory viewing for all marketing teams and legal teams at consumer goods companies. Of course much of it applies outside consumer goods too.

If you use Miro (and you should), use this url to add The Conversation Group’s channel: http://tcg.blip.tv/rss

(To subscribe to any of these in Miro, you can just use the “Add Channel” command in the Channel Menu and put in the RSS url below. Be sure to look at whether you want to download ALL the videos in that feed or just NEW videos added.

TED Talks

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Monterey California which “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

They now make a huge variety of talks from the conference (current and past) available for syndication in video format. (They also encourage users to share talks – including embedding videos as well as enabling download to desktop without any nasty DRM).

The only real challenge with TED Talks (as the videos are called) is where you want to subscribe to them:

• The “official” feed at the TED site: http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
• The Feedburner TEDTalks_video channel: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TEDTalks_video
• The Feedburner Ideas Worth Spreading feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ideasworthspreading

Any way that you get them, these are fascinating commute sized snippets of high energy brain food, all directed at challenging preconceived notions of all kinds. Many are deliberately provocative.

Recent favorites include Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law and Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU

As you might expect, given their reputation for attracting and retaining top quality, imaginative engineering talent and for supporting diverse approaches to innovation, lots and lots of good speakers come to Google.

Two series in particular I’m fond of are the Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU. Neither of these has a feed of it’s own per se, they are just search results on Google Video for the appropriate tags, served as an RSS feed:

• Google Tech Talks: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+%22Google+Tech+Talks%22″>
  +duration=long&so=1&num=30&output=rss
• Google engEDU: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+engEDU&so=0&num=20&output=rss

Again there are a TON of interesting videos – don’t set yourself any expectation of watching them all, but cherry pick from the stream passing by.

Pop! Tech Popcasts

This one stretches the definitiion of favorite since it is brand new, but the initial set of videos is compelling. Pop!Tech is a conference on “The Impact of Technology on People.”

This year they also created Pop!Casts, which are also creative commons licensed, and availble in audio or video formats.

• Popcasts Audio Feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_audio_rss.xml
• Popcasts Video feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_video_rss.xml

Initial videos on their list include Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, and Jason Moran – and intriguing mix.

With all this great content available, there’s no excuse for not having an active, ongoing, “continuing education” program of your own. So take the time to feed your brain and your imagination.

Just for fun bonus: Ask a Ninja!: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja

And my recent favorite, Ninja Poetry:

Check out the announcement on the Miro blog: Miro 1.0 is here.

There’s also:

• Comprehensive Feature Guide to 1.0
• The official Press Release
• Explanation of co-branding potential
• A comparison of Miro and Joost

To help understand why, watch this video from Nick Reville, the foundation’s executive director, talking about the mission behind Miro.

Click To Play