My favorite part of “Writing a Social Content Engine with RDF:”
At the time I was puzzled by finding ways to categorize knowledge–wanting to build all kinds of complicated virtual file systems and the like…. But Del.icio.us tags pretty much demonstrated that this was actually trivial–and that thinking about this too much is basically just a waste of time.
<em>phasis mine. Words to live by…
China’s first novel delivered through SMS (short message service) is being made into a film that will also be delivered to cellphones and on the Internet, state media said Sunday.
The Taiwan-based company Bestis Technologies has bought the film rights to Outside the Fortress Besieged, a 4,200-character, 60-chapter novel that has been sent out to mobile subscribers in short installments, Xinhua news agency said.
South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom previewed a file-sharing application for cell phones this week that will let users swap files, including ring tones, music and videos over its 3G (third-generation) network.
The application will create a peer-to-peer network among SK Telecom’s subscribers, allowing them to freely swap files such as pictures, ring tones, music or video files, said Lee Jou Young, a developer at IXO Logic, one of two companies developing the application for SK Telecom.
Users will also be able to access files stored on PCs, he said.
At present, the application doesn’t include any functions that are designed to protect against copyright infringement or to manage a subscriber’s right to use copyrighted material, Lee said.
“We’re not thinking about that type of problem,” he said.
Wow. A country where the tech industry doesn’t ask the content industry for permission to innovate. Imagine that.
Time to start learning Korean…
Looking forward to seeing Peep “TV” Show when it comes to the PFA this weekend:
Peep “TV” Show finds room for re-organizing reality in the new media of on-line broadcasts, cell phones and ever-smaller cameras. Through the coming-of-age story of Hasegawa and Moé, it asks why people only seem to be alive if they are preserved in exchangeable, exhibitionist digital form - like cell phones, cameras, puri-kura, and surveillance cameras.
Watching TV on your phone seems to be a hit in Korea:
The leading company in movie services is KTF Co., Ltd., Korea’s second largest service provider. The company commenced its service called “Fimm” (First in Mobile Multimedia) in May 2002 and attracted 3.405 million users as of May 2004. Its rival, SK Telecom, the top service provider in Korea, developed “June,” its movie contents service developed exclusively for 1xEV-DO, and obtained more than 2.645 million users.
The firms say that particularly popular contents are terrestrial TV programs encoded for mobile phones. “Such contents account for 40% of our total movie contents sales,” according to KTF media contents team senior Sohn Chang Hwa.
Maciej Ceglowski has posted an “audioblogging manifesto” (transcript here) that is worth a listen. His basic point, that dictation-style audioblog posts and talking-head-style videoblog posts are boring, a waste of time, and antithetical to the nature of the web, is well taken. But when he veers into a general rant against multimedia on the web, he starts to sound like a crusty old BOFH ranting about how Mosaic ruined the Internet.
It should be clear that images, audio, and video communicate things that text cannot. I suspect that Ceglowski knows this, because his manifesto ironically illustrates the point: hearing someone speak URLs out loud is a far more effective way of skewering that practice than just writing about it. His use of background music makes a point as well: the advent of mp3 blogging has turned writing about music from “dancing about architecture” into something worthwhile.
Some of his other points are just lame: a proper audioblogging system wouldn’t use spoken URLs to link things–it might work more like a driving game. And as for “Google won’t index it”–when did everyone on the web become a goddamn SEO monkey? Sure, keep SEO in mind when choosing between tools or formats, but don’t let it dictate the medium you choose to express yourself. Set aside the GoogleWorship, innovate a bit, and let the high-paid computer scientists worry about how to index your work.
No one is seriously considering replacing text on the web with audio or video. As Ceglowski has shown, text is vastly superior for a lot of things, and A/V content can’t easily be manipulated, quoted, linked to, or skimmed. Personally, I’d rather solve those problems than bitch about them.
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