Humor for editors…

Don’t judge the B-Roll.

If there were more government videos like this political discourse might even become rational!

Check out the related videos that are presented after watching an acoustic version of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? on YouTube.

The big budget movie “Avatar” gets the top three spots. Why? The official music video version of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? has almost the exact same title and also has WAY more views than any of the other three, yet it gets bumped to fourth position. The movie “Avatar” only matches one word in the title of the current video but it gets the top three spots. I sense something fishy. Are small independent producers getting pushed down in the rankings in favor of companies like 20th Century Fox? It looks like it to me.

VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it calls the “patent for podcasting.” OK, whatever. Podcasting is so last Tuesday but the government takes a long, long time to approve these things so, what’s this all about. Turns out it was an application from 2003 that doesn’t even mention the word “podcasting” (because the word hadn’t been invented yet.) I think then it’s a bit disingenuous for the company to say it’s the patent for podcasting in the title of their announcement about it. It looks to me like they might be trying to make claims after the fact.

And who is this VoloMedia? I’ve been podcasting for three years. I speak at technology conferences about it. I’ve never heard of VoloMedia until today.

OK so what does the patent claim actually say? Here are the details from VoloMedia’s website. (See you on the other side of this quote. Don’t get lost on the way

For reference, below are the claims issued under U.S. patent 7,568,213:

1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically providing the user with an indication of the availability of updated episodic media via the channel dedicated to the episodic media in accordance with the subscription request.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising synchronizing the updated episodic media automatically downloaded to the computing device associated with the user with a portable computing device communicatively coupled to the computing device associated with the user.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media automatically occurs in response to a predetermined user setting.

5. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media occurs in response to a request received from the user.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the updated episodic media is made available to users not associated with the computing device over a local area network.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the automatic download is further based on a priority assigned to the channel.

8. The method of claim 3, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is reduced in size during synchronization in order to fit available cache storage within the portable device.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is modified in size by removing one or more episodes of episodic media.

What a bunch of vague gobbly-gook. This patent claim could apply to iTunes, my DVR… heck it could even apply to Twitter and Facebook. There’s no mention of an RSS feed at all which is essential for a podcast. I don’t think this patent is enforceable but they could certainly cause trouble for a lot of people.

What’s happening here reminds me of what happened a hundred years ago to the emerging motion picture industry. Several companies got together and formed the “Edison Trust” and tried to control the industry with their patents. The “independents” as they were called (the ones shut out of the trust) moved to the west coast to get as far away from the trust as they could. They concentrated on story and longer feature length films that were easier to market. In the end “content” beat out the control of the technology.

So, what does it all mean? Tom Webster over at Edison research has some good thoughts. Leesa Barnes over at Marketing Fit weighs in as well. But all in all, Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps may have said it best on twitter:

OK… whoever approved this at the Patent Office… I want my tax dollars back for your salary… youre an idiot.

Yep.

This the video promo for Moby’s new album.

Amazing! It’s laid back, simple, and charming. Certainly not something a big record company would do. The changes in media are really opening up the landscape. I hope to see lots of other artists doing their own thing like this!

CAT won a contest on the revision3 website and we were able to attend the recording of diggnation episode #207 at the MSNBC.com digital cafe in Rockefeller Center. Rachel Maddow was a guest on the show and she made us cocktails!

We had a great time! Check out all the pix I uploaded to flickr.

CAT and I had a great time at South by Southwest Interactive 2009.  One of the panels we went to was called Soapbox Spielberg where the panelists created special effects live during the hour.

CAT and I had the chance to participate as volunteers.  Erik Beck of IndyMogul directed us in one of the demonstrations – a short video about a man, a woman, and a cleaver.  Check it out!

There’s a complete writeup of the Soapbox Spielberg session over at NewTeeVee.

With only two more episodes to go, Dave Winer posted his theory about how Battlestar Galactica will end. I think he’s got it wrong. I’ve had a different theory for several weeks now so I’m going to sandblast it into the internet right here so I can get the prestige if I’m right! (If I’m wrong, everyone just move along. Nothing to see here…)

The Galactica has one jump left and they all somehow go through a time warp. They end up back on Earth many thousands of years ago, long before the atomic war and either become the first humans or mix in with them. All except Starbuck who only goes back part of the way and crashes her viper on Earth and dies.

It turns out that Earth wasn’t the 13^th colony it was the FIRST and some time before the atomic war on Earth ships leave to form the twelve colonies.

Everyone on Glactica throughout the series was actually part Cylon because of their distant past on Earth. That’s why Baltar could see Six in his mind without actually being a Cylon.

Why do I think this?

“All this has happened before. All this will happen again.” – Pythia

…or to be more old school about it,

There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens…

..or not… Who the heck knows with this show?

“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008.  It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.

The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004.  That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.”  The power of the internet is on display.

The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio.  Can a video podcaster get a little love?  I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.

I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog.   Ain’t Twitter great?  It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter.  Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day.  I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”