Author: john

RSS Aggregators

A friend from work recently blogged about “Staying Informed with RSS” and how this technology may help keep people up to date. To me, the “push” aspect of this technology is what might bring online content closer to what broadcast has always been, an easy way to be presented with the content, yet now tailored to exactly what you care about.

I’ve been on a search for the perfect RSS aggregator (the software that receives RSS feeds and puts them together for easier reading).  Mike likes Yahoo, but what I’ve been looking for needs to be organized by folders, time, and include part of the text body. I finally found the coolest solution last night: Gregarius. It organizes things the way I like, and since it runs on my server, I can view my news anywhere. So if you’re curious what I read, now you know.

Does video have a Napster problem?

C-Net is continuing their great coverage of the net video issue, today with an analysis of the copyright status of online video sharing. Although the law might not support them on this, they’re quite right in distinguishing between video downloads (through BitTorrent or eDonkey) and streaming services like Google Video and YouTube. Essentially, all of these services (including the BitTorrent creators) have gotten the message that it’s about control: if you can and do control what appears on your network (and respond to complaints), you’re in better shape under the law.

I would say that this gets at a crucial “common sense” issue in copyright law. Downloading a file that you can keep and listen to forever is significantly “more wrong” than viewing a clip which is streamed online. An arguable copyright analysis of this issue might be that downloading breaks the “copy” part of copyright, where streaming essentially only breaks the “distribution” right.
On a related note, one of the most popular illegal video downloads (the Daily Show and Colbert Report) have now been made for sale on the iTunes music store. This seems to me to be insane business sense: who will pay for news video which will be out of date tomorrow? I don’t think I would pay $2 for a video to watch only once. We will see if this brings a crack-down on Daily Show sharing (perhaps they can make their video streams a bit more accessible, if they do).

Times on Net TV

Today’s Times has an article about the new phenomenon of “slivercasting,” or narrow-interest Internet-only broadcasts. They give an interesting overview of how all sorts of narrow interests can potentially find an audience for video content on the net.

However, as with Wired’s September 05 issue on “The TV of Tomorrow,” the Times article focuses too heavily on centralized content creators. One broadcaster laments that:

The site has had as many as 200,000 visitors in a month, he said, but only if he buys advertising to attract them.

Net video is entirely different from television in that there’s no “push” or guarantee that your content will find its way into an audience’s home. On the net, content and community are king. Some of the most successful video efforts on the net that I have seen start as a community of interest and then grow into a collaboration (including video). Unless there is a name, or incredible material, on a site without a preexisting community, I doubt that efforts such as these can be successful. Video takes time to watch, and without a push like broadcast, one needs a good reason to devote the effort.

Why it won’t work

For the last few days, I’ve been posting about how the application of media law to the public might be a bad thing. It’s just occurred to me that one might rightly ask, “why?”

The answer is because the public needs to be given a chance to accept these laws before they can gain any legitimacy. I’ve been doing a good amount of reading lately about laws, norms, and legitimacy and a common theme is that the norms underlying a law needs to be understood and accepted for a law to be truly valid. One way this might happen is through deliberation about the law and its impact within some form of the public sphere. Gaining acceptance for the law through talk is essential because it allows for the opportunity for reflection on the law and for changes to be made. This is why public education about these laws, or blind enforcement (coercion), may not socially be the wisest choice. Without legitimacy, a law is just an imposed rule begging to be broken.