Author: john

Thinking out loud

The Times has an excellent example of a columnist and blogger thinking out loud.

On the blog he started last week (gladwell.typepad.com), Mr. Gladwell noted that the blogosphere has, for some mysterious reason, picked up on the debate [on Canada’s health insurance system]. “But wait!” he wrote. “That was six years ago! I’ve now changed my mind. I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said. In fact, I shudder when I read what I said back then.”

Much like a conversing with friends, blogging is an exercise in speaking, receiving feedback, and evolving ones thoughts and opinions. Collecting history such as this may help fight notions that “Googling” someone to find out about their past really tells us something about who they are today.

Political Turmoil Again Thwarts Progress in Philippines

The Times printed a news analysis on the recent coup attempt in the Philippines. Here’s the letter I sent the editor (we’ll see if I get published):

Sunday’s news analysis that “ Political Turmoil Again Thwarts Progress in Philippines” wrongly puts the blame on former President Aquino. Continuous corruption of the many Philippine leaders since Aquino has deeply harmed the legitimacy of their government. President Arroyo’s squashing the free speech of the protesters and news media only makes matters worse. A functioning democracy requires more than just elections; the need for a government which the Filipino people can rely on is of the greatest importance.
John Thomson, Jr.
PhD Student, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Video Paper Project Experiment

The previous posts on video have sparked an idea for a project on how the expansion of video on the net will create changes in our media (and copyright landscape). I’m hoping that blogging will serve as a good motivation to write a draft. Here’s what I’m thinking of concentrating on:

  • The expansion of video technologies, such as YouTube, Democracy, and BitTorrent (especially when combined with RSS) will drastically change one’s need to rely on cable and Tivo.
  • At least among broadband countries, this move will greatly expand our ability to gaze into other cultures. Since video is a visual medium, one barely needs to understand other languages to appreciate the content (which could never have been understood as text).
  • The limitations of national and international copyright will affect whether this move of video and culture online occurs with or without the support of content owners.
  • Other issues: digital divide (tech and $$), displacement of other video media, Internet tiering, how it will affect content owners/creators/industry.

As always, this at the moment is thinking out loud. Don’t take me too seriously yet.

Video traffic and innovation

C Net reports that the high volume of video traffic on the net may soon slow everyone down. The article points to some of the net provider’s arguments against the content neutral Internet, and many of the comments reflect this. However, it goes on to discuss some of the potentials for new developments in video technology.

Itiva’s technology works by taking a huge movie file and breaking it up into tiny individual pieces that are formatted just like ordinary Web pages. When they’re downloaded by a user, these individual pieces–Itiva calls them “quanta”–are stored in ISPs’ Web caches, which are already distributed in every network.

Once stored separately like this, they can be quickly downloaded and pieced together by anyone else in that network, in a way that’s much more inexpensive for the ISP than if everyone was going back to the original download site.

This may really be the benefit of bandwidth hungy content’s move online: the drive of innovation. While creating a tiered net may be one solution, desire to push the existing network further through new technology (most likely relying on neutrality) is the way to go.
Thanks C Net for the good material on video this week 🙂