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I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation....

...to the Line Islands of Kiribati.Technorati Tags: 2007, New Y...

Susan Crawford explains the fraudulent concession to neutrality from AT&T in an attempt to get their merger approved before the year-end. The small print excludes their 'IPTV' service from neutrality, which was the point at issue. I have already covered the underlying flaw in their special pleading; what we see is a bizarre coalition of legacy TV and legacy networking to sacrifice the low-latency...

John Scalzi and Brad DeLong have kicked off a serious debate about the different interpretations of Starship Troopers by Heinlein and Verhoeven. However, I think they are both neglecting the important critical interpretation by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip .One reason Torchwood has been disappointing is that it's "Dr Who with shagging" premise isn't really enough to sustain it. Camp and sexist as...

The death of James Brown yesterday has shown up in a surge of blog interest - he dominates the Technorati popular videos chart today, and is the top search and James Brown is a top tag (and there are lots of videos tagged James Brown too). Kevin Burton's tool is showing some Brown videos too, though he is indexing a smaller pool of bloggers; I'd look at the Megite one too if it were public.Technorati...

Whenever digital video engineers gather together, there is a mutual camaraderie based on the woes of supporting the NTSC standard. I suspect with a few drinks in them they'd form a mob and string up whomever came up with the frame rate of 30000/1001 and drop-frame timecode. However, the sins of our video forefathers pale into insignificance compared to what is going on with DRM video in Windows Vista.Technorati...

Last week at a bloggers gathering in London I was commenting that Private Eye had 3 cartoons about podcasts in, including one about listening to the Queen's podcast on Christmas Day, so clearly the stuff we were doing is becoming mainstream. Then today Dave Winer points out that the Queen does have a podcast. Here's the feed link. It's come a long way since Bloggercon 2003. And even longer since I...

Rob Paravonian rants about the ubiquity of Canon in D. That reminded me of Dudley Moore's Beethoven parody using the Colonel Bogey theme. I do love that such things are findable online...Update: bonus link - Clive Thompson on the joys of guitar wanking on YouTubeTechnorati Tags: canon, Pachelbel, video, YouT...

The NYT repeats a familiar incredulity about iTunes store sales but misses the point about Apple. Apple is a hardware company — it makes its money from selling good hardware with good margins. The iTunes Store has always been pretty close to revenue neutral for Apple - the vast bulk of its sales revenue goes through to the Record Labels or TV companies. With Apple absorbing hosting, payment processing...

Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension:If you read the list, you’ll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues...

Just login as root and type 'ku'.Hint for the less geeky.Explanation for the non-geeky.How to really solve Sudoku.Technorati Tags: geeky, Python, sud...

The Gowers Review of Intellectual property released a final report today. The Open Rights Group has a good response on the overall impact, but I noticed some rhetorical bias. Paragraph 1.9 of the report says:1.9 Achieving this balance is made more difficult by the vocabulary used to discuss IP policy and practice. Copyright infringement through unauthorised copying and distribution of music and video...

December 4th — 6th, 2006 Internet Identity Workshop— at Computer History Museum I'm at the Internet Identity Workshop today, talking about Microforma...

Nick Carr characteristically sees doom in Second Life's copybot, via Alex Krotoski:Krotoski saw, in the reaction of the new merchant class, that something more than his little laboratory had disappeared from the virtual world:And so, once again, the real world comes crashing in. Sooner or later, most online communities reach this crisis point because the ideals of the founders are replaced by regulations...

Bill explains how to turn Turkeys into meat. But then, aren't we all made out of meat?Update: OMG turkeys!Technorati Tags: meat, thanksgiving, tur...

John Markoff's Web 3.0 piece was an odd conflation of various kinds of "if only the world were a simpler place" AI dreams, actually triggering a full 106 microLenats on the bogometer. I wouldn't have commented on this, except that my copy of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream came today, and I read this passage that summed it up well:In the end, however, it was not capability that limited the potential...

I saw danah's call for help with her timeline of social software, and remembered Chris Locke talking about sixdegrees.com on his EGR mailing list. There, I saw the email from Chris that started me blogging, 5 years ago today. Looks like I posted 4 times that day, on memetic engineering, Geoffrey Nunberg distorting Samuel Johnson by selective quoting, Chris Locke on Johnson, and tracing over pictures.I...

In the Telegraph, Tony Blair writes about the 'need' for ID cardsThe case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world [...] I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don't think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.I...

The Making Light blog is collecting Mike Ford's comments there as a series:De vermis.The worm drives helically through the woodAnd does not know the dust left in the boreOnce made the table integral and good;And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;The names of lovers, light of other days --Perhaps you will not miss them....

JP made an analogy between software development and film-making:Only successful scripts should get financedThat’s what angels want first and foremost. Good scripts. Because they know that they can get good producers, good directors, good actors, good everything. But good scripts are harder to come by.BTW, have you ever wondered why angel investors exist in only two investment genres, filmmaking and...

Their online banking seems attractive, but it has a fatal flaw.It doesn't show a running balance with each transaction, just a mythical 'available balance', and a long list of 'pending' transactions. The trouble is, the pending transactions become actual at different times. In particular, any debits become actual before any credits. So, if you have a large pending deposit of, say, your salary, a few...

Microformat logo pumpkinOriginally uploaded by Kevin Marks. I was wondering what to carve into the pumpkin, and a vision of orange came to me. The orange Microformats logo, as seen on Pingerati.Technorati Tags: halloween, logo, microformat, microformats, pumpkin, web ...

Armando Iannucci explains that comedy is making the serious points in politics:I still want comedy to matter a great deal. I want it to tackle big subjects. The idea that we are making someone laugh about something does not mean we don't take it seriously. Sometimes, we can take something so seriously that the only practical way to release the tension is to make a joke. Sometimes, we can be so appalled...

My boys' blog is up for voting in the vloggies in the "children's" category. To encourage you to vote we have put up a video they made about 5 years ago called Christopher's Buttons, when Christopher invented some magic buttons, and they started working.Here's the full, Director's Cut edition, and here's a short version on YouTube:Do please vote for the boys.Technorati Tags: button, funny, magic,...

Reading Ev's post about buying back Odeo from the VC's and refocusing on smaller faster development, along with Aaron's on how Google could decentralise I see several trends converging.Software startups used to need lots of VC cash and time because of the old packaged software cycle, where you had big, annual releases that you sold for hundreds of dollars apiece. On the web, we have daily releases,...

Ohloh has done some year-on-year comparisons of programming language use.From this chart they conclude that 'The web is being built with PHP':However, if you combine it with this chart:The conclusion looks more like 'PHP programmers write lots of extra lines of code compared to programmers using other languages'.This fits in with my experience - the PHP version of the XOXO code ended up much longer...

The European Union's plan to regulate the net as if it were TV - Television Without Frontiers - picked up a lot of attention in blogs this week, after the Times covered it. The basic idea is flawed - TV involves handing a monopoly over spectrum to organisations, so regulating how they use it makes some sense, but there is no spectrum scarcity online, all you need is a webserver. So the EU limits on...

John Dowdell graciously responded to my attack on Flash video, asking for more solid points, which is fair enough - I did rather assume that Flash video's flaws are self-evident. This post is adapted from our conversation in his comments.First of all, let me say that Flash gets one big thing right, which is unobtrusive ubiquity. Tom Green's history is spot on about the stupidly self-destructive things...

Mark Liberman at Language Log turn pitch in speech into pictures.Radiolab discovers that repeated speech becomes music. Listen to it in this mp3, it's amazing.Technorati Tags: mu...

The Lifeboat foundation is thinking about future threats. I was struck by this one:A system that evolves freely is potentially very adaptable and creative. It could also become nearly anything, with consequences ranging from the annoying to the disastrous. It is likely unlimited self-evolution will need to be contained carefully even as we mine it for truly new inventions. The arrows nicely hint at...

This American Life is the best radio documentary series I know of (Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson agree). I heard on the radio today that it is officially becoming a podcast, and their website confirms it. Free for a week, old episodes for 99¢ each.Subscribe on iTunes or in your feed reader, you won't regret it.Technorati Tags: interactive radio, iTunes, podcast...

The BBC terminology guide, 2006:The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. [...] We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunmen", "kidnapper", "insurgent" or "militant."George Orwell, As I Please, 2nd June 1944Nearly all human beings feel that a thing...

Foxtrot is way ahead of Dilbert these days.Technorati Tags: Google, long tail, puppy, RSS, video, web 2.0, YouT...

Creative Commons are having a fundraiser:ORG is looking for members:and recruiting a full-time Executive Director to build on the great work Suw Charman has been doing there bootstrapping ORG.Technorati Tags: creative commons, digital rights, Open Rights Group, ...

Now YouTube has Google backing, they can stop making us watch Flash video. Everyone who cares about video quality, from Hollywood, to the BitTorrent-using TV bootleggers use mpeg4. Everyone who doesn't uses Flash.I've pointed out before how Apple screwed things up, but it is still fixable. Heres my 5 point plan.Apple, drop the tacky upgrade ads. Seriously, they make you look like the Giselle wannabee...

Neil Gaiman writes:An interview with Terry Gilliam about Good Omens (really, if someone would just give Terry $65,000,000 he could get going. Do you have $65,000,000 you don't need? Check your pockets. Maybe it's in a drawer somewhere. No? Look harder.).Google buys YouTube, meaning a couple more chaps may suddenly have that much money lying around.PS - Terry Gilliam's first usenet post (I watched...

Doc wrote about Vendor Management Systems to counter Customer Management Sytems.One technique I picked up from Stuart is to register a domain (preferably your own name), and forward any email to it to your inbox. Then, when you need to give a vendor an email address, give them their name at yours, eg godaddy@kevinmarks.com. That way, if the subsequently get spam, or unexpected mail, you know who it...

As our gadgets come to know where we are, we need to think about who should be able to find this out.A metaphor that came to mind is that we need be building the Weasley's clock, not the Marauder's map.Update: Jorge points out that Microsoft Researchers in Cambridge have built a prototype.Technorati Tags: digital rights, ethics, ...

.Any comment is superfluous.Technorati Tags: web ...

Microsoft's new video sharing site, Soapbox, was codenamed 'Warhol'. As 'Warhol' was the original codename for QuickTime, back in 1990, I found this rather amusing.Does the iTunes store's support for video podcasts count as Apple's video sharing competitor?Technorati Tags: microsoft, QuickTime, vi...

The Beeb misses the point a bit:On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.The report warned against simple characterisations of the music-buying public that divide people into those that pay and those that pirate.The glaring...

Rob Levin, the leading spirit behind the freenode IRC network, died yesterday from injuries sustained by being hit by a car while cycling. I never met Rob in person, but his indefatigable work in keeping freenode running supported hundreds of conversations I have had with people around the world, many becoming friends, colleagues or collaborators, and I counted him as a friend. I was hired at Technorati...

I got a surprise birthday present today. 17 years ago, when I was at the BBC, my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior put together this amazing drama-documentary with Douglas Adams on the future of media. Using 8-bit animated icons keyed over video, they predicted the future of digital media in ways that are only now coming true. There is a version up on Google Video, but I also cached...

Reading Paul Boutin's coverage of Apple's video announcements today, There are several questions that come to mind (and I know Jobs prefers not to answer questions).Songs bought from iTunes can be burned to CD and play anywhere. Why can't movies and TV shows bought from iTunes be burned to DVD?Could this explain why they have sold over a billion songs but only 45 million TV shows?Jobs talked about...

The Swiss QuickTime page is already showing links to 'Vidéos iTunes', though clicking through gets you to the It's Showtime - The iTunes Store is being updated page.I still think Apple has an opportunity to do an end-run around all the HD complexity by selling an integrated system that avoids the nonsense of HDMI, but I think they may burden us further with their DRM instead, and miss a lot of it....

I'm giving a couple of talks at Podcamp today - one on looking back 3 years to Bloggercon when Podcasting started to take off, and one on live webcasting to make instant videoblogs.If you're at Podcamp, and want to talk about Technorati or Microfromats or anything, come and find me, I'm in a bright orange shirt.Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BloggerCon, microformats, PodCamp, podcasting, technorati, ...

Vint Cerf agrees:IPTV is interesting not because of streaming, but because of on-demand possibilities a la iPodIPTV is interesting because of interpretations of packets v. dumb raster displayTechnorati Tags: podcasting, streaming, vi...

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman dropped by Technorati last week and had a chat with some of us about blogs and indexing and things.Here's the video.Technorati Tags: blogs, podcasting, tags, technorati, vi...

With another Steve Jobs keynote about to kick off, I'm going to indulge in a little speculation. Apple will greatly embrace HD. This shouldn't be a big surprise -after all back when I was there, the high-end uncompressed HD editing in Final Cut took off, but at the time uncompressed was needed as a way to keep the slow CPU out of the way of the fast disk and screen. Since then, Moore's Law has meant...

I didn't attend Blogher, but many of my friends and colleagues did, and mostly got lots out of it. I did pick up an undercurrent of discomfort from my female geek friends at what they saw as the low tech content of the conference, and even 'all these women in high heels giggling together'. Melinda Casino, Shelley Powers and Tara Hunt express various concerns with tone and with intrusive sponsorship.The...

This law is like outlawing restaurants and bars in DC because Congressmen get bribed in them. DOPA is an example of the 'poison gas' view of the internet cloud - it contains odd legislative language like:The Congress finds that-- (3)with the explosive growth of trendy chat rooms and social networking websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to monitor and protect minors from those with devious...

I'm seeing a lot of debate over power law distributions in the wake of Chris Anderson's Long Tail book, most recently debated by Lee Gomes in the WSJ. Chris's rebuttal is on point, but there are more subtleties here; Chris is primarily addressing retailers in his book, so even the longer tails of books and music he discusses are choked off by the original publishers. If you include the lovingly created...

A couple of years ago I wrote:The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.The continuity of viewpoint within a blog is key - you can see more about them than just the one...

While exploring the latest things my spiders have uncovered - often an interesting journey through the collective cosnsciousness - I found my way to a collection of inspired mashups. These artists have taken songs with a cultural resonance, and mixed them with video from another genre entirely to create something new and striking, but that partakes of both.OK, that sounds pompous, especially when...