BigShinyThing

We’re just glad that someone finally picked up on all the ‘chicken over the fence’ poses on people’s profiles. MySpace The Movie is viewable on YouTube (where else?).

[via Queerty]

Flipbook was created by Colombian artist Juan Carlos Ospina Gonzalez. An additional clever feature lets you download your animation onto PDF and print out to create a flipbook. Via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Also an interesting treatise on the nature of copyright law:

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective on perhaps the most sampled drum [loop] in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60′s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Listen and learn. On a similar theme, check out leftfield hiphop DJ Edan’s Sounds of the Funky Drummer project: a 60-minute mix of 80s rap records all of which sampled James Brown’s Funky Drummer breakbeat.

The Independent on Sunday reported this weekend that News Corp has apparently come over all Big Brother at newly acquired community site MySpace. Users have complained that references to rival video swapping site YouTube were mysteriously deleted and downloads from the site led to blank screens.

By removing access to YouTube, execs at MySpace are definitely missing a trick. MySpace has built up a key reputation in the music industry as a place to communicate with other musicians and share music. YouTube is already the fastest-growing video site online, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Its monthly visitors more than doubled from October to November, reaching 1.1 million in November. The site only began operating in February 2005.

In a typical clash of old media vs new, users have responded to this the only way they know how: by complaining loudly. One wrote,

This is sooo like Fox and News Corp to try and secretly seal our mouths with duct tape.

Following some 600 complaints and threats to switch allegiance to rival sites such as Friendster, News Corp restored the links. However, MySpace managers still shut down the blog forum on which the members had been complaining. That’ll do it.

UPDATE: shortly after this story broke, News Corp announced plans to introduce video downloads as one of many new services on MySpace designed to nuke the competition. Because that’s what media moguls do.

YouTube provides video sharing online — a moving image equivalent of photo sharing sites like Flickr. It may yet be as zeitgeist-y: there are already short films entitled ‘London after the bombs’ up on the site.

If it happens, movies will become another portable entertainment medium. It could also speed the growth of vlogging – possibly the ugliest moniker of the year.

“It’s absolutely possible to create a video podcast,” says Derrick Oien, president of the Association of Music Podcasters. If Apple came out with a video iPod, “you chould see a big boom in video blogging.”

On July 18th a Wall Street Journal article reported that Apple was in talks with music labels and other companies to license music videos for the new ‘vPod’ (my guess). According to the article, Apple claimed it would be announcing the device by September. Then, on August 2nd, the blog Macrumors noticed that the trademark for Apple’s iPod had been changed on June 18th, so that it now read, “portable and handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing text, data, audio, image and video files.”

Eric Hellweg points out in Technology Review, “If Apple does launch a video iPod in the near future (a company spokesperson declined to comment on the trademark change or the possibility of a video iPod), it would arrive into a far different world than did the first audio iPod in 2001. Since then, the concept of participatory media has exploded, most notably in the form of blogs, wikis (user-modifiable websites), and podcasts, in which an individual can create and disseminate his or her own ‘show’ over the Internet. (The term ‘podcast’ is itself derived from the iPod, despite having no connection to it — a telling tribute to the Apple product.)”

The vlogging community (ouch) is making positive noises. Jay Dedman hosts around 600 videoblogs on his site, AntisnotTV.com and says that number would explode if Apple releases a video iPod. “Audio is boring. It’s boring to make a radio show,”Dedman says, “The reason [videoblogging] is not that hot yet is because we don’t have a device to shift the video on to. If Apple does it, it will be pretty big.”

On August 9, the online music activist group Downhill Battle will launch its “Participatory Culture” player and website, which will make it easier to distribute video and audio content on the Internet. One of its directors, Nicholas Reville, says that a video iPod “can only have a really strong, positive effect…It would bring a level of credibility– the same thing Apple brought to MP3 players and audio podcasting.”

The support and established behaviour for podcasting is already there. When Apple announced its support for audio podcasting in June and began listing the mostly amateur radio segments within its iTunes Music Store, podcasting saw its biggest boost to date. Just two days after podcasts were made available, more than one million people subscribed.

Story and quotes courtesy of Technology Review.

Currently showing, “Somebody’s got to do it“, a film about a bin man. “Bob does the job none of us want to do, he empties our bins every day. He talks about the work he does, life, marriage and everything.”

See more or upload your own films at the Channel 4 site.

Wired reports on how Popcast which officially launched its broadcasting tool, player and channel guide this month, provides a full set of free tools for DIY video geeks to create full-screen, HD-quality programs. People download the player to watch programs, and can subscribe to their favorite shows.

There are already hundreds of vloggers out there creating their own videos and broadcasting film clips, news segments and slice-of-life shorts. Founder Rob Lord claims that Popcast provides a more sophisticated set of tools for video producers and consistent viewing experience. Each channel is distributed through a “swarm” of viewers who share the content between them, an “optimized derivative of BitTorrent,” Lord says. In addition to this private swarming network, a Flash-based presentation system makes it easy for the viewer to navigate the player, and for creators to use the producer tool. The full story is in this month’s Wired.

See also previous posts about Podcasting – creating and distributing radio programmes over the net.

From the first reports on LBC to the BBC website, main media providers were initally clueless as to what was going on and reliant on (and imploring for) those on the ground (ie ‘ordinary people’) to report what they saw via email, photophone and digital camera. Within 30 minutes of the tube network lockdown, blog search engine Technorati provided links to people’s personal reports. Bloggers who covered the atrocity saw their web access statistics skyrocket as the public voraciously sought first-hand breaking news.

Even after the rolling news services such as BBC 24 were in play, they needed images such as these to ground their reports. Also, these ‘amateur’ witnesses may yet hold the vital evidence and key images of the attacks that escape CCTV in the most watched city on earth. Flickr already has a dedicated page to the events and Wikipedia the most exhaustive (and accurate) account of what actually happened. Multiple media providers have since analysed how the blogs reported the story first.

Note: shortly after this was posted the UK police started appealing for footage and photos as evidence – the UK public is also providing its own panopticon.

The photo above was taken outside a bus stop in Hackney on 8th July 2005. It reads, in bright pink lipstick, “Do we have to pick sides?”