Actually what is happening is that Henry Jenkins is making a first official in world appearance in visiting the Teen Grid, where the Global Kids Island is hosting an event, A World Fit for Children Festival – teams of kids have attended seminars (in Second Life) from UNICEF on world issues, and the kids are building exhibits with their ideas for solutions. Nope, there is nothing novel there, is their doubters? No one is creating?.

Anyhow, Jenkins will bed doing an audio address to the students on “We’re not playing around here!: The pedagogical potential of computer and video games”, interspersed with some times for… dancing. We at NMC are helping out by coordinating and providing the live audio stream. Since us old folks cannot get to the teen grid and be a part of it, but since it is a regular audio stream, we are also setting up a place on the NMC Campus in SL where we can have our own gathering to listen in and run our own back channel. As setup, we have available before the event in the Huntley Ballroom, a video of Jenkins’ presentation at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference, and audio interview with him we did in September 2006, and 2 screens with some random stills of Jenkins as well as some snapshots provided by the Global Kids of the UNICEF project (see event details).

As a warmup we will have a first hour of music being DJ-ed by one of the teens, then the main program starts, and after an hour, well, dance til you drop.

There is always a bit of a dice roll of SL events done live (and egads, its a Wednesday! fortunately this is not a day for a software update) and a lot of stuff behind the curtains, which is what I intended to write this about (see my previous overview of the audio tools, including a gliffy image)

So the pieces in this working include:

* a teleconference bridge for the audio portion (plain old telephone works more reliably than Skype). I even go more low tech in just using the speaker phone and my computer’s built in microphone (using headphones to wipe out the feedback). I experimented with the $30 Radioshack gizmo that patches in my phone line with an audio out I can put in the computer, but the noise on the phone line is worse than the noise from my microphone.

* I have music loaded in iTunes that we will stream out as well. These are songs that the teens selected (thankfully there are plenty of google-able song lyric sites to weed out inappropriate tunes). Actually the music provided by the teens has its own stream, but if you switch stream URLs within Second Life, it requires avatars to stop and start their music player to recognize the new stream. But I can just attach the stream in iTunes, and send it out using our stream. So I make a playlist for the event with the songs plus a live stream in the mix.

* I use NiceCast to stream the audio from my laptop to our streaming server at Limelight Networks. By using the filters, I have a mixer that allows me to crossfade from music back to my audio input, allowing my to DJ the audio smoothly. NiceCast also has a nifty archive option, so it records the entire streamed content as an audio file we can post later as a podcast.

* We use IM to message each other behind the scenes.

* Desktop stickies keep the URLs and such handy

The desktop gets crowded:

And on top of this, we need to monitor chat/IM layers in Second Life.

But nope, nothing really happens in Second Life….

We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we’ve had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 20 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what’s hot and what’s not.

At the moment we only look for references to videos on the three most influential video sharing sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. We plan to add more soon.

We also considered wiretapping your email and IM to see what you were talking about, but figured it was illegal ;)

Nice, they have a sarcastic edge!

The main page allows you to come back often (hopefully click as few ad links?) and see what is this month’s diet coke and menthos video? And it seems for the music video genre, I can hear the deck chairs shuffling on MTV (where they hardly even show music anymore).

In my previous work at Maricopa, e.g. for our digital storytelling collection, I had settled on providing video as streaming Quicktime, .mov, (we had an X-serve server running QuickTime Streaming) and streaming Windows Media, /wmv, (one of our colleges provided us some streaming space on their Helix server). Late in the game, we added as an addition, iPod video versions (.m4v) as a podcast. Long, long ago I was also encoding video as Real Video, but that n was dropped with nary a complaint.

SO now on my new Second Life project for NMC and looking at our other NMC video content, i am trying to sort out the best strategy, finding it as clear as Mississippi mud. Most people have a preference based upon what they currently are using. I am in that camp, and would just as soon use QuickTime, since it does produce high quality video that runs on both platforms. Yes, Windows Media can play on Macs, though I still stumble across web pages with embedded WMVs that cry for a plugin that does not exist on a Mac. Others suggest MPEG-1 as the most widely available, or MPEG-4 (.mp4) as the future. Or is it really time to go down the Flash road, as most of the major web video sites play back content?

And my experiments with the QuickTime export to iPod formats result in movie files that are triple the size of my .mov. Initially, I was trying to set up my site so QuickTime and maybe WMVs were available as download links, while the m4v would be the file referenced in the podcast feed. But since iTunes and iPods can deal with .mov and .mp4, I am wondering why I would bother creating the .m4v files? Especially when they end up fatter and no better in quality.

When I was at Maricopa, I had a copy of(what is now) Autodesk Cleaner, a nifty package in its day for batch converting video across many formats. The bad news is a new copy will set you back $599, quite a chunk of change. For work that needed doing immediately, I have tried a copy of Popwire WMV-9 Component, which adds WMV playback and export capability to any app that uses QuickTime, so I have been able to convert some .dv and .mov video to .wmv (but now wondering am I hurting anyone’s playback by using WMV-9). It seems to work well, and works as a Universal app on my MacBookPro. And Popwire cost my only $49, quite a savings. With a bit of Automator effort, I can have it batch processing files. Sweet.

From things I read elsewhere, I am hearing that Popwire is not as versatile as Flip4Mac, which is still not ready for prime time on the Intel Macs. I’m ready to take a peak when it is out.

I am far from a video expert, and the nuances of co-decs, frame rates, and other obscure settings are beyond me now. I am curious as to what some more knowledgeable folks out there have to say. Is Flash video the best direction?

So many acronyms, so little time.

This is a great remix that really shows how much more impact and insight a short well edited clip can do in helping others get, in less than a minute, a good idea of what a blog really is.

Jumpcut.Remixed by Alessandro Luccardi on Jumpcut.

Sorry, I pretty much lifted the flash source code from the original site. But it is to make a point….

Now this is what gets exciting. Click the “remix” button in the video above. You get all of the vido segments in a timeline, ripe for adding, re-re-mixing, etc. I’ve casually seen a few of these online media mashup tools, and they keep getting more interesting.

Jumpcut…. it must be the 500th cool web tool out this year. Keep the train comin’.

I was more curious about how it worked, and usually when my curiosity is raised with technology, I jump in. So I quickly outlined a story about my first special dog, a Dalmation named “Dominoe” who ventured west with me in 1987, scanned some photos, laid them out in iMovie, and overlaid an audio track. It maybe was 60 minutes of production.. well maybe more. So my “Domninoe” story made it into the pile:

I went back to peek tonight as I was grabbing a video example to use for a podcast demo tomorrow… I needed a clip to toss up Ourmedia, to check if it could be rolled into a podcast via Blogger + Feedburner.

And vavoom, what a surprise when I got to the 60 second story site, and saw that my hasty little story made it to number 11 in the judging (and there were more than 11 submissions… I think).

Also, for grins and comparisons, I uploaded the same QuickTime movie file to Vimeo, a video sharing site that gives you 30 Mb a week of video you can upload. The resulting video plays back as flash, and looks pretty good.

My focus on this session is “Podcasting On the Cheap”- the free/low/no coast ways of at least getting your feet wet. I’ve got my ideas lined up, but could use some help from anyone out there on sharing the sites available for posting the media files one can lump in a podcast feed. This is one of the missing or less clear links- where to hang the media files. I’ve always had my own servers available for stashing my media, but that is not the common option.

The known suspects are OurMedia and perhaps YouTube.

Others that pop up form some googling- anyone use these? I am looking for more than file storage places; they must have a publicly addressable URL so pop into an RSS feed. They cannot be ones where the media expires nor ones with low storage caps (like ones that offer 5 Mb) nor ones that offer “3 months free”

* Bolt http://www.bolt.com/
* esnips http://www.esnips.com/

So where can you reliably hang some media for free? As a special request, how about using Odeo to tell me your thoughts:

Send Me an Odeo Message

See, the folks at iRiver ought to know how vast and powerful an influence I am ;-)

I was eager to get one for my new job at the NMC- I very much like doing informal audio interviews. Browsing the iRiver iFP 700 series lines, I was dismayed at how many were no longer available, not at Amazon, nore at the iRiver store itself. I managed to get an order in for an iFP-795 (500 Mb) that was sold only as a bundle with a waterproof kit. But I had some problems with my new credit card (another long story about call-centers around the world that mangle new address changes). By the time I had fixed the issue with my card, the item was gone:

Despite the preceding page which indicates it was in stock:

It seems very much that the iFP line is being phased out. Worse yet, the new T10 players, with their slick candy colors and maybe even, improved interfaces, are only compatible (for models sold in the US and Europe) with Windows XP. This is not very clear at all from the specs page, where Mac is listed, and the details are hidden in asterisked foot notes.

So if you are thinking about an iRiver, and are on a Mac, get one fast or you are left to ebay as the source (well I guess I could have gotten the T10, boot camp booted into Windoze and …. nahhhhhhh, too much trouble).

iRiver- great little devices, terrible user interface, inconsistent web site, and poor choice in marketing strategy.

In Opening up iTunes:

Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia sums it up nicely: “The Stanford iTunes project benefits from goodwill generated by the growth of open source and social software communities, even as it tacitly undermines them. … I wish they weren’t wrapped in an impenetrable cloak of virtue.”

D’Arcy Norman, a software developer at the University of Calgary, asks whether these objections would vanish if Apple provided a Web front end and offered vendor-neutral MP3 files. For the most part, yes. And if iTunes U also provided Web services interfaces to enable creative remixing, I’d be wholly satisfied.

Dudes, you rock! Green with envy here in Arizona. Congrats! The first round of drinks at NV2006 is on me.

Udell’s been writing lately about the Apple iTunes U effort — Apple offering free pocasting hosting for colleges/universities — for being at the same time generous to the open communities of education and critical of Apple’s walled in garden strategy. Specifically, the “free” stuff can only be pod-captured to an iPod (not any MP3 player), and today, how iTunes freeze dries in the podcast URLs where they cannot be cut and pasted elsewhere.

I’m really conflicted here. I do agree with Udell and Brian and D’Arcy on the zingers thrown at Apple, as I would anyone who offered a big free carrot with a stick of sorts behind their back. I am double conflicted since I found out recently I was going to get an early peek to play with iTunesU. My hope is that this stuff is happening so fast that Apple has time to adjust.

On the other hand, our community college has NO infrastructure in place for every day mortal faculty to put rich media online. We have no streaming servers, no podcast publishing platform available for all of Maricopa. We are not Michigan, Stanford, MIT. And we are considered more advanced with technology for community colleges. The current strategy is dumping video and audio files on the web server (and at some of our colleges they have small disk quotas). So the option that Apple may host stuff, a lot of stuff, for free, and more than just lectures, but student work, digital video, is tantalizing. I cannot fully ignore it. Yet.

So I am playing on the edges of the walled garden, just to have a good idea what’s on the inside..

I’m getting more requests for information, demos, etc internally. People are wondering what the implications are for the Apple iTunes U offer (I signed up, what’s to lose?). I have weak optimistic hopes we can move quickly past the “Oh, I can put my lectures online” flash of brilliance.

Just the sheer mention of the “p” word has climbed in geometric proportions since the beginning of the year, and mostly attributed to the Christmas New iPod Effect.

And as to more of this pre-amble, I am loathe to dicker over definitions of things… but still, almost before I left San Diego yesterday, I had an interesting exchange with Bryan Alexander, who asked me if I thought podcasting was a Social Software.

My first thought was “no”. Well actually it was, “gee, Bryan is so damn smart, and I do not even have a good pat answer as to what ‘social software’ is!” I have a fuzzy internal definition along the lines of Chief Justice Potter Stewart‘s porn quip, “I know it when I see it.”

And at the same time, I have heard discussions that want to call any technology that has some sort of communication as ‘social software’, lumping in email, discussion boards, chats, etc. Yuck. That does not wash for me. What does that get us? So I am thinking it more has to do with technologies that allow for a simple or complex network connections to be made between people and information, and mostly allow for things that leverage the power of the crowd. And there needs to be a personal gain into doing the social thing Yuck again.

But in all that, we both agreed that podcasting falls outside the grey blurry boundaries. For one, it is all about broadcast, there is no interaction back from the user to the podcasting person/thing/entity. And that gets me thinking– if the Web 2.0 ballyhoo is all about moving to the “Read/Write” web than the next bump up for audio ought to be the “Listen/Speak” web. Is that just being cute with words?

And this is where podcasting to a small or medium size degree bugs me. it’s one way transmission of huge blobs of data. You are stuck with a huge chunk of indivisible media, which you listen from start to finish, or guess where something is in the middle (see Podcasts, All or Nothin’). There is no way yet (beyond the magic of Jon Udell). Thus, you cannot easily rip and mix (repurpose) audio content, nor can you point to specific sentence/phrase within the audio blob. You cannot bookmark a segment 4 minutes 32 seconds into a 55 minute cast, nor can you attach notes, annotate. You cannot tag a quote in an audio.licio.us site.

So while iTunes does an elegant job of enabling podcast subscription and download in one interface, it’s really only as advanced as the Mosaic Browser period that was Web 1.0 in 1993.

When we were doing the NMC Horizon Board discussions a year and a half ago for the 2005 version, I had a flash of an idea that quickly sublimated, but it was something like a concept of an audio wiki, where sounds could be quickly built in segments, re-edited, intensively linked by multiple persons. I’m not sure what one would do with it, but if something like this really existed, it would atomize audio content down from the podcast duration into smaller, reusable chunks.

So someone please let me know when it is time for Web Audio 2.0. Until then, like many, I’m trying to quickly ramp up on podcasting, and how to explain, demo its potential to others.

Later… Interruption. About 20 minutes after filling out the iTunesU information form, I got a call from an Apple dude, and signed up to get in early.

So with much better things to with my time, I whipped up this ad for a book not yet in stores:

If we could side step the whinges people have about this being the bane of illegal activity and the realm of black t-shirt clad teenage pirates, and just look with interest at this creative shift in the way information can be distributed, isn’t it exciting?

I’d been toying with doing some experimentation on using bitTorrrent for sharing digital stories- people are expending great effort to produce fantastic personal narratives, but the file size is unwieldy for sharing… what do you think? I’ve got some content lined up, and as soon as I have read the book above, I may start dabbling later in the summer (that would be July for you southern hemispherics)