Bob’s Open-G

Saw this on the TED site.

This reminded me of the work MIT’s Eric von Hippel talked about a few years back at the
Boston IDEAS conference–innovation among the customers. Mountain bikes as the example.
The principle as applied to media? You Tube webisodes innovate TV, podcasts recast radio. And Public Media
struggles to widen its definition of ‘customer’ and ways to connect with them, when their media use has
grown to include multimedia at the expense of traditional TV and Radio.

Its amazing whats happening with online video both in terms of content and technology

The players and their associated features are really in a creative storm.
HD, flash, rate and review, tagging, embedding, etc.

And the content has dramatically expanded from few professionally produced videos to the whole universe of Youtube’s user generated
content.

It seems to me that in any new medium there are two vectors:
Content, or the WHAT and Technological, or the HOW.

And these two inflect each other in kind of dance as the medium evolves.

Take writing—
Some of the earliest writing was essentially invoices, and accounts receivable records
And it was done scratching mud tablets with sticks

It took a long while for that to end up as literature–as the content changed it created the need for better technologies, and better technologies enabled expanded/improved content—

love poems and religious revelations are hard to express scratching mud with sticks in cuneiform—so eventually we wind up with scrolls, ink and the greek alphabet and the Illiad and the Coptic gospels.

So here we are with online video emerging, and the content/technology dance happening again, but at light speed.

Look at how much video players are changing, and the content is in a kind of cambrian explosion of diversity. Very interesting.

Last Friday, WGBH hosted a live performance/recording of Stockhausen’s Mantra, for two pianos and four channel electronics.
It was set up in our fabulous new
Fraser studio, and was a collaboration involving WGBH and the IMSC at USC as well as the New England Conservatory.
WGBH Engineer Jim Donahue has been working for years with the IMSC folks, pushing the boundaries of audio
and this event was done in 10.2 sound and shot in HD. As I’m walking out I stopped to chat with Jim, WGBH’s Antonio Oliart
and the IMSC’s Chris Kyriakakis, .
As I’m leaving that set up I run into WGBH Radio’s master of all things Celtic, Brian O’Donovan, who tells me he’s just heard from a
virtual Irish Pub in Second Life that wants to use his Celtic music show that we’ve been streaming for years to fans around the globe, for the SL pub house sound.
Makes me think how lucky I am to work in a place where these projects this diverse can come and buzz around a
common center.

The origin of this blog’s title has to do with the most common tuning for the Dobro when played lap-style. It also is the tuning which Keith Richards uses for what the late critic Robert Palmer described as the “gritty crunch and bite, the close to the bones timbre” of Richard’s best work, circa ‘Exile on Main Street’.
This blog will actually be given over to my musings and attempts at making sense of the changing new media landscape, which seems to be in a state of ‘permanent whitewater’. I may post some writings, and links to some of what I think are insightful blogs or articles.
But it may occasionally veer into
my interest in Dobro and 70’s Stones guitar, activities for which my enthusiasm is wildly out of proportion to my skill.

to paraphrase the confession of st. patrick:

Ego robertus, peccator rusticissimus …

I, Bob, a sinner, most unlearned, am confessing to the sin of sloth–having not posted in over a year. But I’ll try to get back in the habit.

I’ll start with the observation that there appears to be movement towards a centralization of back end archiving, hosting and serving of public media.
The DDC discussion amongst principally radio types seemed to hit
a doldrums, and during this year in stepped NPR, with a highly successul aggregation and monetization pilot of podcasts. A year later there
seems to be movement towards centralization/scalable infrastructure
for PTV producers and stations. And all this against a backdrop of the
Google/Youtube forces teaching us all that bandwidth is free, fuelled
by venture capital and Google’s ad profits.

The PTV video infrastructure seems driven by the credo that public media
should own its own codebase, in the same way it now owns its own
transmitters. But interesting experimentation is happening on third
party and open-platform social network tools. We see video moving
towards extremes of quality (HD, 16/9 for 52″ plasma screens, and at the opposite end of quality, flash for youtube and video on cell phones) just in time for the analog shut off of NTSC.

So what does it all mean? It means chaos, creative destruction and
the need to read a lot more than I’m able to. But I will try, gentle reader,
I will try.

The most significant development since my last post (lame–I took a long vacation from it) is the explosion of Youtube and the like. And a fascinating thing is evolving, well illustrated by Andrewsullivan’s daily dish.
A blogger gets his contributors and readers to scour the vast bulk of Youtube, and they curate the best videos, forward the links to embed, Andrew selects among those and embeds in his blog to enhance it (he calls the feature Youtube of the day).

Essentially, when you start stringing a bunch of these together, you create a broadband video channel. Produced by an individual, assisted by the “social production” * tools and infrastructure. Ad supported, free to user, minimal costs, maximum audience engagement.

Of course self published video is a also great way for MSM to reach new audiences, and some are figuring this out, even though it plays hell with their business model, production processes and is deeply disruptive. The fun is really starting now that the
deer have guns.

*first heard this from Yochai Benkler at Yale.

I was lucky enough to have a visit at the Integrated Media Services Center at USC.
Wow.
This is a bleeding edge technology lab exploring the extremes of quality, in the
intersection of the senses of sound, sights and touch with digital media/technologies.

Immersive media experiences using 10.2 sound streamed with 45mbps video live over Internet 2, Mashing up google maps with
database mining and mapping photos to GPS-created building shapes to create user experiences allowing you to zoom in from space to the
street level and walk around virtual landscapes in a high resolution gaming-like experience but with real locations. (one of the unintended things they discovered–by including the data streams from internal webcams and security cams the user can not only navigate along these buildings but
‘see’ inside their rooms–equal parts cool and creepy. )

Facial expression recognition software to create real time feedback for pre-verbal learning, etc. etc.

An audio engineer I know consults with them around high end audio, and in piloting their
‘virtual microphone’ software–by plotting the sonic characteristics of a great recording
space (Symphony Hall in Boston), they’ve created digital filtering which can recreate
the sound (in 10.2) of a recording in that space, with the sound of mike arrays that
weren’t there and in a space different than the actual recording venue.

Anyway, go to this site, and browse the
list of research projects

You’ll be glad you did.

When I think of bringing ideas from concept to execution, it reminds me of those old nature films of sea turtle eggs hatching, the newly hatched baby
turtles scampering to the sea, while the seagulls and crabs pick off most of them. A happy few make it to the safety of the surf, only to then get eaten by fish. At long last, a tiny fraction of them grow into sea turtles, big enough only to be threatened by sea lions and sharks, and finally a very few get too big to even worry about them.

I think of new ideas as the eggs, small, fragile, more potential than meat. The chief virtue for
this stage of life is SHEER NUMBER–the survival value is on their being a lot of them.

Then a few of these hatch, and some ideas take form in small, frenetic bodies. The premium at this stage of the life cycle is on SPEED–get to the surf as fast as possible, or get piloted and
running even experimentally, as soon as possible. Nothing dies faster than an idea that has
no physical expression. Get these ideas into practice, however small, however misshapen
as soon as possible, and start them running.

A few pilots get to the next stage, and at this point the premium is now on growth–GET BIGGER FAST. The basic life functions are tested and viable, so feed the thing the nutrients it needs to start to fill out and became a more mature idea.

Then the survivors from this stage can start to explore the mature phase of their life. Start to
mingle with other ideas that have survived these tests. Maybe mate and start laying eggs
to keep the cycle going.
When I sit in a caffeinated room with bright people, passionate ideas and whiteboards,
I want to get as many turtle eggs laid as possible.
When I’m tending my patch of pilots, I want them to move fast, so we can learn fast, and fold that knowledge back in. Dragging things out, letting institutional inertia slow them down just
makes them gull food.
And when they actually get out into the world, even as small versions of themselves, I want to
get them grown up so they can swim on their own.

Anyway: Volume/numbers, Speed, Resources. The qualities most important at each of the three phases in the life of an idea trying to become real.