really.
Chiat/Day: 0 – People: 1
Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.
FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.
miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.
When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.
There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.
Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.
When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.
The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.
Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.
I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.
For a new feature to be used. Recently google allowed
the placement on websites of their content.
there will be more, of course.
iTunes does a good job in keeping my hard drive full with nice audio and video.
It’s easy and wide spread.
It still had glitches though:
Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts
contains those files. No matter if video or audio.
When you delete a podcast then files are not deleted at times.
I just found some old things that should have gone.
The current playback within iTunes is very lame. There seems to be no
easy way or preference to let quicktime handle these files.
But it’s better than nothing. It’s somewhat tragic that there was not
nothing before Apples move into this market. Many Applications worked
much better with RSS and media enclosures. But they failed to gain enough
momentum.
http://thisasseenontvpetsteps.blogspot.com/
or
http://thisdoggieramp.blogspot.com/
not your usual link collection.
ok, provokative title. Let’s rephrase: google tolerates spam.
Blogger is owned by google. It runs the biggest blog service on it’s blogspot domain.
It appears to be very simple to create hundrets of thousands of ‘weblogs’ like this:
http://p85.blogspot.com/
Created solely for spam purposes. So called ‘splogs’. You set up a robot and there is nothing in the blogger software that stops you from adding all the blogs you like.
This is not new. Google / Blogger / Blogspot knows about it. They did nothing against it in the last years.
It should be relatively easy to make sure that there is a human in front of the computer if a new weblog is created at blogspot.com. Simplecaptchas are very common today.
There are two possible explainations why this did not happen yet:
– blogspot engineering is amazing incapable
or
– there is no real rush to get rid of splogs on googles side.
It might make sense:
You have to forget the “don’t be evil” and “organize the worlds information and make it easily accessible” google dogma’s for a second though. Google knows one thing very very well: how to run a scalable service. They have the lowest cost per stored bit due to their own file system technology. It uses commodity hardware and adds failover management brilliantly. It does cost google not much to host millions of splogs.
But wouldn’t million of false blogs pose a danger to the result-quality of a search engine?
Exactly.
Google knows from which ip address a blog get’s maintained. Nobody else does. They have the actual blog data readily available for further parsing. I doubt that the googlebot comes through the front door to blogspot. The bandwidth alone that you could be saved by crawling blogsport internally should make up for the ‘exception’ that this would mean to the googlebot operations. I don’t know these things. It’s a guess.
Every search engine has to have spam combat tools these days. Google is one of the most useful search engines and in the US they have an ok handle on search engine spam. Isn’t it funny that they don’t use their insider knowledge and acess together with their anti-spam tools to simple turn off splogs on blogspot?
Last October there was somebody that scraped famous blogers sites and reposted that content splogs. That got some attention, and stopped. But splogs did not.
Blogspot hosts lots of splogs. But also lots of legit and very powerful weblogs. Nobody can really afford to ignore the biggest weblog service. Yahoo, Msn and even my little BlogsNow have to crawl blogspot in order to find out what is going on. Google can skip the skip, all others have to deal with it.
There is also a third theory that is the most plausible:
splogs don’t matter to search engines. They have to crawl billions of pages anyway. Who cares about a couple of million spam blogs here and there. That’s probably what it is: The aircraft carrier keeps on going regardless if there are 50% more roaches in the kitchen or not.
It’s a gorgeous clear day here in LA. Sunday. No traffic. Just great. At 3pm work is done and get I a bite to eat.
I dragged my laptop with me. Hoping that I could get some non-internet work done. Of course there is wifi
here. From somebody. How am I supposed to kick the internet addiction if it is everywhere I go?