Interesting stuff percolating around the question of how controlled content ought to be, where “ought” means morally, culturally, and for hard-nosed business reasons. Is the issue coming to a head?

We have Viacom sending 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube, including some videos Viacom is pulling out of the public domain without even having viewed them. Viacom’s shareholders ought to start up a suit right now. This is the stupidest marketing move in a long time. Jeff Jarvis puts it succinctly in a post that ends “Damned fools.” Terry Heaton also lays it down. And then we have Steve Jobs asking the music publishers to give up on DRM, although Job’s piece also has some special pleading that (imo) weakens it.

Could the content control bubble be about to burst?

[Tags: media viacom drm youtube everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Steve Schultze, from MIT Comparative Media Studies , is giving a Tuesday luncheon talk at the Berkman about the Beyond Broadcasting conference, which has as its theme this year “From participatory culture to participatory democracy.”

Chris Lydon in a video clip asks, “Is the Internet the new public?” Steve plays a clip of Rebecca Mackinnon talking about Chinese repression of speech that leads to political action. Nevertheless, she says, the Web is enabling new forms of social discourse. Before the Web, she says, you couldn’t be famous in China without getting past an official gatekeeper. Steve tells of a Chinese woman, Xiang Xiang , who uploaded an MP3 that’s been downloaded a billion times—a song about a pig. There may be political echoes to the song, apparently.

The hypothesis of the conference: “Skills that emerge in the course of participating in pop culture can become powerful forces when translated into tools of citizen engagement.”

The first half of the conference will be us listening to speakers. The second half will be working groups. Steven asks us what the working groups should be. (There’s a wiki here.) [Tags: media conferences beyond_broadcast everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I’ve just added a string of icons at the bottom of every post that will (generally) post the post to a social bookmarking site. So, if you want to save the post’s Web address into your account at, say, del.icio.us, you’d just click on the del.icio.us icon at the bottom of the post.

I totally stole this from Content to Be Different. Thanks!

To adapt it to WordPress, the software this blog uses, you edit the Main Index Template in Presentation Theme editor. To put in a button that links to blinkbits, you’d add something like this:

<a href=”http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=<?php the_permalink()?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&body=< ?php the_title(); ?>” title=”blinkbits”><img src=”http://www.yourblogsite.com/wp-content/blinkbits.png” alt=”blinkbits” />

The <?php the_permalink()?> tells WordPress to substitute the permalink of that particular post and the < ?php the_title(); ?> tells it to put in the post’s title. And, of course you’ll have to change the URL of the image file that you’re linking to.

Let the debugging begin! :)

We can already tag videos, of course. But how about being able to tag the good parts?

YourView lets users mark segments on a video using a set of icons, and also indicate the “intensity” of each. In their example, a user could tag all the serves in a tennis match, and then watch all the high-intensity ones, or could watch all the non-boring parts of a cricket match, reducing a 44 hour match to 4 seconds and the credits. More to YourView’s point, the broadcaster of the video could mark it up with icons.

This isn’t exactly tagging because the user only has access to a pre-determined set of icons (and it’s not clear from the site who determines the set). It’s also not clear whether user-based markings are public and social; I’m assuming not. So, you don’t get the social effects of tagging, e.g., find the segments of a video the most people have marked “great shot” or find all segments of all videos anyone has marked “whoops.”

It requires the use of the YourView viewer. Enable any user to do this outside of the YourView viewer, and you’d really have something. (I’m not saying it’d be easy.)

MotionBox.com has a related function that lets you select any portion of a video and tag it—real tags—with any words you want. It seems that only the person who posts the video can tag selections, though. And you have to view the video on the MotionBox site.

Still, we’re getting closer… [Tags: video motionbox yourview tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Jim Gray, a computer scientist at Microsoft, was reported missing at sea on Jan. 28th. Thanks to Google and Amazon, you can help search for him by going through some of the tens of thousands of satellite images, looking for his boat.

The search site is here. You have to register with Amazon to participate. When I did, I didn’t see the Jim Gray search in the list of available projects, but it showed up when I searched for “gray.”

The NY Times has covered this. Microsoft has an update page. There’s a FaceBook group for the project. And here’s the U of Texas image analysis site. (Thanks to Bill St. Arnaud for the links.)

(This type of effort is known as a “mechanical Turk” because, like the chess playing machine it’s named after, there are humans at the heart of it.) [Tags: gim_gray mechanical_turk google amazon collaboration emergency everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Technorati has a new feature that’s only slightly confusing but very interesting and potentially quite useful. (Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors.)

It’s called “WTF,” which technically stands for “Where’s the Fire,” but has another more likely meaning. (David Isenberg named one of his conferences “WTF” and then had a contest to decide what it stood for.) So, if you go to Technorati and take a look at the Top Searches in the upper right, to the left of each entry there’s an orange flame. Don’t click on it yet because the page it takes you to is confusing. Instead, click on one of the searches. At the moment, “Boston Mooninites” is the top search. Click on it to go to the search results page. The top result is not a result at all. It’s got a flame icon next to it, indicating that it’s actually the WTF about the phrase “Boston Mooninites.” It’s an explanation of what that phrase means and why people are searching on it now. Who wrote it? Anybody who wants to. So now click on the flame icon. It takes you to the same page you would have gotten to if you had clicked on the flame icon in the Top Searches list on the home page.

Ok, so now you’re on the WTF page for “Boston Mooninites.” Note that this is not the search results page. It’s where you get to create your own WTF for that search query. Or, you can vote on which of the existing ones; the one with the most votes is featured on the search results page for the query.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this develops. For example, the current top WTF for Windows Vista is a product review, not a neutral explanation. (I’m not complaining.) Many of the WTFs on the Vista list are responses to previous ones, as if WTFs are discussion board, probably an artifact of the layout of the WTF page. WTF is already on the way to becoming what it was not intended to be, which I imagine pleases Technorati mightily. [Tags: technorati social_software wikis everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Technorati.com is a search site that indexes blogs – Google for blogs, as I’m sure Technorati doesn’t like it put. It also lets you embed a chart of how frequently a word is mentioned on blogs over time. This one charts the occurence of tags, tagging and folksonomy:

Posts that contain Tags Tagging Folksonomy per day for the last 30 days.

Click here to get your own chart.

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s advisory board.)

This is a “word cloud” that expresses the words most commonly used in Everything Is Miscellaneous, excluding common words such as “the.” The size of the word indicates its relative frequency. Tag clouds work the same way, except, of course, for tags.

I actually wrote the program I used to generate the word cloud, but it’s kludgy, somewhat inaccurate, and built in Visual Basic. You can create your own word cloud for an online page at SnapShirts.com

Yedda is a collaborative question-and-answer site. Anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer. The community votes on which answers it thinks are best.

You can also subscribe to a question. Actually, you subscribe to tags that may be applied to questions or answers. This widget automatically updates with the latest items tagged with a particular phrase (in this case the word “tag”):

Actually, not every happy community is the same. And the unhappy ones are at least as diverse. So, it’s good to read HorsePigCow’s reminder that communities aren’t always just a bunch of fluffy bunnies snuggling together. Sometimes what we’re calling communities are in fact arguments, or conversations, or people who happen to like the same brand of orange juice.

It’d be good if we could have preserved the term “community” for actual communities, i.e., people who care about one another more than they have to. But it looks like that linguistic battle is over and done. Oh well. [Tags: communities horsepigcow tara_hunt everything_is_miscellaneous]