MP3 + Blogs = MP3jays?

Audioblogs tap into the human desire to share what’s important to us – or at least to show everyone how cool we are. This growth in “MP3jays” writing audioblogs further demonstrates that there’s a lot of interest out there in what other people are listening to. To join in, Apple have recently included a feature in iTunes 1.5 that allows users to publish up their playlists for all to see (and admire or laugh at) – but outside of iTunes, some blogs are courting controversy by offering unlicensed samples of tracks.

The RIAA could chose to target audiobloggers if they don’t license tracks properly – and since many of the bloggers are individuals, they won’t be able to afford the fees to get legal.

However, the advantages in audioblogs to the industry are immense: people place greater value on individual’s tastes and being able to listen to a piece of music tells you much more about how you feel about it than words ever will. Audioblogs represent high quality, highly-targeted publicity for record companies, and not only is it free, but someone else is paying for the bandwidth.

Try the most successful audioblog out there: Fluxblog from Matthew Perpetua posts music on the site – but all the tracks are used properly and with permission.

Fluxblog

The Matrix Online

Admittedly, we’d be a lot more excited about this had the last two films been any good, but Monolith Production’s new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on the Matrix series of films is set to go public in November. The new game will be published by Warner Bros. Interactive and Sega, Monolith have already produced two respectable titles based on licenses: No-one Lives Forever and TRON2.0.

Set directly after the Martrix: Revolutions, Matrix Online (MxO) boasts a story line written by the Wachowski brothers. Mind you, so did Enter the Matrix and look how good that was. The MMORPG is meant to be seen as a fourth instalment, rather like Enter the Matrix being another part of the second film.

MxO is set in a city environment and incorporates the films’ distinctive martial arts fighting theme, but players will also be able to command their own hovercraft and form factions for and against other groups. Bullet time will be incorporated in the game play as apparently there are some people out there who don’t think it’s been completely overused.

Characters’ appearances can be completely customised, so you don’t have to worry about turning up at an event wearing the same sunglasses and trench coat as everyone else.

“Ability codes” seem intriguing, where players download sources of information to create Matrix items and learn special abilities. If you don’t fancy PvP (player versus player combat), then you can create Matrix code and distribute it in the game.

We’ll give it a try when it appears and let you know how we get on.

The Matrix wants you

Google Revamps Blogger Service

Google has completed a revamp of its Blogger site, adding a number of new features and another 27 design templates to the service.

Possibly the most exciting feature is the addition of email posting, so now bloggers can update their site from anywhere where they have email – handy for updating blogs whilst on the move if you have a PDA.

Google are keen to build a community between bloggers with new facilities for adding comments to blogs and setting up blogger profiles. Profiles can automatically link to other bloggers with similar interests.

Evan Williams, Blogger program manager at Google said: “We are focusing on helping users connect to one another, and that has always been a core part of blogging, with the combination of profiles and comments, we make it more built in than it’s ever been before.”

Blogger

Bringing the School into the Home via Broadband

As Britain moves closer to complete broadband coverage, communities around the country are beginning to explore the potential that interactive services offer and are partnering with technology companies and content providers to create some innovative services.

We decided to look at one of the best examples of community broadband TV: Kingston Communication’s collaboration with an East Yorkshire school which has led to an exciting project to engage pupils in interactive learning, both at home and in the classroom.

The Kingswood High School’s Broadband TV (KBTV) Project was conceived in 2001 under the UK Government’s Information Society Programme and Hull’s own Digital Learning Plan. Kingswood was chosen to collaborate with the BBC in its Headstart project.

The BBC provided the school with access to its film and video archive – and from this, using standard desktop tools like Premiere, pupils and teachers were able to create interactive content that formed the basis of many exciting and informative lessons.

Kingswood High went on to develop the idea into community broadband TV – with the aim of providing a range of interactive services via set top boxes (STBs).  The school secured enough funding for the project to provide a one-year trial of STBs for all the families in the local community with a suitable phone line.

We spoke to Andrew Fawcett, Head of Products and Services at Kingston Communications about the stealthy growth of broadband television: “IPTV has come of age, and it’s come of age in a non-linear fashion.  We’re on both sides of the equation, because part of our business is being a broadband ISP, and that’s been experiencing exponential growth, delivering one megabit of broadband to a consumer PC.  Since 1998, we’ve been delivering five megabits into the back of people’s television sets with a service that people don’t know is broadband.”

We asked him for some background to the Kingswood project: “Everybody who goes to Kingswood School, all the kids basically as part of their school work, use the KIT service – it’s given to them free of charge.  They’re creating their own content at school level.”

“The service covers 200 homes at the moment, but we have a proposal to roll it out to 2000.”

Staff at the school are finding that this new way of learning reaches and appeals to children who would not normally enjoy or benefit from traditional classroom teaching methods.

The interactive service provides immersive learning tools at school and at home. Andrew added, “They (the pupils) get the Kingswood Channel, a school’s TV channel with three elements to it.  One is that we deliver curricular materials – there’s a permanently available set of resources for all subjects that’s very video rich.”

“The second part is taking stock materials and turning them into their own programmes.”  Each (school) year has its own area on the service, though areas are accessible to everyone.”

As an example of this, Andrew showed us a documentary on arson that had been created at the school.  The film had been constructed from content that was put together by the school’s pupils and teachers.

Part of the experience of learning about arson includes the kids going out with cameras and interviewing people.  The idea of making children media literate is very powerful. I’ve seen kids who would be a nightmare in class, but this stops being class work, and becomes making a film – and more importantly it becomes a film that’s going to be on live telly when they get home.  You can suddenly engage kids at a level that’s incredible.  Very significantly, the school comes into the home.”

The film included an interview with victims of arson, and an arsonist – and was put together with standard desktop tools like Adobe Premier.

Interactive television like this also provides educators with valuable information on the effectiveness of services and lessons.  “Year Ten”, he told us, “will be asked to go home and watch this as homework.  We track usage for a select number of pupils who have chosen to opt in to the research elements in the programme.  We’re looking at Educational Family Footprints.  One of the key determinants of the success or failure in education is parental support.  We’ve taken families with different educational footprints – from homes where education is core to the family life, to others where education is less important.”

The third aspect of the service provides pupils with a virtual PC they can access using their television set at home.  The system runs a virtual PC using Citrix MetaFrame – all the processing is done at the server end of the network, which only sends screen updates to the set-top box.  The box essentially becomes a “dumb terminal”.  Pupils can access and save work stored on the school’s network, and use Star Office providing them with applications for word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations.”

A virtual PC service like this has many advantages, as the customers don’t have to maintain a PC at home and so security against spyware, hacking and viruses is taken care of by a qualified IT department at the school.  It also ensures that pupils all have access to the same computing platform.

Andrew is justifiably proud of this aspect of the service, “Of all these things we’ve done with KIT, this brings everything together.  It brings the localness and on-demand aspects of the service together, and it emphasises the difference of broadband TV – you could never provide an application like this with satellite TV.  It’s wholly back-channel dependent.”
Kevin Beaton, Head Teacher at the school explains why they wanted to get so involved in a service like this:  “The rationale for the whole project is that the school becomes the local hub that is able to provide the surrounding community with access to digital services. Initially the focus will be on education, so that we can prove to everyone involved that the principle of on-demand access to information and interactive educational content really is viable.”

Vein continued, “The school is currently developing material to be used on KBTV, and we’ve identified a number of logical and consistent uses for the system. Lessons in several departments are already being developed using our very latest interactive ‘White Boards’. This in turn means that teaching methods and the style of learning are changing, and more and more lessons will begin to make use of film and video as a stimulus to greater creativity. Some of the items will only be produced for homework purposes; hence students would be expected to watch educational material on film, and then complete set work on the film at home. Other material will be work from lessons at school, which can be completed at home, or perhaps reviewed at a later stage as part of a planned revision programme.

“Yet other material will be demonstration work from subjects like Design Technology, where soldering small intricate parts can be clearly be shown to pupils in close-up mode. In the field of Art it would be possible to view many different examples of paintings and sculptures, with the key points that ensured the success of the work clearly demonstrated.

“Another interesting aspect of the KBTV on-demand channel is that parents would have independent access to vital school information concerning their children. This would include attendance records, term dates, coursework deadlines, examination entries, parents’ evenings, exhibitions and school music and drama productions. In addition, direct contact could be made with school staff via e-mail, with the possibility of video conferencing for those parents or guardians who were unable to physically visit the school for whatever reason.”

And what about the future for services like Kingswood?  Andrew Fawcett told us what was up next: “There was a very small budget for this – by squeezing things, as we tend to do, we managed to deliver it to 200 homes, to get a reasonable feel for the potential.  This stage of the trial finishes in June – our intention is to look for additional sources of funding.”

Kingswood High and Kingston Communications are compiling information on the before and after effects of the KBTV initiative – hopefully benefits of this sort of programme will inspire more partnership and research in the educational possibilities of our broadband future.

Kingswood High School

Kingston Communications

BBCi Humber

Find Legal Free Music Easily

Funnily enough, just last week I was looking for some free music just for the hell of it – and I soon discovered that locating gratis tunes that are also legal tunes, is really not that easy.

Using the the popular search engines will provide you with plenty of links – but very little music, and a lot of undesirable stuff too. Enter CNET’s new service: music.download.com.

The site is incredibly easy to use – registration is not required, so you can simply browse to the music you think you might fancy and download it straight away. Within seconds I had downloaded and installed to my iPod some dreadful bit of ambient noodling that was obviously recorded by a bunch of deaf chimps after they’d be smashed in the face with hammers. The quality of many of the offerings is extremely good.

The site has an option for music creators to upload and comment on their tunes and thus should create a community around free content – a feedback function to artists is currently missing, but CNET hope to add more functionality, and get the recommendation engine going, soon. It is expected the archive to grow quickly, but is already quite expansive considering they’ve only been acquiring tracks for a couple of months.

Scott Arpajian, senior vice president of CNET Download.com said “While commercial music services have proliferated, we are the first large-scale provider to offer free music downloads in a discovery-focused environment, saving music fans valuable time in finding tunes that match their tastes. Our goal is to provide music fans free digital fuel for their devices, and exposure to original artists and songs that can become their new favourites.”

The new CNET site is another thorn in the side of the major labels – for the time being anyway, until they come up with a way of either competing with it or crippling it.

CNET bought the MP3.com domain name last year, but sadly the archive of tracks hosted by the site was destroyed as Vivendi Universal claimed it did not fit with any of their business initiatives.

On a related note, the charity Warchild have a music site, linked below, that allows subscribers to download music whilst donating to the organisation.

CNET Music Download.com

All-new MP3.com

Warchild Music

CyWorld – A Virtual World with 6 Million Inhabitants

Six million virtual inhabitants? No, it’s not Everquest, it’s not Star Wars Galaxies and sadly it’s not EVE – Cyworld is a Korean virtual community, and the fastest growing site in the country.The site has proven so popular that Park Geun-hee, the daughter of former president Park Chung-hee caused a stir last month by creating her own Cyworld site with pictures of her hobbies and video of her playing the piano. “I wanted to find a way to show young people, especially young girls, who I really am”, she later explained to the press.

Cyworld was founded in 2001 and toodled along for a few years with a number of keen fans, but its popularity exploded when SK Telecom bought it. SKT put marketing Won behind it and it now has 13% of Korea’s 47.6 million inhabitants as members. Korea has long been a key part of the connected world – nearly 80% of Koreans subscribe to broadband internet services, spending an average of 13.5 hours per week.

Subscribers to Cyworld, meet, decorate their homes, wander about a bit, listen to music, accessorise and invite friends over for parties – just what young trendy avatars like to do. Graphics are stylish, but simple and colourful isometric drawings – none of the 3D polygon look that has blighted many attempts at virtual worlds in the past. Think eBoy meets meets MacPaint.

So, apart from subscription costs, what’s the revenue stream? Cyworld’s currency is the Acorn – Acorns are used to buy music for your virtual gatherings, furniture and accessories to keep you at the height of avatar fashion. Here’s another incredible fact: about 100 million Won worth (€72,000, US$85,000) are sold to subscribers every day. That’s about €26.3 million (USD$31 million) worth of play money sold every year.

With 30,000 new members signing up every day, there’s obviously a lot of money to be made in virtual worlds. Could a site like Cyworld be this popular in the West? And who would design it?

One hundred million Won worth of Acorns sold every day.

Cyworld’s home page (Korean)

Print Your Own Games

Nintendo’s eReader, an optical card reader developed by Olympus using their “Dot Code” technology, is a small add-on for GBA users. Players can scan (hideously overpriced) trading cards into their GBA to play games and unlock extras. Each card has a dot code printed on it that stores a couple of kilobytes of code – that code can be an emulation of an early Game and Watch title, or it can even be a smart new umbrella for your Animal Crossing character.

Cards are the same shape and size as standard playing cards (though without the naked ladies on the back) and are available in packs of five or so based on popular Nintendo franchises: Animal Crossing and Pokémon unlock or upload new aspects to the games, or you can even upload the classic Donkey Kong 3 to your GameBoy Advance.

The dot codes use Reed Solomon error correction and now that the scheme has been worked out, homebrew coders can finally write their own games for easy distribution to GBA owners. Tim Schuerewegen cracked the code and is hosting an original game – BombSweeper. Coders interested in writing for the GBA can even use GNU GCC to compile code – plus the API for the GameBoy Advance is very well documented.

The eReader has been modestly successful, but never set the world alight. In fact, support for it seems to have been quietly dropped. Try plugging one into your GBA SP and you’ll see what I mean – it no longer fits. The link port on a SP is now on the opposite side of the console, so the eReader can’t slide fully into the cartridge slot.

Tim Schuerewegen’s page on the GBA

The eReader file format

Official eReader home page

TellTale Weekly: A Project Gutenberg for Audio Books

Telltale Weekly are building an audio library – on a cheap now, free later model. They are looking to add at least fifty titles to their library every year, releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The professionally recorded, DRM-free, texts are available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio files and can be transferred and listened to however the user wishes, for personal use. The site currently has 23 titles, but are looking to expand as quickly as they can acquire content, and they’re looking for contributions from authors, performers and producers.

TellTale Weekly hope that by charging a small sum for new titles now, they will be able to offer them free later, after five years or 100,000 downloads. “Paying to hear the text now (and for the next five years),” they say, “helps to cover the costs for the production, recording, and bandwidth of the performance you purchase, and supports future releases so that we’ll still be producing new audiobooks by the time our first one hits the public domain.”

TellTale Weekly

Creative Commons

Slashdot on TellTale

BBCi Launches One-Minute Movies – “It’s not a competition.”

One Minute Movies is a new site from BBCi, and it’s designed to give everyone the chance to show their short film to the world.

The site gives the reason they’re doing it: “There are many websites about making films but we thought they were all a bit too serious, a bit too technical. The spirit behind One-Minute Movies is to just pick up a camera and shoot.”

With strong advice and tips on story, directing, sound and editing the site even has a small collection of classical music you can download and use for your own project. Tips come from professional film makers like David Lynch and Ann Coates and there’s also a facility for sending on your own tips and discussing them on the message board.

The rules are simple – basically it has to be all your own work and not break any laws. It doesn’t even need to be only a minute long.

We like this idea. Although the idea is not unique to the BBC, they are getting high profile exposure for what we feel will become a popular form of content, particularly on mobile devices.

They have made the smart move trying to ensure a certain degree of quality by providing lots of information about the process. The site concentrates on making films with the equipment lots of people would already have, without requiring any additional expense from software or hardware.

Although just about anyone could shoot a short film and host it themselves, having a movie on the BBC site will give it a much larger audience. Be aware though, as with all these things, submitting your film to BBCi gives them the right to do whatever they like with it, forever.

Making something only a minute long might seem simple, but it can be extremely challenging – and rewarding. Perhaps we’ll get round to finishing that stop-motion Lego film that nearly drove us insane at Christmas.

BBCi One Minute Movies

Brand Republic

The Magic Portal – sheer genius (requires DivX)

MovieLink Offer Re-rental

MovieLink, the on-demand film service that delivers films via broadband Internet connections, is experimenting with different pricing models. They have launched an offer that permits their viewers to re-watch films that they have downloaded, paid for and watched. They call it MultiPlay.

If a viewer has the urge to watch a film again within 30 days of the original rental, they can pay a normally reduced price to have another 24 hours access to it and have the advantage that the film does not have to be downloaded again. Not all films that MovieLink carry are included, presumably because of licensing restrictions, and the cost of re-renting varies but start at 99c.

MovieLink