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If you've come to depend upon the Internet to be your prime source of information, to help you live your life, to connect you with your world, then its time for you to help the Internet in return. It needs your help more today than ever in its history.

This medium, and new media in general, is turning old media's future bleak. The telcos, the cable conglomerates (who also own the cable channels), and the cellular providers (who are now pretty much one and the same as the telcos) weren't very interested in the Internet back when we were building it.

But now that its slowly running them out of business, they're responding the way they always respond: throw even more money at Congress and get our representatives to turn the Internet into their own private channel.

If you love this medium, it is imperitive that you help save it. Go to Save the Internet for the sad details on how big media is trying to make this space its own private network. Get your Senators' names and phone numbers and call them both, and tell them how you feel. This is a tremendously important issue, and you can really have an effect on the future, but you have to act now.

Tags: net+ neutrality · telcos · cable

I’ve been spending a lot of my time over the last few months experimenting with audio/video compression for portable devices: trying to push the limits of quality. Its the ultimate exercise in tradeoffs.

We’ve looked at just about every compression tool out there, and have settled on Sorenson Squeeze as a great tradeoff between functionality and output quality (though for most applications it is simply a control panel for others’ codecs.) It lets us batch easily.

Even when bandwidth problems go away because you’re not streaming in real time (because most portable devices are playing back from a stored stream that was previously downloaded and synced), you run headlong into CPUs that can’t handle high stream rates, or can’t decompress a high stream rate while simultaneously throwing the pixels at the little screen.

The way this has been handled by Microsoft (under its “plays for sure” marketing program) is to dumb down the maximum stream rates and image sizes. The wmv specifications on my Archos AV700 mandate a size and stream rate (352×288@30fps 800kb/s) that is butt ugly on its 480×234 display. I’m finding, however, that you can push the envelope pretty far.

I’ve coded a theme statement/promo from an upcoming walkie-lookie series at what is (for web video) an insane rate:

• 160 kpbs audio data rate at 48k
  
• 1600 kpbs video data rate (with a 2400 kpbs cap)
  

Tags: wmv · Archos · futurism · history · science · sorensen · codec · portable · media

We rolled out the public beta of the Walkie-Lookie site, and it hasn’t crashed…yet.

We’re not doing direct downloads for devices yet, but we’ve decided on all the coding rates and types. Here’s another advance Lookie, this one coded in the format we’re using for the Archos products.

Tags: walki e-lookie · preempti on · bush

When we roll out the final version, you'll be able to download a version of each of our videos customized for your make and model of personal video device, but for now we're holding back on the device-specific downloads to make sure the basic systems are stable, but I snuck a couple of the coded videos out the back door. Here's one of our Lookies coded for the Video Ipod.

Tags: walki e-lookie · liberty · statue · french

There have been a lot of podcasts I've wanted to write and deliver since I podfaded in July of last year. The last couple of months I've been haunted by the desire to predict the short-term future of Biblical Archeology.

The discovery of what we now call the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 upper Egypt, and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 in the caves near Qumran, started a gold rush in the mideast for ancient documents. At the same time, it caused mid-eastern governments to try and protect their treasures from plunder by western collectors and museums. We don't know how many documents got caught in the crossfire, but we've known about one for a long time.

I'm talking about what we now know is "The Gospel of Judas," a Coptec codex that sat decaying in a Hicksville, New York safe deposit box for twenty years until the Nation al Geographic Society (and a motivated collector) stepped forward to underwrite its translation and repatriation to Egypt. Many respected institutions wouldn't touch the manuscript, even though they'd be the first with a groundbreaking discovery. They were worried about the provenance of the document, and maybe a little scared of its contents.

A lot of forces are at work here; people with "unclean hands" who once might have been prosecuted by mideastern countries for spiriting off national treasures, are dying or finding ways in their last days to find pathways for these documents to come to light. And there's The Da Vinci Code, which popularized the work of people like Michael Baigent (who himself has popularized the work of people like Robert Eisenmen). Though Da Vinci is fiction, it is uncannily allegorical to the way the church, scholars and governments have conspired to keep the questions raised by these newly-discovered documents from becoming public questions.

The premiere of The Da Vinci Code movie will only fuel the fire and make the questions more pointed and the potential answers more interesting to main stream media. It is the final realization of Martin Luther: the common man able, not only to read the text in his own language, and to interpret it for himself, but now to see it in context alongside other apocryphal texts that have been hidden, then suppressed, for millennia.

Other movies and media, too, are asking pointed questions. The God Who Wasn't There is being pitched on liberal websites like Daily Kos. And there's always the Internet itself which may be the ultimate deconstruction of organized religion as we know it; and could also serve as the cradle for a new form of spiritual thought.

It would have made a great podcast. I wish I'd had the time to write and deliver it, but my mind and body have been on a project that we're just about ready to finally roll out. We started on it last July, figured it would take a few months. Boy, were we ever wrong!

My partner and I have always been believers that video overpowers audio whenever and wherever they're in combat. When the Irivers and Archos and rumors of Video Ipods started to swarm early last year, we wanted to be first with a site designed to feed original snack-size material, created and customized for portable, personal video devices.

While we haven't seen anything emerge quite like what we're building, the web video revolution has raged all around us as we've sat, chained to our desks like scriptorium monks, reworking our plans, producing and postproducing our features, building our networks and compressing and then compressing some more.

We're just about ready to roll out our portable video site. We're calling it Walkie-Lookie (we hope to be fully functional sometime in May--almost a year from when we started). In the past, we would have raced to be first at any cost, but if age brings any wisdom, its if you can't be first and right, its far better just to be right.

Tags: walki e-lookie · qumran · judas · Vinci · Baigent

This is my homepage during hurricane season.

As I write this, that website reports: “There are no tropical cyclones in the Atlantic at this time.” Wilma is gone.

She left one hell of a mess. We’re in a building on a corner, and they’ve been working on the traffic lights all day long. Wilma destroyed them. What she couldn’t tear down, she battered. The workers have no idea when the lights will work again, because they depend on the power that is out for almost everyone in the Palm Beach county. Five surrounding counties have similar but less severe problems.

I can write and post this, and our server can serve it, because of the generator that runs night and day behind our building. A couple of the residents on the street behind us have them too. But in that high-density residential district, most people left, either before the storm, or right after. Most of us knew what we were in for.

The guy who runs the liquor store down the block has a generator too. Same make and model as ours, so we compare notes. Before the storm his customers talked about how he was a local hero because he opened and sold liquor long before the chain stores did right after Frances hit, and again when her ugly sister Jeanne hit. After Wilma, he didn’t disappoint.

There is a curfew, so I am living here, with an air mattress that doesn’t hold air, 12 T1s (amazingly 11 of them working), a day old pizza that I’ve only eaten two slices of, a box of Bowl Appetit (Betty Crocker for Meals Ready to Eat), a case of water, the droning generator, and gasoline.

Yes, gasoline. It has become so precious, that most of my day was spent trying to acquire more, We are having it brought in from the next county up, where the damage wasn’t so bad and there are more operating gas stations. We were prepared for this to the point of hoarding, but it wasn’t enough. We got more gas tonight, and we can make it another day.

This is the ugly side of the hurricane. We are truly the great unwashed. Tonight the curfew is at 7. The nights have been black. I’ve seen stars I haven’t seen since the remote Nevada desert or the Alcan Highway. There is the din of generators, and nothing else. No lit storefronts. No lighted parking lots. No streetlights, no stoplights, no traffic. But tonight there is a glow on the horizon. Downtown Palm Beach—Cityplace—has power. There is life out there, even if you can’t quite reach out and touch it.

Cell phone calls are iffy. A mystical experience at this stage of hurricane recovery, is to pick up a phone and get somebody on a cell phone on the first try. That happened an hour ago, when I reached Ray at home. He has no landline, no internet connection, power from generator, and a cell phone whose best service comes from a tower that also serves the main staging area for Palm Beach County hurricane relief.

Last year, we were down almost a month as the treasure coast rebuilt. This time, we were only down a half-day.

I sit in this darkened office, surrounded by people in their homes listening to battery-powered radios or watching television by generator, trying a cell phone call now and again. But I have the whole world before me, a T1 connection, and 15 computers talking with people around the country and around the world, as if nothing has happened.

It is a strange world.

Tags: Wilma · hurricane · recovery · comm unications · T1

Your press release saying "Kanye West departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks." Serves to remind all of us why we need diversity in media ownership. Your network has a right to only air people who are willing to speak your words from their mouthes.

Has it occured to you, though, that this may be one of the reasons so many of your shows on so many of your networks have viewerships in the hundreds of thousands, while alternative media is starting to get viewerships and listenerships in the tens of thousands?

There was a time in this country that ownership of the media equaled control, because there were no other voices; you could pre-script a range of "acceptable" viewpoints and claim you're presenting diversity. You can't do that any more.

Tags: kayne west · NBC

Tags: podfader

Too many years of mixing too loud, plus a bout of otitis externa.

But I really meant allegorically. A few weeks ago, I know a couple of people tried to post comments here and were turned away. It got fixed, but looks like the bug returned.

So sorry if we couldn’t hear you. The folks at Blogmatrix are looking into it, and the attempts are appreciated.

I’ve also been remiss in doing anything more than venting my spleen and uploading quickly, and I’ll try and pay more attention to the whole PBCliberal Bloxmatrix experience.

If you really try, you can put a good face on this week’s Supreme Court news. Of course, there’s a limit to what one liberal can stand.