Technology360

Joost: It's The Metadata, Stupid!

Janko Roettgers writes:

When talking about Joost, people tend to focus on its P2P infrastructure, its media center-like interface and its content deals. Now those are all valid points, but the real key to Joost’s success may be something else: A metadata framework that might just revolutionize the way we watch television. ...

... So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.  ¶  Imagine a personalized TV channel that only serves you shows your friends are literally talking about. Or think about the way this could transform programming itself. What if the Lost folks didn’t do their next Alternative Reality Game on the web, but in Joost itself, allowing you to collaborate with your friends and collect clues while watching the show? ...

Link:  NewTeeVee.

PBCore for publishing, sharing, and preservation

I'd like to shine some light on a good conversation that has popped up about the uses and importance of syndication and metadata on an Integrated Media Association blog.  See Jack Brighton's post with this title, John Proffitt's post, RSS a good start, but a federated PBCore-based metadata archive would be better, Dale Hobson's post, Thoughts from back home: centralize output, not input, and also the comments on those posts.  --Dennis

Folksonomy vs. taxonomy

Now there's a title that will scare away most readers.

I've been thinking about folksonomies this week, occasioned by a post that Bruno Giussani made in his LunchOverIP blog about Gartner's "Hype Cycle" report.  That report ranked folksonomies as a low benefit emerging technology. 

He didn't report on why and I can't access the report, but that then was followed by a conversation this afternoon at work (broadcasting organization) with a smart colleague who was arguing that the tagging (i.e., folksonomy) and search capability built into the media-over-IP service we've begun to use in the past year will not be sufficient to enable users to find our content and that of our partners without  implementation of metadata on our part and some form of professionally-designed taxonomy.  Not just how do they find stuff, but also, how do they find our stuff?

Then, on the other hand, this evening I ran across a post, Folksonomy as Symbol, on the Berkman blog by Becca Tabasky that quotes a short pro-folksonomy essay (he calls them "bottoms-up taxonomies") by David Weinberger.  He writes:

... If a folksonomy is a symbol, what is it a symbol of?  ¶  First, folksonomies stick it to The Man... ¶  We don't need no stinkin' experts to organize ideas and information! There is, of course, inefficiency built into expert-based taxonomies because they have to choose one way of ordering, and that one way is necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases. As Clay Shirky says, "Metadata is worldview." But beyond the inefficiency, simply having someone else have the authority to say 'It shall be filed thus' is a statement of political authority. Even when the experts do a good job—as they usually do, because they're experts—it is still an implicit statement that someone else's way of thinking is better than yours. ...

... Folksonomies also embrace excess. Publishing and broadcasting by their nature require us to trim the fat from our world. That's how those systems survive ...

Excellent essay, but then my colleague also made some excellent points.  For us professional media types, nothing defines the divide between the way we've done business throughout my 37-year career (and before) and the way we'll likely be doing business for the next 37 years than the admissibility of user organization of media content.  This is core value territory.  Are we to have self-organization for "small craft" content (videos of cats swinging on fans) and expert organization for "big craft" content?  Or is there a role for both?

We broadcasters need to understand that all curation doesn't need to be done on the ground on a program-by-program basis.  That's an artifact of the scarcity paradigm that's constrained us for decades.  Like most humans, we're good at making necessities into virtues.  But in an abundance paradigm, not only doesn't curation need to happen at the program level, it doesn't need to be done only by us.  It's not hard to envision curation at the five- or ten thousand-foot level -- which might be a working definition of taxonomies -- existing simultaneously and productively with user curation at ground level.

--Dennis

Alphabet soup update: OMN, PBCore, PBS NGIS

I spoke on Open Media Network this past week telephonically to the Southern University Research Association/Video Development Initiative (ViDe) 2006 conference in Atlanta and in person to a forum in Washington, DC sponsored by the New America Foundation.  My slides for both presentations are now available online on the ViDe and NAF web sites.  Although they're not posted yet, the SURA/ViDe slides for the presentations of my colleagues Gerry Field about the PBCore metadata initiative and Ed Caleca about the PBS public television Next Generation Interconnection System should be available on the ViDe site soon (I produced the session, so thanks to both for their contributions!).  It may be that both the ViDe and NAF sessions will be available as a video stream or download.  If so, I'll update this post.

Between the SURA/ViDe presentation on Wednesday and the NAF presentation on Thursday, OMN decided to make the 1.0 release of the OMN client slip five or six weeks to around the first of June, so the SURA/ViDe date is incorrect.  --Dennis

Preserving Digital Public Television

The Library of Congress has funded a project, Preserving Digital Public Television, to design an archive for the long-term preservation of digitally-produced public television programming.  The project has just launched a web site, ptvdigitalarchive.org, to share information about this important project.  Congratulations for a very nice effort, but puhleez, friends, add an RSS feed so some of us will have an order of magnitude or two better chance to catch what's new.  --Dennis

The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media

About a month ago, I posted an exerpt and link to Terry Heaton's terrific essay of this name.  If it went scrolling by without reading then (for shame), you have a second chance.  It's been republished in the December issue of The Digital Journalist.  Check it out.  --Dennis

Interview with OMN founder Mike Homer

AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins continues his interview (part 3 of 4) with Open Media Network founder Mike Homer, this part labeled "What About Social Networking?".   On 10/30, I posted part 1, "Reinventing Public Broadcasting," and updated it on 11/11 with part 2, "Why Open Media Network?".  Presumably part 4, "What Open Web Really Means," will be coming in a couple of weeks.  --Dennis

Audience Participation

Back in 1996, at the dawn (or at least early morning) of the browser age, UK television producer John Wyver published an essay in an apparently now-defunct publication, Abacus, that looks visionary in light of web/media 2.0 developments and the trend toward democratization of production and distribution.  Someone out there linked to this recently and I ran across it yesterday but, unfortunately, have lost who that was.  But it's good reading.  --Dennis

Wyver writes:  "... We used these new media to bolster our old medium of television. But we knew their potential far exceeded the uses to which we were putting them. Five years from now, the roles will be reversed. Some (although not all) parts of the broadcasting world will naturally migrate onto the Web. Here, television broadcasting will become an adjunct to Web-based interaction, rather than vice versa, and the broadcasting industry will be rapidly evolving towards a future very different from that which today's media giants now envisage. ...¶... What if television supported the Web? What if Web sites were the organising force for television shows rather than an adjunct? This vision has much to recommend it. It opens a new range of creative opportunities for programme makers. It offers a broader range of revenue sources than either the BBC's licence fee or ITV's advertising. It offers real viewer participation. On some subjects, the Web could gather broader, deeper content more cheaply and quickly than trad-itional television production companies could. Here's how television - new television - could work five years from now. ...¶... The key to creating community, however, is a complete rethinking of the role of the producer. No longer will producers have more or less the final say about content and organisation and no longer will they be more beholden to commissioning editors than to the viewers. The independent production team will still contribute its own televisual segments - some inspired by information on the Web site - and it will edit the broadcast show. However, in this new world, the most important job of the production team becomes structuring, indexing and enhancing the Web site, and one of the most time-consuming tasks will be "weeding" the site, stripping out superfluous, superseded and out-of-date material. ..."  Abacus via Internet Archive.

Interview with Clifford Lynch

Matt Pasiewicz has an interesting wide-ranging audio (MP3) interview with Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information.  I've heard Cliff speak three or four times and he was very generous with his time and advice at the meeting nearly a year ago which resulted in the formation of the Public Service Publisher initiative which I chair.  A very thoughtful person -- good listening for the education, library and public media communities.  Link:  EDUCAUSE.  --Dennis

The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media

Terry Heaton has another terrific essay: "... Television newscasts and programs, CDs, the morning paper, cable TV tiers, magazines, books, movies — virtually every form of mass media comes already bundled. It's as much a part of our consumer society as keeping up with the Joneses. The bundle includes everything that makes up the whole, from the content to the ads. This is how we do things. "Drive people to the bundle" is the mantra of mass marketing, which then uses its part of the bundle to rifle unwanted messages this way and that.  ¶  But bundled media has a serious drawback, one that cannot be wished away. It takes time to consume anything prebundled, and time is a precious and valued commodity in today's world. We're working more, and we have less time to ourselves.  ¶  And so, driven by the very real demand of less time, we've begun the process of tasting that which is unbundled. We unbundle television shows by skipping the commercials with our DVRs. We unbundle CDs by downloading the songs we want. We unbundle the national media by subscribing to specific RSS feeds. The signs of a burgeoning unbundled media world are everywhere. ...¶... The business opportunities for unbundled media are truly remarkable, but in order for local media companies to take advantage of them, they must begin viewing themselves as more than one-dimensional deliverers of bundled media. For broadcasters, that means finding the courage to say to ourselves that our transmitter isn't our top business anymore. It's but one of many, and our internal systems and even our organizational charts should reflect that. Only then will we be able to truly reinvent ourselves for the future. ..."  Link:  Donata Communications.  A complete list of essays and links are available on his weblog page.

Added 11/4:
Heaton also links to a related article in MediaDailyNews:  "Tasting the edges" of unbundled media and adds another post, "Unbundled video downloads: an exploding market."  --Dennis

Digital asset management – a report on current trends

Update 11/7/2005.   The presentations for this conference, Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries, are now available online.  Link:  Association of Research Libraries.

Al Cornish of Washington State University (home of my day job) has a nice post reporting on a higher education DAM workshop he attended last week in Washington, DC.  Link: 

Library Technology Issues. --Dennis

Interview with Open Media Network founder Mike Homer

Update 11/11/05:
Part two of this interview with Mike Homer, Why Open Media Network?, has now been posted.  Part one is linked below.  Link:  AlwaysOn.

AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins has an interview with Mike Homer about Open Media Network.  This is the first of four posts and I'll link subsequent ones here.  Mike is its founder and also chairman of Kontiki.  I'm chairing the Public Service Publisher initiative which is partnering with OMN.  --Dennis

Archiving television

J. D. Lasica has posted a 7-minute video interview with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle "about the obstacles and opportunities in archiving our television heritage."  Link:  New Media Musings.  --Dennis

The digital home: Science fiction?

"... Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the “digital home”, a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth. Demand from corporate buyers of technology has barely recovered from the dotcom bust and is widely expected to be unimpressive for years. By contrast, the homes of consumers appear to technology vendors as a barely tamed analogue wilderness. Darcy Travlos, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, estimates the market opportunity of the digital home at $250 billion in America alone and $1 trillion worldwide in three to seven years. ... ... All this points to a huge problem with the digital-home vision: the lack, among most consumers, of any sense of crisis about the status quo in entertainment. “We don't think many folks are looking for an electronic nerve centre in their homes,” says Pip Coburn, who runs Coburn Ventures, a technology-consulting and investment firm. After all, popping in a DVD, say, is so easy and works so well. By contrast, getting a digital home up and running promises several lost weekends of fiddling with manuals and settings, and hefty expenses in new gear. According to Mr Coburn's formula for evaluating new technologies, whereby adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change) outweighing their perceived pain of switching, the digital home ranks as a clear 'loser'. ..."  The Economist.

Added 8 Sep. 2005:  Umair vs The Economist.  Umair Haque writes:  "I have a lot of respect for the Economist guys, but sometimes they really get tech wrong. Case in point, the latest article about the digital home. The argument (it's hard to follow) is essentially that consumers don't value the digital home, but incumbents do, so they'll try it, and it will be a big, costly error.  ¶  I think this is a specious argument. Let's take a bigger picture look at what's happening in this space. ..."  Link:  Bubble Generation weblog.

Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building

Stuart L. Weibel, until June part of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative management team, writes:  "... There is much talk of taxonomies, their strengths, and deficiencies these days and in fact the emergence of 'folksonomies' hints at a sea change in the use of vocabularies to improve organization and discovery. The Dublin Core community has struggled with the role of controlled vocabularies, how to declare and use them, and how important (or impotent?) they might be. The notion that uncontrolled vocabularies – community-based, emergent vocabularies – might play an important role in aggregation and discovery occasions a certain discomfort for those schooled in formal information management. Whether it is just the latest fad, or an important emerging trend, remains to be seen. ..."  Link:  D-Lib Magazine.

New postings

I've added three presentations to the "Writings, Presentations" list on the left:  "Public Service Media in a 'My Time' World" from the 2005 Integrated Media Association meeting in San Francisco (also see Stephen Hill's companion presentation, "The Public Service Publisher Initiative"), "PBCore: The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary" from the 2005 PBS Technology Conference in Las Vegas, and "Scenarios for the Future of Public Broadcasting" from the May 2005 Channeling Public Interest Media" conference, also in San Francisco.  --Dennis

PBCore published!

PBCore -- more formally, the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary -- has been published by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded the multi-year, multi-party collaborative effort.  The dictionary is available under a Creative Commons license.  It's available at pbcore.org.  -- Dennis

Waiting for Attention... or something like it

Steve Gillmor writes:  "The idea behind attention [as in attention.xml -- Dennis] is very simple. I know, because it’s my idea. ...¶  Soon the outlines of a spec emerged; who, what, and for how long feed data was being consumed. ...¶... Why is this so important, at least to me? Because RSS is about time, and the data about lack of interest is intensely valuable to me as an indicator of what can be thrown out or pushed down the priority stack. As RSS takes hold, we are moving rapidly to a multiplicity of valuable content, where throwing out duplicates, redundancies, and repetitive analyses is key to providing enough of a window for absorbing the much greater signal-to-noise of the attention stream. ..."  Link: Steve Gillmor's Inforouter.  An interesting overview of this effort.  Steve has also been very helpful to the U.S. public service publisher initiative in which I've been active where his advocacy of attention.xml has been pursuasive.  I've been convinced that attention metadata are at least as important to its architecture as formal metadata (PBCore in this case) and tagging, which it will also incorporate.

Robert Scoble has a video interview with Steve on this subject (and others)  at ourmedia. --Dennis

New approaches to television archiving

Jeff Ubois writes about television archiving in a new article in First Monday.  --Dennis.  Abstract:  Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year, yet only a tiny fraction of it is preserved for future reference, and only a fraction of that preserved footage is publicly accessible. Most television broadcasts are simply lost forever, though television archivists have been working to preserve selected programs for fifty years. Recent reductions in the cost of storage of digital video could allow preservation of this portion of our culture for a small fraction of the worldwide library budget, and improvements in the distribution of online video could enable much greater collaboration between archival institutions.  Link:  First Monday.

Google vs. del.icio.us: search vs. attention

For the past several months, I've been using Google Alerts, customized daily emails to alert me when something of interest for my web log pops up in Google News.  For example, I have one that sends me a digest of daily references to "HD Radio."  I've had a couple of dozen of these and, while they've been a useful supplement to my now 190 RSS feed subscriptions, the ratio of possible links to usable stuff has been too high.  A couple of weeks back, I subscribed to del.icio.us RSS feeds for the tags, "podcasting" and "broadcasting."  With these, I'm finding many more usable links and I've been impressed enough that this weekend I've replaced 15 of the Google Alerts with del.icio.us feeds.

If you're not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a bookmark manager.  Instead of using your browser's favorites page to enter your bookmarks, you can do it on del.icio.us and add descriptive tags ("radio," "DRM," etc.).  Not only can you see all your own tags, you can also see what other people have saved using the same tags.  And, using the magic of RSS, you can subscribe to those tags in your news aggregator (I mainly use Bloglines) so any time someone adds a bookmark using a tag in which you're interested, it registers as something new in your aggregator account.  Very powerful.

So why is this important for digital media?

Google and other search engines give you everything that matches a search term -- kind of like drinking out of a firehose.  On the other hand, del.icio.us tells you what other people think is important enough to bookmark -- that is, to what they are paying attention.  Since the end of January, the Public Service Publisher initiative, in which I'm active, has had the benefit of the vision of Steve Gillmor, the co-proposer of the attention.xml specification, a means of harvesting metadata about actual usage to enable people to be smarter about what things they pay attention to.  The tags used by del.icio.us and the photo site Flickr.com perform a similar function, though in a manual way.

Search will be important for future digital media sites, but with thousands of content elements, attention will be even more powerful.

--Dennis

Managing Rights in the Digital Age

The ResearchChannel is carrying a talk with this title in its Northwest eBusiness series by Steve Davis of Corbis. The abstract says, "...Steve Davis, intellectual property lawyer turned entrepreneur, has built a global company around the concept of managing digital content and rights services. He discusses the future of e-business and media services in this fast-changing, complex environment." VOD link.

New approaches to television archiving

Abstract:  Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year, yet only a tiny fraction of it is preserved for future reference, and only a fraction of that preserved footage is publicly accessible. Most television broadcasts are simply lost forever, though television archivists have been working to preserve selected programs for fifty years. Recent reductions in the cost of storage of digital video could allow preservation of this portion of our culture for a small fraction of the worldwide library budget, and improvements in the distribution of online video could enable much greater collaboration between archival institutions. ... Link: First Monday.  The author, Jeff Ubois, is a staff research associate at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.  He has a weblog about television archiving and digital video at www.archival.tv.

Digital asset management

Broadcast Engineering has a feature article on DAM in its 2/2006 issue that's worth checking out. --Dennis

Educational Resources for Digital Asset Management

A new web site serving as a DAM tutorial with a spin toward selecting systems is up at digitalassetmanagement.com. I can't vouch for its objectivity, but a quick perusal leads me to believe it's worth a visit. --Dennis

A framework for Internet archeology: Discovering use patterns in digital library and Web-based information resources

Abstract: Archeologists use artifacts to make statements about occupants of a physical space. Users of information resources leave behind data–based artifacts when they interact with a digital library or other Web–based information space. One process for examining these patterns is bibliomining, or the combination of data warehousing, data mining and bibliometrics to understand connections and patterns between works. The purpose of this paper is to use a research framework from archeology to structure exploration of these data artifacts through bibliomining to aid managers of digital libraries and other Web–based information resources. ... Link: First Monday.

Public Service Publisher initiative

The "public service publisher" (PSP) initiative that has been underway during the fall of 2004 and winter of 2004-05 was featured in two sessions at the Public Broadcasting New Media Summit 2005 in San Francisco this week. [Disclosure: The Summit was the annual conference of the Integrated Media Association of which I'm a board member and I'm one of the principals developing the PSP.  The PSP is not a project of the IMA.] The initiative has been in a selected comment period over the past few weeks and is now moving into a general comment period. ¶ Full information about the initiative is available at the companion website to this weblog, technology360.org/psp. Anyone wishing to provide comments can email me at the wsu.edu address listed at haarsager.org. I've pasted the executive summary below. --Dennis

The Public Service Publisher (PSP) initiative is a process through which public broadcasters can identify a workable, system-wide strategy to meet three emerging needs:

·         The need to provide, in a simple and usable way, content to a growing audience of listeners and viewers who are adopting on-demand technologies, including streaming, TiVo, RSS, iPods, et al.

·         The need to distribute public service content through a system that optimizes online search results, thus reaching new users and expanding the impact of existing programs.

·         The need to develop revenue streams based on new media applications that can expand and sustain new service without undermining current system revenues.

This concept was developed by a group of public broadcasting executives, independent producers and “outside” colleagues.  Much of the inspiration came from two sources:  first, a groundbreaking paper, Public Radio Online (PRO) by Stephen Hill, and second, an innovative RFP process initiated in the UK, where a government agency solicited proposals to develop a new digital delivery service for public service programming.  The PRO paper proposed creation of a web-interface and related infrastructure to provide access to all public radio content online (national and local streams, archives, and web-only features).  It proposed that all traffic to the service would come through station sites, and suggested a tiered service in which some content would be free, while other service levels would be offered for a fee (either a monthly subscription or one-time charges).  Producers, stations and networks would share this revenue through formulas that reflected actual use of content and traffic delivered to the service.

In December 2004, an ad hoc group of 14 executives – organized by Mark Fuerst, Dennis Haarsager, Hill and Steve Rathe – met in Chicago to discuss these concepts.  The organizers

felt it was important to create an inclusive process in which the interests of stations and producers could be identified and reconciled with the other public broadcasting interests.

The meeting succeeded.  Over ten hours, the participants enlarged and refined the PRO concept to include public TV and 3^rd party partner content.  Guided by new CPB research, they placed a high priority on reaching fringe and non-public broadcasting users.  They embraced the RFP approach and tailored it to the requirements of U.S. public broadcasting.   They reached consensus on the following points:

• There is an urgent need to provide on-demand service to a growing audience of new media users.
• Reaching this audience will require a system-wide strategy.  Efforts by individual stations, producers or networks will not provide a critical mass of content, be less competitive, and less likely to be sustainable.
• Various forms of paid content should be explored as sources of new revenue, supplementing existing sources such as underwriting.
• The PSP should be configured to respect and preserve existing brands; nonetheless, the group found compelling reasons why a PSP service should be offered both through existing participant web sites and through a freestanding web portal – a public service media mall.
• The PSP would offer producers a powerful way to attract and serve new users—without closing off other distribution options that those producers may also wish to exploit.
• By aggregating public radio stations’ online program schedules, the PSP could enable “TiVo-like” functionality for public radio, allowing listeners on-demand replay capacity for all broadcast programming while maintaining branding.
• The PSP would allow uniform and user-friendly new media acces to U.S. public broadcasters’ content on a worldwide scale, under terms determined and controlled by those broadcasters.
• The technical and marketing requirements of a PSP extend beyond the scope of any existing organization; so in creating a PSP service, system leaders should consider a range of organizational forms, such as combining existing services, forming a new operating organization, or outsourcing some operating requirements to existing non-profit or commercial entities.

The group agreed to launch a planning process over two-months, beginning with the distribution of a Request for Preliminary Proposals.  Comments and responses are being collected through mid-February.  Additionally, they presented their ideas at the IMA Conference in San Francisco on January 27 and 28 and then with the public broadcasting community at large.  They will also meet with potential respondents to the RFPP.   And finally, they will contact potential funders to solicit advice and support.

David Weinberger Library of Congress address

I'd like to give a strong recommendation to listen to the address that David Weinberger gave recently to an audience at the Library of Congress (and C-SPAN).  Dr. Weinberger is currently a fellow at Harvard's  Berkman Institute for Internet & Society and is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.  His web site is the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.  I learned from the intro to this speech that he has also worked as a joke writer for Woody Allen.  The first half of the speech is especially relevant to modern digital distribution considerations, but there is interesting material in the second half as well as the introduction and Q&A.  --Dennis

2004 Dublin Core Conference presentations available

Most of the presentations at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2004, Shanghai, China, are now available online. --Dennis Link: Welcome to DC-2004.

Share the Wealth

EMI is leading the charge to transform the nightmare scenario of superdistribution - users circulating content without paying for it - into a lucrative business model. ¶
Previously, Digital Rights Management (DRM) was about keeping honest users honest. Content protection - not promotion - was the focus, and companies rushed to develop DRM solutions and technologies to prevent users from sharing content with their peers. ... ¶ This stringent approach to DRM has the buy-in of major media companies because it protects music downloads and video clips from unauthorized distribution. But it also ignores user requirements to control and use this content as they like – including the freedom to access it, port it and distribute it among their peers and across a number of devices and platforms. To create a sustainable mobile content offering operators and content rights owners have to control, protect and charge for content. But they must also fulfil user demands for a seamless customer experience – and the freedom to share. ¶ Against this backdrop, superdistribution is gaining traction, and the business model media companies once considered taboo is now poised to go mainstream. ... Link: TheFeature.

DRM to Go: Protecting Mobile Content

Mobile content has made Anders Andersson a lucky man. An avid fan of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, he was worried that his day job and long hours would prevent him from watching track and field events and following his favorite Swedish athlete Carolina Klüft, who competes in the heptathlon and long jump events. But TeliaSonera, the leading telecommunications provider in the Nordic-Baltic region, has come up with solution that will allow Andersson to keep up with coverage—even on the bus to work. It has rolled out Sweden's first large-scale mobile television broadcast service, allowing Andersson—and thousands like him—to watch the Olympics anywhere, anytime on a 3G-enabled handset for free. ¶ In neighboring Finland, TeliaSonera has launched a service designed to change the way users listen to—and interact with—music. In June, it became the first operator in Europe to "air" Sony's StreamMan. The mobile service allows users with Nokia 6600 and Ericsson P800 and P900 smartphones to listen to music, create playlists, and share their experience with friends. ¶ TeliaSonera is one of a growing number of mobile access providers making the transformation from network operator to broadcast operator. ... Link: EContentMag.com.

Moratorium on metadata?

Ramesh Jain: "In the recent issue of IEEE Multimedia Magazine, Dick Bulterman wrote a very interesting piece "Is it Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?." Dick is a very well known researcher in multimedia authoring environment and was a leader in the team that developed SMIL. I strongly recommend that people interested in use of metadata read this article. Particularly, his humorous story at the beginning of the article is very revealing. ¶ This article has many interesting arguments that are presented using three well well-known metadata standards: Dublin core, MPEG-7, and Semantic web. I will not go in details here but will mention here two of my favorite points:

1. During the past decade, it's become clear that for electronic assets, locating text is best done using the text itself rather than relying on metadata, because the context of the search is defined at query time rather than catalogue time.
2. Most of the metadata for text files, images and video, if not all of it, is assigned using automatic techniques based on once entered parameters combined with clock, camera parameters and similar information at the creation time. These parameters are usually useless in the context of the search and even when could be useful are usually wrong because people don't change parameters (like clock in the camera) when they move. Granted that one day these parameters may have some correcting things or more correct contextual values like the clock in you mobile phone that is set by the local carrier. But today most of this data is wrong.

..." Link: Ramesh Jain.

Metadata for multimedia

Metadata should be considered broadly in two different classes. There is metadata about a document, an image, a sound file, a video file, or any other sensor file. This meta data is about the whole file. Thus who is the author, or creator of the file, time and place of creation, mechanisms used in creation, and similar information is part of this metadata. Let's call this A-type metadata. The other class of meta data is related to the content of the file. Let's call it C-type metadata. Thus the examples about a number representing annual salary and such information are related to the content of the document. ... Ramesh Jain link.

Metadata, text, and multimedia.  Based on research literature, trade literature, and even popular press it is very easy to get the impression that semantics will be no issue because we are now going to attach metadata to all forms of data.  It appears that the current belief is that once metadata is available, semantics problems are solved.  Wouldn't it be nice, if this was even close to truth?  ¶  So what is metadata and how does it solve the semantics problem. ... Ramesh Jain link.

New Public Television Partnership Receives Major Program Preservation Award from the Library of Congress

Thirteen/WNET New York, one of America's leading producers of public television programming, has been awarded close to $3 million by the Library of Congress for Preserving Digital Public Television, a new three-year planning project that will set the groundwork for preserving digital television programming. ¶ Joining Thirteen as partners on the project are public broadcaster WGBH Boston, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and New York University. All four institutions will work together to plan standards, procedures and facilities which will lead to creating a long term preservation archive for public television programming produced in digital formats. ... Business Wire link

Metadata for the Masses

Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. ...¶... But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification... — how people classify and categorize the world around them. We’re beginning to see ethnoclassification in action on the social bookmarks site Del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr. Both services encourage users to apply their own freely listed tags to content — tags that others can then employ when looking for content. ... adaptive path link This is would seem to have some interesting applicability to the problem of providing a recommendations system for "long tail" audio and video content. --Dennis

Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary, based on Dublin Core, to be launched

Here's Dublin Core's news story about PBCore. --Dennis. The inaugural version of the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary (PBcore), a standard way to describe all public broadcasting content based on Dublin Core metadata, is being finalized for the launch of version 1.0 in September 2004. ... DCMI News link

To Metadata or Not To Metadata

To metatadata or not to metadata, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous search results Or to take up metadata against a sea of irrelevance And by organizing them, find them?

With all due apologies to the Bard, the questions of whether to add metadata to unstructured content and how much effort is really justified to do so have been raised with increasing frequency and vigor in the last year. ¶ These issues and more were explored last year at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) 2003 Workshop. While some participants argued for a drastic reduction in metadata efforts or at least rethinking those efforts, other participants offered new ideas of how to create valuable metadata and how to generate value from metadata. ¶ A couple of things have become increasingly clear: Metadata is not going away and there is no one simple solution to how to add metadata and maximize its value. Consequently, what we are going to do in this article is take a look at some of the basic issues around adding metadata to unstructured content and explore a range of approaches that various groups and software vendors are trying. We will then examine how a broader view of metadata, beyond simply adding keywords to documents, is leading to a more sophisticated, multi-dimensional or infrastructure-based approach to metadata that supports a smarter balance of both more and less metadata. ... EContentMag.com link

In Search Of Better Video Search

IBM, Microsoft, and academic researchers are trying to invent ways to find specific images in video footage. ¶
For 20 years, computer scientists have been working on improving ways to search among reams of video clips for a particular shot. New research by IBM, Microsoft, and academic teams studying the problem could bring them a step closer to that goal. ¶ At a conference in Cambridge, England, last week, an IBM researcher gave the first public demonstration of a computer system called Marvel that uses statistical techniques to learn about relationships between colors, shapes, patterns, sounds, and other clues from video footage that can help identify its content. IBM's prototype then labels the footage so users can go back and find individual shots. That could be a boon not only to TV news producers but intelligence analysts watching surveillance video and even PC users editing home movies. ... InformationWeek link

PBCore web site & "case for"

There's been a relaunch of the web site for the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary project (PBCore), generously hosted by the University of Utah and maintained by the indefatigable Paul Burrows. In addition to the home URL, it is now accessible from the easier to remember pbcore.org.

Readers might also be interested in a short essay, Public Broadcasting's Future Is PBCore's Future, by myself, Marcia Brooks at WGBH, and James Steinbach at Wisconsin Public Television. It was included as part of the deliverables for the project which developed PBCore, is posted in the Continuation area below, and as a pdf on my web site, technology360.org. --Dennis

PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) Test Implementation Complete; Launch Imminent

The inaugural version of PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary), a standard way to describe all public broadcasting content, has emerged from the Test Implementation phase and is being finalized for the launch of version 1.0 in September 2004. Under development since January 2002, PBCore is the result of unprecedented cross-organizational cooperation by a team of public radio and television producers and managers, archivists and information scientists. ¶ A common metadata protocol is fundamental to public broadcasting's ability to work in collaborative environments to deliver and exchange content across new digital distribution platforms. PBCore will enable more efficient and cost-effective ways to leverage content and service partnerships to serve existing and new constituents. PBCore will facilitate new production collaborations and the ability to parse traditional programs into short segments for Web distribution or as niche content for specific community, service and institutional needs. For these applications where granular manipulation and interoperability are required, PBCore will be essential. [continued below] Market Wire link

Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements

It is common to hear members of the digital library community debating the relative merits of the two most common rights expression languages (RELs) ... and which is preferable for digital library systems. Such debates are, in my opinion, premature and should be postponed until this community has developed a clear set of requirements for rights management in its environment, including rights expression, the encoding of license terms, and file protection. ¶ This article is intended to provoke discussion of those requirements, and it attempts to do so by illustrating aspects of the current developments in rights management that may be problematic for digital libraries. This does not mean that the digital library community will need to develop its own rights language and rights management solution, separate from the existing standards in this area. It means that at this moment in time we do not have sufficient information about our own rights management needs to evaluate any particular solution nor to negotiate for extensions to accommodate digital library functionality. ... Ariadne link

Hungry for Video

Who among us wouldn't like to remodel a living room for $1,000 or make crispy duck salad with bitter orange vinaigrette in less than 30 minutes? Any fan of Scripps Networks' collection of home and hospitality cable channels, which includes The Food Network and Home & Garden Television, and which currently has a combined 209 million subscriptions, knows such things are possible. ¶ The problem for most people is finding the time to watch the programs that offer those tips, which is why Scripps now delivers video content to consumers via both the Internet and digital cable. For individuals who subscribe to either service, segments from popular series like Before and After and 30-Minute Meals with Rachel Ray are literally at their fingertips. What makes this possible on the back end is Scripps' digital asset management (DAM) system. ... PC Magazine link

Asset Management For Digital Television

As television stations go digital, the problem of managing digital assets is becoming more and more of a concern. Analog assets, that in the past were logged and scheduled for play-to-air, now have to be manipulated entirely by their metadata — a database of auxiliary information about content that grows with each step in the content’s life cycle from production to distribution. Hence it’s not only TV stations that rely on metadata, it’s everyone from the content creator to the distributor, and each step along the way, different types of metadata are necessary to drive back-office applications. ... DTV Professional link

Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary

After a remarkable two-year collaborative effort led by CPB and WGBH, the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary ("PB Core") is moving toward launch. I've been fortunate to participate in this effort, but a number of others have done the heavy lifting. I would add that PB Core is perhaps the most remarkable collaboration I’ve ever seen, incorporating the asset management needs of public radio and television, national distributors and local stations, producers and broadcast stations.

The timing is perfect: in television, PBS is rolling out both the NGIS and ACE initiatives; in radio the NPR PRSS is rolling out the ContentDepot and an innovative program marketing and DRM system called Public Radio Exchange (PRX) has begun; and public broadcasters associated with the Integrated Media Association believe that broadband is beginning to gel as a third public medium. Public stations across the country are facing the implications of "going digital," both over the air and over new platforms. A host of new services are in the offing. There's system-wide focus on most effective use of resources. At the core of all this is a common metadata standard – the lingua franca of public broadcasting’s digital transition.

Test implementation is wrapping up this month and we hope to release results from that phase by mid-July and publish the dictionary in the fall. A news release from WGBH can be accessed in the continuation below. A paper presented at the Dublin Core 2003 Conference entitled "PB Core -- The Public Broadcasting Metadata Initiataive: Progress Report" is available at technology360.org/PB_core_DC03.pdf. Project updates, presentations, background articles, and resources are available on the PBMD Web site at http://www.utah.edu/cpbmetadata/. --Dennis