MetaBroadcast Blog

We woke up to a day packed with exciting meetings to learn that, even more exciting, Test Tube Telly users on Facebook and Twitter are nominating our 4iP funded app for the Most Creative Use of Facebook Connect in the 3rd annual Open Web Awards from Mashable. Thank you so much for your votes! And keep them coming :)

Test Tube Telly is a social media guide for long and short-form video content from Channel 4, BBC, and YouTube. Connecting with Facebook allows users to learn what their friends are watching, loving, and commenting. Twitter login has also been integrated in the fall of 2009 and users can now switch between their two accounts in just one click.

On this article, the Intelligent Life website writes: Does history work on television? Andrew Marr gives an insider’s view. Myself, I feel there’s even more to it, beside telly historians and their tools of trade. From the couple of paragraphs reproduced below, it is the last one that incites my imagination: could TV soon evolve into real-time interaction far beyond the red button benefits?

I found this UK telly feature useful only during large sport events like the Olympics and Wimbledon, when I couldn’t be bothered with TV guides/ schedules to understand what was on where and when. So the thought that TV content could become as hyperlinked as web content is a beautiful dream of unexplored potential, and possibly a huge opportunity.

Having seen the presentations and debate at the 2screen event last week, I continue to believe that the future lies in one screen savvy EPGs that rely on wonderfully linked content and thus, make the boundary between broadcast and internet fuzzy, if not irrelevant. But let me not get ahead of myself. I give you Andrew Marr’s thoughts, and hope to hear yours:

Television forces you out of the library. In the making, at least, it’s a fresh-air medium. Then it insists that you focus ruthlessly on a few emblematic stories. Then it boils things down yet again, because of the relatively tiny number of words each film can contain. There can be few spare words. It won’t replace books, with their vast word-hoard. But it is no longer a merely parasitical, secondary narrative, either.

And of course it is changing too. For how long will the hour-long narrative set piece survive? Soon, I believe and hope, viewers will be able to pause, dive away from the main narrative and pursue particular stories more deeply, watch more archive, hear a longer version of the interview and join a digital argument about what the telly historian has just said. In the end, you will even get to heckle “Civilisation”.

Three years ago, Chris shared his thoughts on the topic prompted by Simon Schama and Al Gore:

Al Gore [...] observed that while TV viewing is tremendously immersive, it is weaker than the Internet in maintaining multi-way conversation and encourage a meritocracy of ideas. [...] He urged TV festival delegates to consider how the natural strengths of current TV and Internet media can be combined.

It is almost 70 years since the BBC began scheduled television broadcasts, but we are still improving our understanding of how to best use the medium. Boundaries are being pushed by people like Simon Schama getting deep into the gritty detail of making great TV. What can we learn from him as we develop our ‘new media’?

[...] In TV richness exists in the raw footage. In the digital world technology also create opportunities—for richer interfaces, more interactivity, and better connection with others. I am not convinced that the Simon Schamas of the Internet are taking time to gain a detailed understanding of the possibilities.

Russell Davies – Dematerialising a Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)

When asked what it is that he does, he’s never come up with a good answer until seeing a sign inside Vauxhall Station: front of the train, less crowded –> now he knows he wants to hang out at the front of the train :)

Post-digital is the other answer to what he does, and if you listened to him before, you’ll know that his presentation is always alive, growing from very old and very recent events, reacting to sessions before his, and generally making a lot more sense in its oral form than in the nuggets I would summarize.

You might as well say it was so entertaining that I mainly took away a fuzzy feeling of comfort and a couple of ideas (which is the most any presenter can communicate efficiently, anyway, so rock on!). When it becomes available online, I’ll point to it, and until then, note:

There is a great deal of infrastructure around. Think of the newspaper printing machines he used easily and cheaply, for a friendly joke/ Christmas gift so successful that it turned into a service, Newspaper Club funded by 4iP. Think of all the RFID tags already embedded into our world.

Do physical things. It’s much harder to impress people on the screen today, because almost everything has been done already. However, the perception is that things in real life are hard work, and they can have greater impact.

Overall, seek to move from representing the world on the web to embedding the web into the world.

The afternoon was, indeed, much better than the morning. I don’t know, though, whether we’d return next year. I do know that we’d both like to see more ideas that can really happen tomorrow, as the theme this year proposed, rather than abstract thinking. Who knows, we may have to organize our own event one day. Not before the after party, anyway :) Good night, dConstruct!

Update, September 8th 2009: A few photos of the presentation on Flickr. Thinking now that the actual slides won’t end up online…

dConstruct logo, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

August de los Reyes – Experience and the Emotion Commotion

Invited to design the Windows keyboard button. Accepted with glee. It took six months! Now he can point at it at airport security check when asked what kind of designer he is :)

We find ourselves shifting from material to immaterial, as a society. People now value experience over things, buying memories over products.

Embedded intelligence: objects creating idea spaces, for example, places where you can/ are likely to think. Rational vs. emotional thought are not two different things, but two modes of the same thing.

Emotion is a label that we apply AFTER we experienced something, says a theoretician (I’m so bad with names!), e.g. after we see a bear and feel threatened, we label bear correctly. This theory is controversial, and here’s one proof that beyond the physical stimuli and nervous system answer, the context makes a huge difference: the high bridge study (1974), made to support the two-factor theory of emotion.

Male students were asked to cross a shabby bridge over a deep gorge into the arms of a nice lady. She would ask them serious questions on how they felt during their crossing, start flirting with them unannounced, and hand out her phone number. When she was on the other side of the bridge, answers were mainly about anxiety, and about a quarter of the guys called her. When she was positioned in the middle of the bridge, the answers revolved around thrilling, and half the students called her afterwards.

He applies the MDA model presented earlier by Robin Hunicke to non-game products and builds a counter-intuitive two-factor design theory: incite, then imprint. More here [PDF], as it wasn’t properly detailed today, I feel.

One of my favorite talks today, Robin Hunicke’s Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback went deeply into what I call (for lack of better words, though juicy surely qualifies now) shiny or sexy when I speak of design, online or not. Perhaps I got even more excited as she comes from the world of games, and I’ve been waxing lyrical for a while that the perfect designer for our services must have built successful games.

Not having been into gameism, though = gamers who insist that a game MUST HAVE 1. goals 2. a need for skills, old or newly acquired 3. challenges and 4. a story. According to that view, Monopoly, one of the most successful games of all times, should not work: its mechanics prevent the user from being in control.

Introducing MDA: Mechanics –> Dynamics –> Aesthetics. A model still to be enhanced and refined as it doesn’t include juiciness clearly enough = the juicy feedback a gamer receives from the game.

Recently, Hunicke designed Flower for PS3, a game of no challenges and goals, proven juicy by its sales, however. Her explanation: it was build from the start to allow the gamer to be free and reach a state of zen, if you like. The game, with graphics and sounds, responds to one’s actions, but that’s all there is to it. No arbitrary rules or restrictions.

Other examples of good juiciness: Prius, for giving the driver feedback on consumption (and not only) in real time, to the point where it’s reported that drivers change their driving style. The iPhone. Robots, be them cuddly dinosaurs we get for our kids, or that portrayed in the movie Moon. Online, Mint, for its explanatory, friendly sliders. For that reason, Excel could me made juicy, too :)

What if a game is not about winning, but about enjoying being, enjoying other things being, and enjoying the relationship/ interaction between you and them?

Potential application of MDA juiciness: building services online with real-time desktop components. Advice for b2b services/ products? Remember that efficient should not exclude fun.

Robin Hunicke, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Two beers in the sun, some food and coffees later, the sessions look a bit rosier. We missed some of Nathan Shedroff & Chris Noessel’s Make It So: Learning From Sci-Fi Interfaces, but we still got more out of it than from the abstract and/ or dull presentations this morning.

Successful anthropomorphism of humanism: sound is enough (though not speaking, R2D2 was one of the most lasting characters in Star Wars due to its expressions of feeling-like states with which we could relate/ empathize). Behavior is enough.

Microsoft’s Mr. Clipper (1997-2007) came out of research from the likes of NASA and Stanford BUT was poorly implemented. If done well, anthropomorphism adds a layer of sophistication, skill/ capability, and power. It is, however, a touchy technique in UI design.

The Institute for the Future worked out that it takes some 30 years for a new technology to be accepted and embraced. So we’re in a great place, this is still a good time to influence how the new technologies will end up.

The lesson from sci-fi interfaces is: if something works for the movie audience, it will work for the real life user. Except, shooting Minority Report took longer because Tom Cruise’s arms would hurt from trying to operate his interface up in the the air for long times :)

nachos, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Two American (i.e. little awareness of the rest of the world, beyond statistics) talks in the row, and neither focused on designing tomorrow. Oh, well, perhaps we’ll do better after lunch? Just a tidbit, too, from Brian Fling’s What’s Next? How mobile is changing design: Are HTML, CSS3, XML, APIs the new universal language? Are we designing for the medium or for the context? Many minutes later: Q What’s next? A Everything. After so much insistence on flying cars in the first part of the presentation, I think flying cars are next, dude! Forget all about mobile… phones ;)

Yes, the presentation was more upbeat, but the tempo doesn’t replace content in my book, and no questions from the audience proves me right (that or EVERYONE is ravenous). Among silly talks saturation, a busy inbox, and unreliable wifi, I stare at the ceiling rather than the screen, but that cannot please me endlessly and I sure hope it’s not what we paid for.

Brighton Dome, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Michael Migurski & Ben Cerveny of Stamen – Let’s See What We Can See (Everybody Online and Looking Good). A presentation so academia geeky in its ways and complex in its examples (of little use to normal people, rather built for authorities) that it failed to retain our attention for long. I caught just a tiny tidbit of food for thought that rang true (though partial): last century, we were expressing complex concepts through language; today, we can do it through behavior. There’s a growing data literacy. To turn off complexity at any time = turning off understanding.

Still, I can’t help thinking I would have spent the 45 minutes (waaay too long for a presentation) in the Royal Pavilion Gardens and make more out of them.

Royal Pavilion Gardens, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

It is our first time at dConstruct in Brighton, and its fifth edition. Let’s see what we pick up other than first impression—wow, this is a larger audience than imagined!

Adam Greenfield – Elements of a Networked Urbanism

By end of 2008, more then half the world’s human population lived in cities (U.N.). By end end of 2012, networked sensors will account for 20% of non-video Internet traffic (Gartner)

Cities as open APIs, where every resource has a 128 bit address, if not its every component. A world of dynamic responses, its constants becoming variable (building membrane responding to CO2 levels or a road responding to traffic).

If everything is so adaptable, isn’t there going to be a loss of sense of space for people? If latent information becomes explicit, aren’t we going to become uncomfortable (imagine you have TOO MUCH information about your local restaurant and pub and police force)?

Moving from a browse behavior to a search behavior, from a held information environment to a shared one: curating and re-releasing things, like packages of urban experience (e.g. secret information now: where to get shirts ironed fast and cheaply). From object to service, from vehicle to mobility, from ownership to use.

What if information, including personal history, never expires anymore, but persists? What if, at the same time, we are not longer passive but interactive, actively engaging in curating our city? What if wayfinding turns into wayshowing (take this subway car to exit onto that street—makes me think of Tube Exits, the iPhone app). However, this can be disempowering, as technology fails—all networks fail.

A city of such potential, fully networked to the point of garbage bin RFID chips, is being build in Korea: New Songdo City is a U-City = ubiquitous city (see ubiquitous computing).

Transition from community to network is troublesome. Community exists through cohesion based on plausible liability, on the nodding conversation level, and the interesting things happen where there’s a gap: in income, in habits, in ethnicity, etc. The current urban trend towards homogenization in a SN type of network fashion (do think Facebook) is threatening: too much information on your neighbors ruins community, too explicit knowledge (this neighborhood is Tory or Scientologic) creates a suburban feeling, rather than the urban one we were after when we decided to live in a city.

To avoid these mistakes, we need good urban design, we need to bring, next to technology, the best human contributions: intelligence, sensitivity, tact, delicacy. We need to contribute in design ourselves and become a constituent rather than a consumer.

Thoughts? Definitely a good coming together of various concepts and theories. I hoped, however, that there would be more about the future rather than the present.

Adam Greenfield, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

About a week ago, amplus.tv finally started gaining weight, like babies do, and its family sighed with relief. Gone are the newborn wrinkles, here to stay are defining features. Rather than boring you, like parents do, with every little detail that miraculously improved or stabilized (and you have never even noticed), we give you the highlights of the highlights:

1. Login with twitter is smoother, and amplus.tv will remember you forever—as long as you add moving images to your channel at least once every 60 days (and you don’t log out :)
2. The bookmarklet resides now in the website header, and has become much smoother itself (make sure to delete the old one and grab the new version)
3. Every user has an associated user number that is now published in his/ her channel page, to express our excitement with and gratitude for the early explorers of amplus.tv
4. Every bit of moving image, from any channel, was originally spotted by a first user, and now first spotters are visibly credited for their discovery anywhere the video is displayed
5. RSS feed items now include video descriptions, and link back to their amplus.tv channel, crediting the channel maker wherever the feed items travel

Lots of niceness and shininess, no? Hurry up, give it a go, and let us know how we may help you get more out of it. And check out the community channel in the sidebar of this blog :)

amplus.tv is the simplest, cutest tool for building a channel of moving images online. It now recognizes 7 major sources: blip.tv, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, TED, Vimeo and YouTube. To make a channel, login with Twitter and use the shiny, tiny bookmarklet in Firefox. Then take the RSS feed of any channel into readers or miro (lovely FREE player of video feeds), embed any channel on a website (think blog), and send a twitter message about… any channel :)

Cross-posted on Mirona’s professional blog and her personal blog.

amplus refreshed, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

amplus.tv is the simplest, cutest tool for building a channel of moving images online. It requires a Twitter account to sign-in (we only twitter on your behalf when you ask us to), and it recognises at this point 7 major video sources: blip.tv, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, TED, Vimeo and YouTube. To grab any video from these services you use the tiny bookmarklet you receive after sign-in, working like magic in Firefox. Then you can take the feed of any channel into your reader or miro (lovely FREE player of video feeds), embed any channel on a website (think blog), and send a twitter message about… you guessed it, any channel :)

Fair and square, amplus.tv has seen the limelight nearly one month ago at the Open Video Conference, as a cool app based on URIplay, our open source metadata aggregator. Born on June 19th 2009 after 8 days of labour, and hardly pampered meanwhile (as all hands on deck cuddled the TTT baby), amplus.tv is the prototype of a grander design we’ve got baking. While a bit wobbly, needing a new onesie, and craving even more food than the current 7 video sources, the service is already able to entertain large crowds: there’s you, with family and friends, the readers of you blog, with family and friends, then those who look at your channel page on amplus.tv, with family and friends, those who read a twitter message about your channel, with family and friends, and let’s not forget all those who come about an item off your feed in the reader, shared by… their family and friends :)

Yesss, I’ve insisted on family and friends above for a reason: what can be more entertaining, informative, or inspirational than showing dear ones what moves you instead of just telling them? With amplus.tv it’s easy peasy, so get playing and creating, and tell us what you think :)

Cross-posted on Mirona’s professional blog and her personal blog.

amplus.tv, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

We’re excited that Channel 4’s Test Tube Telly is live! It’s a service that helps you to find and watch great content from Channel 4 and YouTube, with a little help from your Facebook friends. We record a list of shows you watched or liked, and share these among your friends.

The team at MetaBroadcast built the innards of the site, and advised on the UX. Fondly nicknamed TTT, the service uses our own social media libraries, and is built on top of URIplay, our open source metadata aggregator. We have been working on similar applications for two years now, and have extensive experience in binding video metadata and social networks, to the point where we build and iterate this type of service very quickly: a month for core development.

It is great fun working with Tom, Andy, and Halmat at Channel 4 to make Test Tube Telly a juicy experiment. Next step? We can’t wait to enhance the site together with C4, and to release much of the metadata code open source, as part of URIplay.

test tube telly, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Present
Chris is ON AIR at the Media Futures Conference, presenting URIplay and our new baby product, amplus (more of a prototype, really). This will be the second LIVE introduction to a simple online tool for building video channels, and I’m very excited that so many people will understand the value of good metadata by seeing (and hopefully using) a straightforward, playful service built in a bit over a week by a smallish team. More about it in a post to follow :)

Update: Download the presentation [PDF, 4.4 MB]. Better yet, see it right now :)

Future
On Saturday, July 4th Chris will make his annual appearance at Open Tech, looking forward to more examples of open data in theory & practice, as well as inspiring conversations. Do find him.

Chris will also stop by miniSPA on July 15th if all goes well on the product front that day.

On September 4th we will attend dConstruct in Brighton, so do get in touch if you want to have a chat there, we’re terribly social.

Past
We enjoyed Twitter Dev Nest in London (follow @devnest) on June 23rd, though Chris was ever so slightly… knackered, just back from his NY trip. Of all talks we were mainly into apps and thus liked, in this order: scoopler (real-time search engine), selective twitter (for Facebook), friendbinder (all your friends in one place, think Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.), where’s my friend (places twitter friends on the map) and tweetrhapsody (a Twitter love story). There was one more app of interest, but I didn’t catch the name :( Otherwise, good beer and pizza :) We’re looking forward to the next one and hope to present, maybe, in 140 seconds, an idea crafted that very night on the seed of much older experience (2007!).

The first public appearance of amplus happened during the first metadata roundtable at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19th, to illustrate the benefits of clean metadata for video producers and lovers of moving images. Chris then went on and joined the second metadada roundtable on June 20th, and generally met a lot of cool folks changing the world. You can download the presentation [PDF, 6MB] or see it right now.

Previously, Chris had checked the Twitter Dev Nest upon his arrival in NY on June 17th, had fun, and made a note to stop by the one in London and compare. IN NY he met one of the two developers of Tweetboard, a brilliant service for real conversations over Twitter. I had seen it around the web quite a lot already, so I hope it flourishes.

After Chris presented at BarCamp London 6, a serious URIplay discussion started on Twitter, which you can easily follow. His presentation is on Prezi, and a few photos are available on Flickr.

Last week, Rob spoke at a looong conference (and useful, we hope to learn from his belated account) and now it’s our turn again to announce the next event: Social Camp London, we’ll be there on Saturday. Drop a comment/ twitter/ etc. if you’d like to meet.

We’re pleased to announce that the source code for URIplay is now available under the Apache 2.0 License. URIplay is an open media metadata aggregator about which we’ve written on this blog previously.

The BBC have provided loads of support for the URIplay project, and own copyright to much of the code. The team over at RAD Labs have worked hard to ensure that BBC code can be released this way. You can read more on the RAD Labs blog.

MetaBroadcast is actively developing URIplay to support a number of commercial projects. Our latest (near-daily…) updates will remain licensed under Apache 2.0, with the goal of encouraging a community of contributors.

Check out the source over on the URIplay Google Code project for today’s latest revision, and send questions our way. We’d love to hear from developers and publishers.

finishing touches on the presentation, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Come see the URIplay presentation at BarCamp London 6. In between 15:00 and 15:30 in the main hall (King’s Cross), Chris will tell you all about the video navigation of the future, involving metadata aggregation, data in media RSS RDF, and the support of BBC RAD Labs in launching the open source code and using the URIplay service in their prototypes.

Cross-posted on Mirona’s personal blog.

Update: The presentation is available over on prezi

Today we are very excited to announce the first public release of URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. A huge range of great audio and video content is now available online, but the content is fragmented across many different sites and platforms, with little connection between one siloed system and the next. We believe in the generative power of the web, we believe in linked data, and we want to see many ways to browse a full range of media content.

Enter URIplay, which aims to provide a single interface to metadata about audio and video content, built through a community effort. It makes light work of integrating content from a range of sources. Some cool things that you can do with today’s release:

• Access podcasts and YouTube data through the same interface—integrate only once for two sources, with more sources to follow.
• Read data using standard RSS or RDF libraries.
• Get context from Wikipedia, for example a list of everything Aaron Sorkin has made.
• Look items up via their iMDB links (using info from Wikipedia and DBpedia).
• Include data from the live web, via Twitter search. For example, what’s hot on YouTube?
• Subscribe to links in iTunes (e.g., this aggregate podcast made from an OPML file of interesting stuff) and in Miro (e.g., this list of the latest YouTube videos discussed on Twitter—paste it into Miro’s box titled ‘Add Channel’).
• Follow links to other sources of data, such as MOAT and Freebase.
• Diagnose the reasons for any latency—we return a breakdown of what we were doing while your app was waiting.

The work for this release has been completed by the MetaBroadcast team, with loads of support from the fine people at BBC RAD Labs. URIplay is a distributed system. The Java URIplay software running at uriplay.org makes calls to other services across the web to compile the necessary data. The BBC has also deployed a URIplay server, which means we can delegate queries regarding bbc.co.uk URIs to them. This launch is just the start of the journey for URIplay. We hope to add much more content over the coming months, find ways to better link disparate datasets, and add more servers. We’re actively seeking further involvement from developers and content publishers. Try our interactive demo at http://uriplay.org/, and join us on our Google Group or at Google Code. Finally, we’ll be releasing the full source code soon, under a permissive open source licence.

UPDATE: The code is now available, over on Google Code

Part of the research for our future consumer product is assessing the volume and quality of video content available online. One approach is to analyse video sources. A couple of days ago Chris pointed towards the Internet Archive as it has dedicated a whole section to public domain video content. They digitise it in several formats, host it, allow us to play it and offer it for download, as well. Regrettably, one cannot yet embed the videos. Why regrettably? Because they are literally sitting on a pot of gold: over 110,000 videos yet to travel the internets and, consequently, promote this amazing treasure and effort.

For more proof that free quality video is available online, let’s also consider:

• The success of YouTube, especially as a viable channel for small budget short movies and animations (rather than your everyday home video/ copyright-infringing publishing of a recorded TV show);
• More and more old movies, cartoons, documentaries a.s.o. are entering the public domain in one country or other (e.g. Mickey Mouse is still copyrighted in the U.S., but not in Russia);
• BitTorrent client Vuze, formerly Azureus, has topped 10 million unique monthly users this January* and a good number of them must enjoy free videos, legally made available in the Vuze library.

These said, let’s now find out where video content resides online, beyond the usual suspects (YouTube, Daily Motion, MySpace, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc.) and spread the good news—shall we?

The Guardian published a nice piece yesterday about our prototyping with BBC RAD Labs.

We’re really excited about this work because it has given us a the chance to develop our ideas around social navigation of media content, and aggregation of metadata from several providers. MetaBroadcast’s role on this project was to develop much of the web social media guide, and the backend metadata aggregator.

The project gave us a great opportunity to further develop the URIplay software and ontology. During March we’re planning to release the URIplay source code, and a public URIplay API for developers, in collaboration with the BBC.

If you’re interested, you’ll find a discussion of the details over on our Google Group.

consumer product survey

Hello, I’m Mirona Iliescu, the Product Manager of MetaBroadcast’s upcoming consumer product, a movie buff, and a social media butterfly. Within the start-up I do all sorts of stuff, from Design to Marketing to Community, but my focus today is to learn how you find and view videos. I believe that there is a lot of fabulous video on the Internet, and I can’t wait to help everyone discover and share it anytime, anywhere, with as few clicks as possible.

Among the first steps to that bright future is a survey we launched a week ago, hoping to learn how people all over the world share video content at the moment, with whom, and with what results and expectations. It takes 15 minutes to complete and it would help us immensely. Feel free not only to fill it in, but also to forward the link (here’s a convenient one: http://tr.im/maketvfun) to family, friends, and colleagues who love good video.

We won’t share your data or your answers, they’re both for internal use. We will, however, follow up with respondents who welcome it, and, later this year, launch a shorter quantitative research. These efforts are meant to inform a design so far built on intuition and assumptions, and help us move on towards building a prototype of our service. But first things first: be a darling and fill the survey that gets the rollercoaster going :)