Category:Audiovisual

Beginner's Guide to the AudioVisual P2P Net

Using the net's P2P audiovisual infrastructures can be seen as connecting oneself to a collective mind - an intelligence much smarter than each individual. Here is how it works:

Tools and Platforms

A blog (basically a dynamic homepage, last entries show up first) is an individual's or an organisation's virtual home in the audiovisual P2P net - here a review of blogging tools, providers and some basic blogging introduction: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050714gardner/. Very popular is the free and open-source wordpress platform: http://wordpress.org/.

New blog entries can be tagged (keywords describing the content) and then be found via blog search engines like technorati http://www.technorati.com/ or smaller but more specialised ones like blogdigger http://www.blogdigger.com/.

An important tool for bloggers is the RSS feed, readers can subscribe to a blog's feed (like to a channel) and will be automatically notified about all updates. Feedburner http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home is the largest feed management provider and offers a very useful free basic service.

There is a vast choice of "free" services for media hosting - important in this context is the question "who owns the content?". Since those "free" services all want to make money somehow they all have a "terms of service" or "terms of use agreement" that should be read and understood before submitting media. In most cases "free" means that the service retains the right to alter the user's media and to use it for advertising. Some of the more recent "terms of service" agreements from some of the better known providers seem to be very bad for the users/creators. One of the few safe choices at this point (July '06) for free media hosting are still only the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/index.php and Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org/.

Licences, like the popular Creative Commons licences http://creativecommons.org/ are important for an unbureaucratic online distribution: instead of restricting a user's possibility by reminding him of the copyright, online audio and video gets distributed because users are encouraged to share e.g. a podcast under a certain license.

For musicians/djs specially interesting is ccmixter http://www.ccmixter.org/ - featuring creative commmons licensed samples/remixes and making it easy for artists to focus on the creative part of their work.

The open-source democracy player http://www.getdemocracy.com/, broadcast machine http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast and videobomb http://www.videobomb.com/ - all from the participatory culture foundation http://participatoryculture.org/ - are very interesting options for distributing/promoting independent online film and video.

Still in an earlier development, but promissing for independent audio/music distribution is the open-source project songbird http://www.songbirdnest.com/.

This Open media projects list at ourmedia is a good starting point for exploring alternative/participatory web media projects: http://www.ourmedia.org/about/open-media-projects.

A good general resource for audio/video web related topics is the Wikipedia: e.g.: Podcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast or RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29

How to

Our Media's Learning Center is a great place to start learning about podcasting and webcasting, at http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open.

A good place to start learning about videoblogging is http://freevlog.org/.

Theory

The so called "digital revolution" at the end of the 20th century was often exclusively described as a technological revolution - it was going to bring consumers a new "digital" quality (CDs instead of LPs) and advanced productivity to almost every industry. Ten years after the web went mainstream a different picture evolves: consumers turn into producers, we blog about a participatory culture and citizen journalism and we share our media (recommended article: "We Are the Web" by Kevin Kelly, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech_pr.html).

Or in short: what was "Power to the people" in the '60 of the last century today is "We are the media" (watch this "Video Mash-up about the Vlogging movement": http://www.ourmedia.org/node/9237).

Some Basic Resources

This section, maintained by Valentin Spirik, will focus on the how-to and technical aspects of producing audiovisual content using the new P2P autonomous media infrastructure.

Our Media's Learning Center is a great place to start learning about podcasting and webcasting, at http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open

This Open media projects list at ourmedia is a good starting point for exploring alternative/participatory media projects on the web: http://www.ourmedia.org/about/open-media-projects

(July 2006)

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