Spreading Flames from Embers of a Read Only Fire

Lawrence Lessig gave a keynote performance at Wikimania 2006 in which he praised the assembled Wikimaniacs for their contributions to free culture and urged them to do more. Jonathan Zittrain moderated Lessig’s keynote. Zittrain admires Lessig and in closing the session, he rued the passage of time because there was no time for discussion. In an aside to Lessig, Zittrain said with some irony, “You are in danger of giving RO [Read Only] a good name”. While Zittrain’s observations may be true for our conventional understanding of discussion in the face-to-face version of Lessig’s keynote, but it also shows how difficult it is to integrate the full implications of Lessig’s work into our thinking. Lessig (and Zittrain, to the extent that he used the time Lessig had planned for interaction) implicitly said, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’

Unfortunately, I did not attend Wikimania 2006. Despite my absence, I am confident of the statements I wrote in the previous paragraph. I can be so confident because several participants made the meeting much more than the Read Only form implied by Zittrain. During and after Lessig spoke, they engaged in the practices that Lessig advocated. For example, Andy Carvin live blogged about the meeting and made a digital recording and Chris Bradley created a transcript of the presentation. And Damian Finol and Raines Cohen each made video recordings of the performance. And Robin Good remixed excerpts from Finol’s video to make memorable quotes more accessible. Wikimania organziers also arranged for professional video to be taken. More recently, I contributed by prototyping an approach for selecting scenes within Google videos as an alternative to Good’s reproduced excerpts.

Each of the media and instances has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, Finol held the camera steadier and panned less but Cohen captured higher quality screen images. The professional video may have higher production values but the amateurs got theirs out more quickly (Have they released the professional videos yet?). While only some contributors explicitly include creative common licences, they have released their work in the spirit of free culture. With the resources that each has released, they and many others are making it possible to extend free culture as Lessig urges. When Lessig and Zittrain decided how to use the available time, they knew that this group of Wikimaniacs did not need to be lead through the doing. But if we aspire to draw outsiders in, we will probably need to facilitate the doing, too.

How are you going to contribute to expanding the Read Write Culture? What can we do to catalyze more growth of the movement?

Attn: Google’s Human Reviewer (copy)

Note: I copied my post to the Google Reviewer from Seamless Services? because I can’t be sure that they will allow it to be published. Presently, blogger.com will only allow me to save it as a draft.

Google’s spam-prevention robots have flagged my blog.
Since you are reading this, you are not a simple-minded Bayesian spam filter. Please consider additional explanation for this approach that you will find at:
https://scspaeth.wordpress.com/tag/video/

I would have preferred to keep this discussion here at blogspot.com to maintain integrity of the development. But I don’t know what your decision will be so I created the additional information in a place where I could be sure that it will be preserved.

Intro to scene selection in Google Video

Apple promotes its new version of iDVD 6 by describing its ability to facilitate creation of a “professional” feature of commercial DVDs.

Practically every DVD has a scene selection menu. It’s one of the best things about watching DVDs: jumping from scene to scene without rewinding or fast forwarding. And you can add the same professional touch to the DVD titles you author yourself in iDVD 6.

Eric von Hippel suggests ( Democratising Innovation, 2006 ) that power-users push the envelop of tools and influence their development. In December 2005, Jon Udell celebrated Google Video’s move to Flash because the change gave him greater control over display. He identified the opportunities and benefits of video clipping:

Composing on-the-fly remixes is one of the nice benefits that fall out of this approach, but the larger goal is to bring the social effects we see at work in the textual blogosophere into the realm of audio. Linking and quotation drive discovery and shared discourse, but media formats, players, and hosting environments are notoriously hostile to linking and quotation, and I’d really like to see that change.

Udell even prototyped a clipping service using Greasemonkey on Firefox to demonstrate how he thought it should behave. But Greasemonkey appeals primarily to hackers and geeks.

In July 2006, Google Video announced the new Link within a Video feature and Garret Rogers reported on Google’s improvements in linking to time code anchors:

An hour long documentary with only one really good part would be a nightmare to share normally — but now it’s as simple as adding “#45m2s” to the end of the link.

But Rogers also expressed doubts about how widely the feature will be used:

I wonder how users will learn to use this feature if they don’t read blogs though — it’s definitely not user friendly. A way to select a point in a video when using the “send link” feature would be an excellent and welcome addition in an upcoming version.

Google Video improved the tool further to make it easier to link to a specific spot in the video and in November 2006 described how to queue up a clip:

Now, whenever you specify times of interest in a comment, we’ll automatically hyperlink those times so that clicking on them will take a visitor directly to that spot in the video. To be hyperlinked, the time must be in h:mm:ss or m:ss format and within the actual duration of the video.
If you want to share that special moment, simply right click on the hyperlink, select “Copy link location,” and then paste it into an email to a friend or post the link in your blog.

That is straight forward! So I think that people would be excited about this capacity and bloggers would be promoting it like crazy. But the number of links to the page on the Google Video Blog that describes how to use this function is (on 2007-02-23) surprisingly small:

Web Results 1 – 8 of about 9 linking to http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-commenting-and-stats-features.html. (0.08 seconds)

So either people do not appreciate the power of the approach or Google Video has made the process so intuitive that people can use it without coaching/instruction. They have added the following just below the input fields for comments:

New! Link to interesting parts of the video with times like 1:24:30 or 0:55.

Personally, I was sufficiently uncertain about how it worked, that I went to an obscure sandbox (to me) of Google Video and experimented before trying it in a place where I really wanted to use it. Look for my real application in the comments at Damian Finol’s video of Lessig’s Presentation at Wikimania 2006. Note that a comment can have more than one link. The time-code links quickly take the viewer to each of the starting points in any order. In my example, I have arranged the list similar to a table of contents. In this way, it is possible to combine the attributes of text and streaming media.

In casually touring videos at Google Video, I haven’t seen many people using the new feature. If Google were actively encouraging people to use the technique, then they might showcase uses. Google Video has created a type they call picks and provide a link to filter for that type. When I looked there, I found extensive use of the commenting feature among the 10 current Google picks but only one comment contained a link to a time code. An anonymous viewer of a robotic arm amusement ride commented that ‘Any taller and she would have been scalped at 0:05‘. While I am happy to find this example, it hardly demonstrates the power of the approach.

If video is the new language of the masses, as Lawrence Lessig asserts in his presentation at Wikimania, I anticipate we will start to see better use of the tool and further refinements in tool function. For example, I’d like to be able to edit my comment and selectively link to it. I agree with vaXzine, a user who tried to link to a better audio track for the Lessig presentation, that it would help if it were possible to add simple html to the comments.

Scene Selection in Google Video

I created a list of 28 “scenes” to produce a Scene Selector for Damian Finol’s video of Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at Wikimania 2006. The entire video is 49 minutes and 14 seconds long so it would help to be able to jump around to points of interest. I created the list by making excerpts from Andy Carvin’s live blogging at the event and then refined the list by watching and listening to the video.

This comment provides a list of links to “scenes” that make it possible jump around Lessig’s keynote to topics that interest you.
For more information:
https://scspaeth.wordpress.com/tag/video/
0:18 Zittrain’s Introduction
2:03 ReadOnly vs. ReadWrite cultures
4:30 Sousa’s concern for loss justified
…
19:47 Copyright supports ReadOnly
21:00 © War on RW- How to resist?
22:10 Litigate & build popular movement
…
46:22 Brokaw, David Clark, Stallman
47:45 Plea: Wikipedians push free culture
48:45 Zittrain’s Conclusion
Note: New comments are added at the top of this list so they will displace this list from close proximity to the video and will require scrolling.

I pasted the full list into the comment tool and discovered that the comment tool accepted only the first part of the list:

This comment provides a list of links to “scenes” that make it possible jump around Lessig’s keynote to topics that interest you.
For more information:
https://scspaeth.wordpress.com/tag/video/
[the list continues but WordPress is making it difficult to share]

I copied my Scene Selection List from my comment at Google Video and pasted them here. But, I kept losing them while trying to edit this post. Will need to troubleshool this issue, too. Seems that it has something to do with the captured links to time-codes.

Blog filtering criteria

Earlier today I wrote Seamless spam blog? about Google blocking Seamless Services because its filters suspected that it was a spam blog. I wondered what characteristic of my postings could have triggered the blocking action. Spammers often list line after line of links. Those pages increase the number of links to their sites that are published on the Internet. The spammers hope that search engines will count the links and the they will increase their search-engine rankings.

My tests of Scene Selection lists consist of series of links to one domain. Perhaps Bayesian Filters misinterpret my series of intentionally similar links for link count bolstering. If that is the case, then the filters will need to be improved to discriminate this beneficial use of similar link lists from spam links. Others trying to use this approach to adding value to Google Videos should not have to go through this process.

Since my first tests of the approach were small or in sandboxes, then their intent and value may be unclear to reviewers who are unfamiliar with the approach. Perhaps I should quickly post the more complete version so that the intent and value are made clearer.

SCSpaeth’s Seamless spam blog?

I guess that collaborative innovation looks like spam to Google’s blog filters. I have been investigating Eric von Hippel’s paradigm for innovation:

Eric von Hippel suggests ( Democratising Innovation, 2006 ) that enagaged-users push the envelop of tools and influence their development.

by identifying opportunties to improve Google Video’s features and post the results of my experiments Comparing WordPress and Blogger in this blog and Multilink comment in Google Video in a blog supplied by Google. When I tried to post the next installment in the series, I got this dire warning from Blogger:

WARNING

This blog has been locked by Blogger’s spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts. Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what’s going on and how to get your blog unlocked.

When I tried to add another post about my efforts to prototype improvements to Google Video, I found that Google’s spam filters thought that http://scspaeth.blogspot.com is a spam blog. The service redirected me to the page copied below. I wonder what the spam filters are flagging. Google Video provides the tools to embed video into blogs so I would be surprised if it were the videos that are drawing the attention.

Your blog is locked

Blogger’s spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What’s a spam blog?) Since you’re an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won’t be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We’ll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two business days.

If we don’t hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

Get your blog unlocked

Word Verification:
Type the characters you see in the picture below….

I submitted the request to have a human review the blog to determine whether they think it really is spam. I wonder whether the human reviewer will recognize that the blog is an effort to co-produce innovations to improve Google services and do more than simply turn off the spam block.