Not only does the film embrace the mobile as the core piece of its release pattern - a pattern which also includes simultaneous launches on DVD and the web - it embraces the mobile platform as a way to tell the story, too. Instead of offering up a large video download, Rage was released in seven parts throughout the week through the streaming media application, Babelgum, which has now climbed to #16 on the list of top free Entertainment-based iPhone apps.

The film's style is also well suited to the mobile with a minimalist look and feel where the story is told through exclusively through close-up interviews of fourteen people who witnessed an event at a New York fashion show. There are no nuanced details or special effects here - it's a perfect fit for a mobile audience who often half-watches videos while killing time or driving to work.

According to filmmaker Potter, this experimental distribution for her new movie is actually an attempt to fight the digital piracy problem faced by the movie industry today. And yes, she's doing it by by offering up her film for free...albeit in a way that ensures the film can only be viewed, not recorded. However, after watching the iPhone release, those interested in owning the movie can immediately purchase a DVD which includes 21 unused scenes by way of the film's online site for $24.95. That, too, represents, a major change to the usual release pattern for films. Typically, the movie-DVD release window involves several months of waiting where the only way to watch the movie is through illegal means such as using the peer-to-peer technology known as BitTorrent. 

Will this rethinking of movie distribution pay off? It's too soon to tell, but industry insiders are watching with deep curiosity. Jim Shomos, an Australian writer-producer known for mobile video series, for example, thinks using the mobile platform is a more direct way of getting the film to the target market - that is, people under 35.

Others are more skeptical. After all, does anyone really want to watch a full-length film on their mobile phone? Oh that's right, they do. Apple's iTunes store is proof of that. Now if we could only get studios to release really good films this way...

Today the White House launched an official collection of photos depicting Obama's first 100 days in office on Flickr. The Creative Commons Foundation asks why these photos are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution (meaning you have to credit the source) instead of being in the Public Domain free for use in any context, as data created by the Federal Government usually is.

The answer to the question? The photos aren't Public Domain because Flickr doesn't offer Public Domain licensing as an option. That's a shame for every photo publisher, not just he White House. Creative Commons licensing makes it really easy for people who want to re-use photos to do so quickly and easily by allowing content creators to communicate their conditions for re-use ahead of time. If you just want to get your photos out into the world with absolutely no restrictions, though, Flickr doesn't offer that option. Or, if you're a government agency that wants to publish photos on the best photo sharing site on the web and make them Public Domain like you ought to - you're out of luck.

We're going to guess that the White House will be added to the list of selected partners participating in the Flickr Commons, where organizations like the Library of Congress have photos posted under a special "no known copyright" license. That won't solve the problem for the rest of us, though, and it's probably not a scalable solution for every government agency that would like to publish to Flickr.

Hopefully Flickr will be prompted to change its licensing options; other users have asked for Public Domain as an option for some time. We've asked the company for comment and will update this post if we get a helpful reply. Flickr's support for Creative Commons has been fabulous. The next logical step is to support publishing photos to the Public Domain.

UPDATE: Since posting this we've been pointed to an active conversation on Flickr about Public Domain, where we found a link to site co-founder Stewart Butterfield's explanation four years ago for not offering Public Domain as an option.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

Creating Codes

Using iCandy is easy. You simply drag and drop a web site link or iTunes track into the iCandy interface to create the QR code. You can also add in photos from either your computer or an online service like Flickr or Snapfish. The iCandy application then creates the barcode which you can then print out or use elsewhere on the web...like in a Zazzle.com store for example, where you could sell your barcode-emblazoned merchandise. The iCandy application supports any URL from the web, but will specifically support media from iTunes, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Scribd, Slideshare, last.fm, Pandora, and imeem.

Scanning Codes

For end users interacting with the barcode, the process is simple, too. All you need is a webcam or a barcode reading application for your smartphone. The company suggests that iCandy could be used to create a digitally enhanced album collection which you could use to play tracks from your iTunes music library. This is demonstrated, quite adorably we might add, by one of the iCandy engineer's 4 1/2 year-old-daughter, who launches music (and dances around) in this YouTube video.

Although this idea of interacting with your music collection appears to be the primary focus of the iCandy application, we think its other uses are just as appealing, if not more so. With the QR codes created by the application, bands and other artists wishing to promote their music could create merchandise - flyers, t-shirts, cards, etc. - which link directly to their homepage on the web or the music itself.

Imagine how this could work: after a long night out at the local bars and clubs, you could simply scan a card or other giveaway item the band had handed out after their last set. That's much easier than entering in a URL or even having to locate the album listing manually. Thanks to iCandy's innovative technology, a code scanned for music you don't already own, would also give you a prompt to purchase it from iTunes, Amazon, or Rhapsody.

iPhone Application in the Works

Even better than having to use your computer would be using your iPhone as the barcode scanner instead. Since the QR codes are just normal barcodes, you can scan them today using any third-party QR code scanning application on your iPhone, or any other smartphone for that matter. However, the company is working on an iPhone application that would auto-play the track if you already owned it and it was in your iPhone's music collection. If it wasn't, you could be shown the track in iTunes so that you preview it or purchase it, if desired.

The auto-play feature is where the company is having problems at the moment because of how Apple has the phone locked down. A company representative told us that they will probably have to meet with Apple in order to get this sorted out properly and play by all the rules.

In the meantime, QR codes that link to other web sites - or even YouTube videos - will work with the iPhone. Other camera-equipped smartphones can also be used to scan the barcodes and direct the users to the appropriate web sites.

Try it Out!

The iCandy application is still in beta, but you can register to try it out now. To get right in, use the code "RWW" when you sign up here. Company feedback can be sent to the company via the feedback form on their homepage (http://icandy.ricohinnovations.com) or via email (feedback@icandy.ricohinnovations.com).

The service lets users send a message through one interface (SMS, IM, web publishing tools) and then automatically cross posts it to more than 30 other social networking sites. It's a way to broadcast your messages into more networks than you could otherwise participate in. Now with some very visible investment, the company should be able to scale and roll out even more features.

Ping.fm is just one of a number of companies trying to help users get their content out into multiple social networks automatically. They are all a little bit different. New entrant Tarpipe may offer the most sophisticated user controls and Pixelpipe stores high resolution copies of the photos and video it broadcasts in lower quality. There are a number of different services like this, but Ping.fm may be the most popular and now it's getting a big boost from Ito and Hoffman.

Reid Hoffman was one of a number of early PayPal execs who made out well when eBay bought their company in 2002. Now referred to as "the PayPal mafia," the group sticks together informally to invest in or work for their many small investments in new Web 2.0 companies. (See, for example, our news breaking coverage of another PayPal team member, Dave McClure, joining the high profile Founders Fund last week.) This group has been closely tied to the early days of YouTube, Facebook and Digg. For an excellent and engaging history of the connections between all these companies, see Sarah Lacy's new book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.

Getting an investment from Hoffman could bode well for future, larger, fund raising efforts by Ping.fm. Hoffman is in touch with many of the hottest projects on the web - he's on the Board of Mozilla, Kiva.org, gaming company Zynga and a number of other companies.

Lacy calls Hoffman a "friend-tor," as opposed to an investor. He's among the group of young technologists who have experienced the good and bad about institutional investors and can relate to young technologists who need to be more cautious than most people were in the first web bubble. Plus LinkedIn is awesome, so we're sure Hoffman offers good advice.

Joi Ito has an equally impressive resume (see his Wikipedia profile, for example). He was an early stage investor in Flickr, Last.fm and many other very interesting companies.

Will these two investors make a big difference in helping Ping.fm in particular, and cross posting to multiple social networks, a standard part of life online? Only time will tell, but with the proliferation of niche social networks and the long tail of participation online across networks large and small - it makes sense. Consider the growth of mobile media publishing as well and there's all the more reason to get your content out of a single silo of Flickr, or Twitter. Hoffman and Ito have already bet on it.

Idiomag is a company we love to tell people about - it's one of the most awesome ideas we've seen in a long time. The personalized music magazine site relaunched today with 4 times more content than ever before and a more traditional, link-intensive page design. Unfortunately, this great idea has serious problems in implementation and today's redesign doesn't appear to have solved those problems.

Idiomag looks at the color scheme of the video or photos accompanying an article and bases the whole page aesthetics on a complimentary set of colors. The service learns from your feedback and offers a new set of recommendations ever day.

We love the idea, but two years after Idiomag launched, we still return to the site begrudgingly today. We visit it at every opportunity, appreciating the music recommendations and hoping the rest of the site will get better.

Content is Hard

Why is it so unpleasant to go to Idiomag? Mostly because the syndicated text content from music blogs is awful. Most of it is really poorly written and the presentation is even worse. The Flash display of text from feeds misses punctuation, inserts spaces between letters in the middle of words - it's absolutely unreadable.

We keep hoping that the next article served up will be free of overdrawn adjective soup or abrupt beginnings and topic changes. No such luck.

There's obviously a world full of crappy music blogs out there, and we appreciate the MP3s they post, but Idiomag's parsing for quality content isn't working. The blog posts are placed very prominently on every page of the site and the whole user experience suffers as a result.

There are a lot of moving parts in the UI that make it unpleasant to use, as well. The first paragraph of every article is repeated as a "pull quote" at the top of the page, meaning you've got to skip the 2nd paragraph on every page because it's the same as the first. There's an independent collections of MP3s playing on all the pages, luckily they stop when a video loads, but they are no longer tied to the same artists as the articles and it appears that every article now has videos instead of photos.

We didn't see any of the celebrated new content from partners like Billboard and Rolling Stone. As part of the relaunch today, Idiomag says it has quadrupled the number of articles it can offer - up to 11,000 per month.

Give it a try for yourself, it's a great idea and maybe it will serve you better than it has us.

We've seen a number of new services lately that focus on the audio in YouTube videos, but the most enjoyable one so far is Mixtube - a mixtape maker for YouTube audio. It's based on the metaphor and interface of the now "sleeping" Muxtape.

We expect the site will be operable indefinitely, as YouTube rarely comes down on derivative services. Thanks to Andy Baio for finding this one.

Lifestreaming?

Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information. Bloggers like Julia Allison, whose internet activities and real-world attention-grabbing stunts made her "internet famous," has used the format to rocket herself into stardom. That stardom even made her the subject of a recent Wired magazine article on the subject of self-promotion. Her method of communication? The lifestream, of course. Her blog is no more than a short collection of photos, videos, copy-and-pasted emails, random thoughts, links, and general over-sharing. The site even scrolls horizontally instead of vertically which makes it seem much more like a timeline than just another blog.

Julia Allison's Site

The simplicity of a lifestream is ideal for our information overloaded age. Lifestreams are short and sweet, yet still provide the same insight into a person's life as yesterday's casual personal blog did. A video here, a photo there, and today's web citizens can voyeuristically peer into anyone's life and get a sense of who they are. Long-form bloggers, on the other hand (myself included) require time and attention to read, but with so many publishers out there, people just aren't reading content like they used to - they're just scanning text and moving on. For new bloggers, this means getting readers is harder than ever - your words are getting lost in a sea of noise. So to stand out, several are turning to the lifestream instead in order to get noticed.

The New Blog

But the Julia Allison method is only one option for lifestreaming. Over the weekend, I stumbled across this blog, if you can even call it that. This was no ordinary blog - it was a lifestream based on the social aggregation service, FriendFeed. Take a look:

The New Blog (Click To See It Larger)

What's amazing about this site is that the elements of traditional blogging are mirrored here. Instead of posts, there's a stream. Instead of "Recent Comments," there are the "Recent Discussions." And instead of an "About Me" page, there's a link to the blogger's Facebook profile. Could this be the future of blogging? For active social participants, the above site could certainly be the ideal blog as it highlights their participation instead of their thoughts and opinions.

But even though FriendFeed might be the easiest way to add a lifestream to your site (or turn your blog into a lifestream), it's certainly not the only way. The Lifestream Blog keeps track of the many different ways that web site owners are self-hosting their own lifestreams. You can check out the galleries of these sites both here and here.

How You Can Stream Your Life

So, how are people doing this? There are several ways, but many people today are using custom code on their sites in order to produce the lifestream. However, if you already have a Wordpress blog, you can set up a custom lifestream within Wordpress with relative ease. In fact, there are a couple of options to do so:

• SimpleLife Wordpress Plugin - this plugin lets you either add your lifestream as a widget or as a page.
• RSS Stream Wordpress Plugin - this plugin lets you add a lifestream as a page on your site.

We also told you about the much-anticipated Sweetcron, brand-new automated lifestreaming software for self-hosting your own stream.

SweetCron

Unfortunately, the developer has still yet to release the software, despite having originally promised a June release. These continued delays leave the door wide open for another developer to release their own software and capture the early adopter lifestreaming market. (Do you know of any others in development? Let us know!)

Lifestreaming Is The Always On Blog

There was a time when casual, personal blogging was your way to communicate with your friends on the web. Via posts, commenting, and blogrolls, bloggers formed niche communities on the web to socialize with each other. Today, new tools provide that same level of socialization - perhaps even better than blogging ever could. Via micro-blogging sites like Twitter, every quick thought or link can be shared with your community of followers and you can see theirs, too. You can join and exit the never-ending conversation at your leisure. Plus, other social sites like FriendFeed provide today's new discussion boards where conversation occurs surrounding the items posted and shared, leading to even more of a community feel, and one that's drawing more users every day.

Sites and social tools like these and many others encourage more participation on the social web than ever before. Although the social participants on these sites are often more active in socializing than they are in blogging, there's still that need to stake out your own piece of real estate on the web. But we wonder: does that really need to be a blog anymore? Perhaps not.

Blogging Newspaper image courtesy of Annie Mole]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_blogging_reveale.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_blogging_reveale.php Trends Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez We're watching the media landscape change in real time and one of the most interesting ways that's happening right now is through new online video producers breaking the monopoly of the old TV giants. Who's taking the lead in the new video landscape? Though old media is making a strong play - it's not winning so far. New, independent online video producers are the top publishers today.

A company called TubeMogul is keeping track of the viewership on 15 different websites from YouTube to Crackle. Today they've launched the TubeMogul Top 40, a monthly leaderboard for viewership across a wide variety of video services around the web. Below is a look at who those leaders are.

]]> Sponsor

]]> TubeMogul provides easy video publishing to multiple sites at once, then tracks the views that its users achieve. The company says it's got nearly 30,000 users today, including some of the biggest media brands in the world. Some of those giant brands are even holding their own online.

The list includes 40 different sources of video, but here's a look at the top 15. How many of these have you heard of?

1. Next New Networks
A venture funded mini-empire of online video shows on a wide variety of topics, from sports to politics to a rip-off of the lolcat phenomenon as a video show. Run by former edge-TV execs. Some good stuff, and hey - they're winning!
2. Chris Pirillo
A one man empire run by uber-(media)-geek Chris Pirillo. Pirillo notes in a blog post about the TubeMogul 40 that these numbers don't include his successful live tech-help show, either.
3. Howcast
How-to videos, similar to the many other offerings in this space but with a little more allusion to sex. And more viewers.
4. For Your Imagination

Professional video producers, making content for brands to ride along with.

5. Tornante

Michael Eisner's company, the holders of Vuguru.

6. WatchMojo.com

More professional video producers, making content for brands to ride along with or otherwise make use of. Apparently it's working, given the presence of these kinds of companies.

7. iJustine

Justine Ezarik, the woman who stole Justin.tv's lunch in terms of publicity. She's now interviewing top tech executives, covering movie launches for General Motors' I Got Shotgun social media campaign and generally having fun.

8. Nalts

According to his bio: "Kevin Nalts is one of the most-viewed YouTube comedians with more than 650 short online videos seen more than 25 million times. By day he's a Marketing Director at a Fortune 100 company, and he speaks, writes and consults in the area of online marketing and viral video."

9. MyDamnChannel

Hollywood veterans doing comedy, including the You Suck at Photoshop series. It's working for them.

10. Ford Models

Ad sponsored eye candy, content about beauty products, nothing new here - just supermodels blathering on the internet.

11. CBS Interactive

The rolled up web properties of CBS.

12. HBO
13. Rocketboom

This daily short form, comedic documentary show just keeps on drawing crowds. It's getting more social media play than PBS (#20).

14. FUNimation Productions

Anime! Why am I not surprised? I had no idea though.

15. National Lampoon

Next generation, low-brow humor that's not as funny or smart as The Onion but is from a very established brand.

Notes

That's just the top 15 of TubeMogul's Top 40 and it's notable that these numbers don't count viewership through services like Blip.tv and Castfire, both big services. TubeMogul is a very successful service so far though and their claim of 30,000 users is remarkable.

Our take away from this list is that old media is still generally dominant but that video producers born and bred on the media fringe are holding their own very respectfully. And that Chris Pirillo is a maniac.

]]> Discuss]]>