----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 2:14 AM
Subject: [videoblogging] Creating
"groups" in the iTunes directory (and beyond)
I thought some of you might find this interesting.
Podcasters with multiple feeds perhaps like Rocketboom, or megavlogs like
ThePan.org... or just some of you discrete bands of roaming vloggers, or
self identifying groups of podcasters.
iTunes has a way to create a group or network of associated podcasts in
the iTunes directory. You have to request it via a form (read forwarded email
at bottom), and each podcast can be only part of one group, but I think it's
very cool.
Here's an example.
Jump down to the forwarded email for details on how to request it. It's
courtesy of a discussion on the Yahoo "Podcasters" group. Great group
that.
On a much cooler side note. :)
This groups idea is sort of a cool idea for all directories and meta
search services. I'd love to see something about it in the mRSS (meta RSS)
spec. A standard for specifying discretely a "group" affiliation,
self identifying groups.
In RSS (or via a feed service like Feedburner or platform like Wordpress)
a podcaster or vlogger would specify an affiliation by name, that name acting
like a tag. Then all directories and services could identify that
network of like blogs/podcasts/vlogs and it could help make them
more browse-able and findable. (among other things)
You might think of it as a specific "facet" of tagging, like geo-tagging
is a facet of tagging based on geography that helps us find things by where
they're located. This however creates a geography based on communities
and like geo-tagging it to will create a space who's value can be mined and
used in so many ways i cannot begin to guess at them all.
Unlike iTunes a blogger/podcaster/vlogger could specify multiple
affiliations. These could be generalized affiliations or
very discrete affiliations.
Because it's based on a (fairly) trusted mechanism (the blog and it's
associated RSS feed) the information could be changed at any time by the
podcaster, and it would be self policeable. For example some groups like
"official PAN editor" or "official Rocketboom contributor" will be discrete,
others like "ThePan.org fans" or "rocketboom fans" or simply "midwest video
bloggers" would be simply general identifications decided on by the consensus
of participants.
Because it's just like declaring your affiliations on your website and
because it's like using plain legal english it's transparent and policeable by
proxy of its members. If you declare yourself an "Official Rockatboom(TM)
editor" or part of "The Podshow Network(TM)" and you're not then whoa is
you. It'd actually be just as enforceable as if you lied on your blog or
resume. Because it's plain as english it would be actually in many cases
legally enforceable under standard law, not that it would ever come to that.
I'm just saying, it's fairly nuke proof. I think. ;)
This basically allows for an endless creation of "space" (think of it as
architecting more space in cyberspace if you like) a sort of consensus and
freeform way of identifying endless communities... a new geography for the web
rather than just being a chaos of blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Think of it if
you will as a nice warm ocean current in cyberspace for when you decide to
stop "surfing" the web, and graduate to sailing the meiaverse. Or think of it
as a new form of road. The point is it creates a new space to be
explored that in conjunction with other architected things like geo-tagging
can be very powerful.
As just one example you could cross geo-tags with group-tags and you
might be able to automatically view and browse all podcasters who claim to be
"midewest video bloggers" or "rocketboom editors" on a google map.
That's just one simple example though. With standardized facets of meta
information embeded in RSS like groups affiliations, geo-location information,
and others we can start to dream up and create services that exploit and
explore this information in standardized ways to do amazingly useful things we
haven't even though of yet.
Best of all though, this kicks the crap out of obtuse "categories" like
Apple's iTunes directory categories. :)
LOL.
I find traditional predefined "editorial categorizations" increasingly
obtuse, useless, and worse of all wasting of vast amounts of time and reources
because they leverage their tyranny on vast amounts of people. A good
specification can either distribute empowerment which ultimately creates value
and saves time... or it can distribute wasted time, frustration, futility. The
net affext is either a multiplication of good, or a multiplication of evil but
never in between.
Anyway, where this mRSS specification for group affiliations would lead
us is an endlessly mine-able, browse-able and searchable metaverse of
communities.
Meta search tools like Mefeedia.com, or Odeo.com, Technoratti, or
Bloglines, any meta aggregator or directory could then identify these
communities and automatically allow targeted searching and browsing of media
from communities.
You might even be able to simply subscribe in your agregator to
a discrete group of vlogs or podcasts.
For example, you might wonder what the editors of WeAreTheMedia.com are
up to (what they're blogging about) and you'd be able to browse all the
editors posts through a service like mefeedia or bloglines and see absolutely
the latest posts from the entire community.
You'd be able to add an entire community to your news or media aggregator
with a single click and that community would evolve of it's own accord without
you having to persoally maintain it by adding and removing members.
Great for small and medium sized groups like Rocketboom editors, or ThePan.org
or evilvlog.org members. (Although you probably wouldn't want to go and
subscribe to a large general group like that of "video bloggers" of which
there might be 8000.
This type of meta aggregation of communities might even obsolete
experiments like Evilvlog.com, community vlogs, or so called Planet Planet
blogs, like Planet Debian which are becoming quite common in the open source
community. Think of them as instantly and organically grown threads of
conversation and media. Instant communities.
In many ways this is inspired by Flickr Groups. I've been asking myself
since forever how we can create similar groups in the vlogosphere in a much
more organic and decentralized way. Without all having to become a member of
the same community service like Flickr, or Youtube, or Myspace, Blip.tv or
even Mefeedia or some such. This would allow us to have our Flickr type
groups without having to all join Flickr or some other common service. We
could use any blogging/podcasting/photocasting/vlogging platform we wanted,
and what's more we could use any meta service we wanted, wether that be
technoratti, bloglines, mefeedia, odeo, or whomever we preferred. This
interoperability does communities without lockin.
In the end its standards like these that focus on replicating and
decentralizing mechanisms in discrete services like Flickr and Youtube.
That's going to allow the vlogging and podcasting community to grow beyond
these services... because there cannot be one Flickr or one Youtube, and we
certainly cannot as participants make choices over which communities we can
participate in by where we decide to host our media.
I would like to see Myspace and Youtube and other such services go back
to being the training wheels for newbies. I dream of the center of the new
media world being an open, organic and free media scape, not one
centrally dominated by private entities that weild inoperablility like a
weapon to lock-in users.
In order for this to happen we need to contemplate on the best features
of these private services and figure out how to turn them inside out. This is
very similar to how Open Source and linux have turned the computer world
inside out. This is no mistake. If Microsoft's model is embrace, extend
and extinguish... then our moto should be replicate, extend, and set
innovation and people free.
Also, I believe that there's a new power-law in business due to
the openess of the internet, one that fundamentally states that
interoperability and openness wins. AOL proved early on that the web
cannot be co-opted by any one enterprise... that innovation thrives in
open environments. If your walled garden does not respond to that openess then
innovation and the market will simply go right around you.
Open Source has proven this in software and the operating system, and I
hope that we're doing the same in media with blogging, podcasting, vlogging
and photo-casting.
Jumping back a bit, down to earth, another important point of such a
standard is a) it's easy, powerful, and simple and b) even if no one
supports it at first... it starts building value exponentially as each new
person and group uses this standard to identify themselves. It's a
similar power-law to the creation of the web itself. Every new web page
and every link makes the web that much more powerful.
I've seen other specifications like FOAF (Friend of a friend) and XFN
(Extensible Friend Network?) for specifying relationships with friends
via XML markup in web pages, but I've seen that these are way to complex and
technical to maintain. I propose we start simple, very simple, and see where
it takes us. This idea is simple.
This simple specification, a proposed extension to mRSS, is
completely decentralized and self updating. You don't have to add new
friends one by one to your network as you do with XFN and FOAF. Your friend
networks are self defining and changing on the fly in an organic manner by the
proxy of the group and the independant actions of its members. Your
relationship with the people in these groups is maybe not precisely know at
first, but the value of relationships can be endlessly explored and
overlapping interests found. Like tagging, the very relationship may even be
evident; "Rocketboom editor", "evilvlog friends", "midwestern vlogging
buddies", or "the weagel family". :)
This is to say, editor, friend, buddy, family. These are your
relationships. Like tags the symantics and keywords can be explored and even
automatically related using clustering technology.
Wether you identify yourself as a vlogger with 8,000 others, or a member
of the "yahoo video blogging group" with 2000 people, or "evilvlog.com" with
40 other editors, or a member of "the verdi family" which consists of three
vloggers, the value is all relative. Like vlogging it's meaning ful wether the
group has 2 members or 8000.... wether a vlog has an audience of two or 20,000
it's value is relative to it's meaning to those people who participate in
it.
Oh, and heh, most people would argue the most meaningful groups of all
are simply groups of two. Between two life partners, between a parent and a
child. So you know, this is the new media scape. Our value fucking
scales. And I say small groups is where the revolution is at. :P
The road to success with this is in the following....
1) simply beating the idea with a stick until it's black and blue
and making sure it's sound and tough enough to stand up to the scrutiny
2) writing it up and accepting it in the Media RSS spec
3) lobbying for Feedburner, blip.tv, Ourmedia and Wordpress and other
creation platforms to support it
4) Then lobbying directories and meta search tools like FireANT.tv,
Mefeedia.com, Technoratti, Bloglines and others to start supporting it. It
should given it's simplicity gain rapid popularity if I'm right. I site new
powerlaws. :)
Like I said it only requires one platform like Feedburner or Blip to
support it, and one meta service like Mefeedia.com or FireANT for it to start
gaining tremendous value to the community. This is where the strong
relationships of these services and this community can light a fire under
progress if for no other reason than it's fun and experimental and easy.
BTW, I'd call it "groups". Or in long form it's somethign I call "meta
communities" or "meta groups". Meta-communities that exist outside of some
proprietary service like Yahoo groups, or Flickr are something I've been
thinking about for a while. I have an experimental idea a goal to ween
myself from communities that are defined by proprietary platforms. It's
probably an impossibility, but it leads to interesting ways of thinking, like
what would or could the gepgraphy of the communities we participate would look
like if they weren't defined by stupid boundries like technology, or
businesses need to entrap us by making artificial boundries and attempting to
lock us in to their platforms and tools. Is there another way to do business
that doesn't require wielding lockin as a weapon? Open Source would seem
to suggest so, maybe, but the best theory I've come up with is simply making
another aspect of business rule, passion... I jokingly call it "love-in". I
think lovemarks.com illustrates the point. Companies who's customers love
for them keeps them "locked in"... however, I think that Linux, open source,
wordpress, podcasting and vlogging belong on their own list. Not companies,
but institutions. This illustrates how I feel about the center of the media
scape being open and free, not proprietary services like Youtube or
Myspace.
The center of the marketplace for ideas, knowlege and intellectual
property must remain open. The center of our new mediaverse is not an ebay or
an amazon or even a craigslist. It's should be at it's center a wikipedia, a
wordpress, a whole series of open and interoperable entities.
Our social structures, in their simplest forms the "groups" in which we
participate, reflect one important facet of this new space.
So what do you think?
(And I mean about the idea, ignore that I write to much, that's not going
to change :)
-Mike of mmeiser.com/blog
Disclaimer: I put in those misspellings and gramatical errors to bait
you. Get over it. :)
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dan
Kuykendall
Date: May 18, 2006 6:49:39 PM
GMT-04:00
Subject: Re: [podcasters] Apple
supporting podcast networks?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Todd Cochrane wrote:
That's very interesting... Who is the guy at
Apple to talk to?
Sorry, not giving up my contact! But I will pass on
some info I got.
My version of the response from Apple:
- ---------------------------------
We don't have an obvious way to request one, but
people can always use
the form at the bottom of this page:
To create nice and personalized Artist Groups
requires several people
across a couple internal groups at Apple. However
they can more
easily/quickly create unbranded groups like
this
- ------------------------------------
So I guess the best solution is to hit that support
page and request an
unbranded group be created, if you need one. Then
pursue a branded one
if you feel strongly about it.
There is a limitation in the design which means
that a given podcast can
only be part of one Artist Group, so I guess this
means pick wisely.
- --
Dan Kuykendall (aka Seek3r)
In God we trust, all others we virus scan.
Programmer - an organism that turns coffee into
software.
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