History of Walkman

1. BBC News: The music you could take anywhere
   "The Walkman´s design utterly changed the way we view electronic media - without it we might never have had the minidisc or the MP3, much less the digital camera, the handheld personal organiser or the mobile phone.
   "But what the Walkman really changed was the culture of music: you could now listen to what was effectively the soundtrack of your own life, starring you as yourself," she said.
   July 2003
2. Phil Patton: Walkman
   Robert Nell, Sony´s vice president in charge of audio products, said that Walkman´s achievement was that it "provided listeners with a personal soundtrack to their lives." Designer Stephen Holt of the design firm Frogdesign, which provided Sony alternative designs in the early days of the Walkman, agrees. "The Walkman for the first time provided ordinary people with a cinematic soundtrack for their daily lives," he says. "One result was that it brought a kind of spectacle to daily life and made humdrum activities feel cinematic."
   date missing, approx 1999
3. Sony History: Listening to stereophonic sound while walking, Before summer vacation, Developing it together, Just try it, Why no record function?, Please listen to this.
4. The Cassette Mythos: A Short History of the Cassette
   The final shot in the arm that effectively made cassettes a part of world audio culture was the development of two new battery-run cassette machines--the Sony Walkman and the so-called "ghetto blaster," both of which became available in the late seventies. Both served the same purpose essentially, although one was intrinsic and the other extrinsic: access to high-quality portable music.
   From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
5. scena.org: Sony Walkman - Music to whose ears?
   The social pleasure of sharing music was terminated when people clamped plugs in their ears and tuned into a selfish sound. Music in the Walkman era ceased to connect us one to another. It promoted autism and isolation, with consequences yet untold.
   July 2004

History of the CD

1. ARA content: The Music Compact Disc Celebrates a Major Milestone; CD Turns 20
   The year 1983 made a significant mark on American pop culture. Mohawks were in fashion along with stonewashed jeans, long t-shirts and leg warmers. Cabbage Patch dolls and Rubik’s Cubes were the must have toys. Every Breath You Take by The Police topped the Billboard chart, and compact discs first hit the shelves at the local music store.
   Twenty years later, most of those fads have gone by the wayside. However, the compact disc has shown itself to be a proven technology - despite wary merchants and consumers when it first became available. Unlike its predecessors, the 45, LP, 8-track and cassette tape, the CD has not only taken the electronics industry by storm, but has recreated itself along the way.
   2003
2. One Off: History of CD Technology
   1841 Augustin-Louis Cauchy Proposes a Sampling Theorem.
   1999
3. Negativland: The real history of the CD
   But then, in the spring of 1989, something wonderful happened for the music industry. Everything changed! Almost overnight, CD´s were everywhere! Suddenly they were a huge success and suddenly it became almost impossible to get anything on vinyl at all...
   A critical essay on the marketing of the CD by the music industry
   Date missing, approx. 1999

History of MP3 / iPod

1. Wired: Digital Music Goes Portable
   The first MP3 player published in September 1998
2. Wired: Will MP3 Walk Over Walkmans?
   Second generation of MP3 players, 64MB, April 1999
3. Wired: Don´t Tell Me How to Listen
   The Recording Industry Association of America and the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies promptly sued Diamond in an effort to stop the Rio. The Old Guard, which profits from compact disc sales, knew that once consumers could take MP3 music from their desktop computers to their favorite jogging trails, the digital format would flourish. They were right. They knew they would lose, and they did. - Jun. 1999
4. Wired: Sony Joins Personal Stereo Queue
   Sony, hoping to turn the historical parallels into a marketing advantage, threw a party at Manhattan´s Roseland Ballroom this week. The point was to celebrate the history of the Walkman while generating some hype for its new MP3-friendly "personal stereo system," the MS Walkman, as well as several other new devices. Sept. 1999
5. Wired: Note to Sony: Skip iPod Knockoff
   A few years ago, Sony made a colossal mistake. Rather than build a hard-drive-based MP3 player, the Japanese company sat back while Apple Computer wowed the world with the iPod. The iPod quickly became not just the most popular MP3 player ever, but the epitome of portable audio, as Sony´s Walkman had been in the ´80s.
   Sony was so worried about piracy, and sapping revenue from its Sony Music division, that it chose to do nothing and let Apple ascend. Apple made boatloads of cash from the iPod, while Sony struggled to remain profitable as revenues from its main cash cow, the PlayStation 2, plummeted. Oct. 2003
6. Newsweek: iPod World
   The glue for the bond is a tiny, limited-function computer with a capacious disk drive, decked in white plastic and loaded with something that until very recently was the province of ultrageeks and music pirates: digital files that play back as songs. Apple wasn´t the first company to come out with a player, but the earlier ones were either low-capacity toys that played the same few songs or brick-size beasts with impenetrable controls.
   Aug. 2004
7. Kottke: iPod, youPod, we all pod for podPod
   Interesting user comments about commuting with iPod, blocking out the sounds of the city and the evolution of iPod, posted May 09, 2003
8. Fortune: iPods Make the World Go Away (locked)
   As technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, we seek out other less obtrusive gadgets to protect us from all the noise.
   We´re living in a device-centric age. Technology may not yet fully define us, but it increasingly defines how we behave and spend our time. In New York City, I notice that subway riders are quieter than they once were. More and more, I see little white earphone wires emerging from their hats and hair--the telltale sign that they´re listening to iPods.
   March 2005.
9. Apple: iTunes Music Store Downloads Surpass 300 Million
   March 2, 2005
10. MLAgazine: iPod and Apple
    History of the iPod.
    no date, but recent
11. Geofftech: A brief history of the Apple iPod / iTunes & The Music Store
    no date, approx. Jan/Feb 2005
12. Wired: Inside Look at Birth of the IPod
    Ben Knauss is a former senior manager at PortalPlayer, the company Apple Computer approached to help develop an MP3 player that would eventually become the wildly popular iPod. Knauss shared his firsthand knowledge of the device´s development, the glitches that almost killed it, and the extraordinary steps Apple took to keep the iPod a secret.
    Jul. 2004
13. Business Week: iPod Killers? New rivals take aim at the champ
    Mobile phones that rock, jam, thunder, and swing are on the way. Wireless operators around the globe are working with music studios, phone makers, and artists such as Sean "P. Diddy" Combs in a sweeping effort to turn the mobile phone into a go-anywhere digital jukebox.
    April 2005
14. New York Times (registration): How the iPod Ran Circles Around the Walkman
    At Sony, having both digital players and music in the same corporate family has actually been detrimental to its hardware interests. The music label directed the hardware group to make copying impossible, to the extent that until recently, customers could not enjoy on their Walkmans the music from their own legally bought CD´s that they had encoded in MP3 format.
    Sony Connect, the late-arriving, woefully designed answer to the iTunes Music Store, still lamely insists on using Sony´s proprietary compression standard. Apple got away with holding to its own standard only because it got everything else right, and was early to boot. Sony Connect must lag somewhere around 300 million song sales behind Apple, but pretends otherwise.
    March 2005
15. Mac Observer: Apple Exec: Shuffle Grabs 58% of Flash Player Market; What Cell Phone Threat?
    On the market less than six months, Apple´s iPod shuffle has grabbed a 58% share of the flash-based digital media player market, up from 43% in February, company chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer has told Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich in a recent interview.
    May 2005

Dr. Michael Bull

1. Michael Bull: The Intimate Sounds of Urban Experience: An Auditory Epistemology of Everyday Mobility (doc)
   The world is changing right in front of our ears. We increasingly inhabit a world in which the "other" is pre-occupied with communicating to absent others- either interpersonally through the use of a mobile phone - or with the "culture industry" through the use of a personal stereo or MP3 player. The creation of mobile bubbles of sound or "sonorous envelopes" is fully mobile, occurring in any space including the moving automobile which often acts as a confluence of these mobile communication devices - mobilities within mobilities as it were. In this paper I address the social and theoretical significance of the "sound" dimension of the use of these technologies.
   Date missing, approx. 2004
2. Wired: Bull Session With Professor IPod
   Lecturer Dr. Michael Bull is "the world´s leading -- perhaps only -- expert on the social impact of personal stereo devices," according to The New York Times.
   Feb. 2005
3. MacNewsWorld: Dr. Michael Bull on the iPod-as-Icon
   I think it´s been eye-opening, to see how many users feel that the iPod has allowed them to rediscover their zest for music. Some people that I interviewed are in their early 30s -- ranging up to their 50s -- and they´ve downloaded a lifetime of music. Using the iPod allows them to revisit music they may not have heard in 15 years, so it´s produced this notion of being able to access the musical treasure trove of your own past.
   Jun. 2004
4. BBC News: More than just a pretty interface
   But, says Dr Bull, it is because of this deafening visual chorus that exercising choice over what we listen to is so important. Through interviews with Walkman owners and now iPod buyers, he found that listening to music acts as a shield, aura or cocoon. Using headphones helps to keep the world at bay and reclaim some space.
   Mar. 2004
5. Economist: The meaning of iPod
   This does not mean the iPod is inherently anti-social, however. For its second effect is to make music consumption, a traditionally social activity, even more so. You can use your iPod as a jukebox at home, and the ability to carry your music collection with you means you can always play new tracks to your friends. Many iPod users compile special selections of tunes, or playlists, for family listening while in the car. Family members negotiate the contents of the playlist, so that Disney tunes end up juxtaposed with jazz and Justin Timberlake.
   Jun 2004

File sharing

1. USA Today: If pirating grows, it may not be the end of music world
   Music pirating is so rampant and so entrenched in China that it´s unlikely to ever be eradicated. Chinese consumers have come to believe that music is worth, at most, a few cents a song, and that copying and sharing music are totally acceptable. In all probability, no company will ever be able to sell $15 CDs or 99 cents-a-song downloads in the world´s most populous nation.
   So artists have to regard CDs as essentially promotional tools, not as end products. Yu Quan makes money by performing concerts, getting endorsement deals and appearing in commercials. If people hear and like Yu Quan´s songs on pirated CDs, at least they´ll be more likely to come to the concerts and buy what the duo endorses.
   May 2005
2. Wired: Supreme Showdown for P2P´s Future
   When Grokster and MGM Studios square off Tuesday in front of the Supreme Court, the lawyers will argue copyright law. But the court´s decision will affect how people use entertainment and share information. The highly anticipated case, MGM Studios v. Grokster, pits all the major movie studios and record labels against Grokster and StreamCast Networks, two operators of file-sharing services.
   March 2005
3. Alejandro Zentner: (pdf) Measuring the Effect of Music Downloads on Music Purchases
   Mathematical evalutations
   The results suggest that peer-to-peer usage reduces the probability of buying music by an average of 30%. Based on my estimates, back of the envelope calculations indicate that without file sharing sales in 2002 would have been around 7.8 percent higher. - June 2003
4. Koleman Strumpf: (pdf) The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis
   Draft, March 2004
5. Wired: P2P Fuels Global Bandwidth Binge
   Internet users consumed more bandwidth than ever last year, driven by the growing popularity of peer-to-peer networks and heightened demand for video files. Burgeoning demand also prompted internet carriers to upgrade their network capacity to handle the upswing in traffic, a new report indicates.
   April 2005
6. Mark Cuban: Let’s test the RIAA logic...
   THe RIAA claims that sales of the top 100 CDs sold 195mm units in 1999, materially above the 154mm units sold in 2004. Which leads to a question. Are sales down due to filesharing, or have RIAA members just lost marketshare?
   I contend RIAA sales are down because they lost marketshare. There are more CDs being self published or released by non RIAA members than ever before. Sales from websites, concerts and car trunks are taking away sales from traditional labels. Access and awareness of that music has exploded through webradio, websites, p2p, satellite radio and tours.
   March 2005
7. The Big Picture: Radio´s Wounded Business Model
   Well, maybe. I used to listen to the radio to find new music. But Radio has abdicated that role; Introducing listeners to new bands, songs and albums has long since been abandoned by the medium. It was considered too risky to possibly send a listener down the dial. Instead, listeners were sent away fom radio wholesale.
   The great irony of this is that the ever shrinking playlists are what first impacted music sales -- consumers don´t buy music that they have never heard or heard of. Now that the Clear Channels of the world have mortally wounded that industry, their methods have finally come home to roost against themself.
   July 2004.
8. BBC News: UK net users leading TV downloads
   British TV viewers lead the trend of illegally downloading US shows from the net, according to research.
   Web tracking company Envisional said 18% of downloaders were from within the UK and that downloads of TV programmes had increased by 150% in the last year.
   Feb. 2005
9. Economist: Music´s brighter future
   The internet will eventually be wonderful for music buyers, but it is still a threat to today´s dominant record labels
   Oct. 2004
10. Peter Cochrane: Customer needs - anticipating change and fixing problems
    What happens next do you suppose? The latest recording studios are on laptops in garages and bedrooms. And the new-wave tech-savvy artists are adopting a DIY mode with everything published directly on their websites.
    It strikes me that MP3 and Napster were only the start. Unfortunately, the music industry still doesn´t seem to be looking and listening... the audience, artists, technology and business model are all moving on!
    Apr. 2005

Portable video players

1. Wired: Movie, TV Fans Ogle Video to Go
   Manufacturers hope consumers who have purchased MP3 players and TiVo video recorders will pay $400 or more to watch programs in transit. The latest portable video players to join the mix are the Creative Labs Zen Portable Media Center and Samsung Yepp YH-999 Portable Media Center, which were announced on July 9 and will be available later this summer. The devices display movies on a 3.5-inch video screen and can run on battery power for three hours or more.
   Status report, July 2004
2. Engadged: Sony PlayStation Portable/PSP hands-on review
   Detailed review of Playstation Portable, Dec. 2004
3. Wikipedia: PlayStation Portable
4. Engadged: Switched On: The iPod Photo’s slippery slope towards video
   While that’s not exactly been the case with Apple and a video-enabled iPod, the company’s derision of portable video has certainly signaled that we shouldn’t expect such a device before, say, the next major Earth-smashing asteroid threat.
   Why Apple hasn´t published a videoPod, Oct. 2004
5. (duplicate) Economist: The meaning of iPod
   Are video iPods next? Strikingly, none of these shifts in usage patterns applies to video. People do not watch movies while walking the dog, make playlists of their favourite movie scenes, or clamour to buy individual scenes online. Portable video-players, which are already starting to become available, undoubtedly have their uses, such as providing entertainment during long journeys. But they seem unlikely to be the kind of industry-changing products that the iPod and its imitators have unexpectedly proven to be.
   Jun 2004
6. BBC News: Mobile TV tipped as one to watch
   But all is not simple and straightforward in the mobile TV arena. There is a battle for supremacy between two competing standards: DVB-H for Digital Video Broadcasting for Handsets and DMB for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting.
7. MobilePipeline: Everyone Wants Mobile TV - Except Users
   First, broadcast TV fails the most basic test of a successful mobile application because it de-mobilizes users. Mobile people move around but you have to stop to watch TV.
   Apr. 2005
8. MobilePipeline: Researcher Blasts "Naysayers," Calls Cell TV "Killer App" "Consumers can watch TV when sitting in a taxi or train, or in any waiting room," he says. "For optimum TV viewing, the best viewing distance is 5x the screen size. That is exactly the distance people hold their cell phones, and typical screen resolution is now sufficient for TV."
   Apr. 2005

AUDIO: Podcasting / streaming

1. Wikipedia: Podcasting
2. Never heard of Podcasting?
   It´s basically just a silly new word for "downloading an mp3 file." The podcast advantage is that you can subscribe to shows, and they download automatically as new episodes become available. Think of it as Tivo for audio programs.
   Definition of podcasting from thesoundsinmyhead.com
3. Wired: Podcasts: New Twists on Interenet Audio
   For anyone who loves listening to the wide variety of internet audio programming, but can´t always listen to their favorite shows when they´re scheduled or take the time to download them manually, help has arrived.
   Oct. 2004
4. IT Facts: BBC audio streams demand reaches 6.8 mln hours in February 2005
   British Broadcasting Corporation served more than 6.8 mln hours of recorded audioshows to the Web users in February 2005. In January 2005 5 mln hours of audio were streamed off the Internet site. BBC is experimenting with making online streams of its audioprograms available online, and so far 4.4 mln users took the company up on its offer. BBC doesn´t offer any data on demographics and origins of the listeners, making it hard to see whether the online users are just time-shifting their audio, having access to full BBC shows in UK, or whether most of the Web streams go abroad, thus creating demand for BBC shows in markets, where radio version is not available.
5. Digital Web News: Podcast links
   A overview of trends in podcasting, from Nov. 2004 to Apr. 2005
6. StreamingMedia.com: Podcasting: One Small Step for Technology, One Giant Leap for Personalized Audio
   In some respects podcasting seems like a step in the wrong direction. There are so many ways to receive sophisticated content now that the idea of downloading short audio files to an audio player seems almost quaint. And streamed content often comes with transcripts since visitors have indicated they would rather read—or quickly skim—the text than watch and listen to the full file. That said, podcasting has taken off like a rocket and the astounding success of MP3 players has shown the world that consumers demand personalized audio.
   April 2005
7. Philip Hodgetts: iPod: the new radio and a precursor
   There’s another phenomenon that has rapidly grown under the radar: Podcasting. Podcasters create an audio show which, with the help of software is automatically delivered to your iTunes and subsequently to your iPod if you synchronize. As the developers of iPodderX say on their site “Fresh content, automatically” - what could be a better description of radio? Fresh content, of the type you want to listen to, automatically. With radio you tuned in: with podcasting it’s delivered to your iPod without any more effort than tuning in a radio.
   Feb. 2005
8. Bob Stepno: Podcasting & Video Blogging : History & Context
   This list puts podcasting on a timeline with related phenomena...
   Mar. 2005
9. Robin Good: Promote And Market Independent Music Online: Indy
   Indy is a music discovery tool. Its goal is to give independent (indy) musicians (those not signed to a record label) a great new way to promote their music and to create a whole new way for people to discover music that they´ll love.
   As a listener, all you have to do is download the Indy "player" (a small 1.5 MB application) and double-click the "play" button. Indy will then start to play a random selection of songs. As you hear them, you rate them by clicking on any button from one to five.
   Apr. 2005

VIDEO: Podcasting / streaming

1. Wired: Take Your Porn on the Road
   Cherian has developed PSP Video 9, an elegant application that converts several digital video formats -- including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and AVI -- to PSP format. Configure PSP Video 9 to work with Cherian´s other program, Videora, and you can automate video transfers from BitTorrent to your PC to your PSP -- overnight.
   Podcasting on Playstation Portable, March 2005
2. Wired: Video Feeds Follow Podcasting
   With the success of podcasting -- a recent technology that lets anyone subscribe to and play back audio feeds on an iPod -- the natural next step is technology that can do the same with video.
   Dec. 2004
3. Robin Good: Is Video-Casting The Next Big Thing? Move Over Podcasting
   As surely as day follows night, video follows audio. The increasing popularity of podcasting, both as a distribution channel for audio broadcasters and as a "radio-show" delivery manager for subscribers, inevitably means that insatiable techies will turn to video as the next medium to "podcast".
   Feb. 2005
4. Robin Good: Open Source Desktop Television Software Will Let Anyone Webcast Video At Virtually No Cost
   The sourcecode for a ground-breaking project has just been released by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). The software, currently under development and due to be released in June, will enable anyone to broadcast full-screen video to thousands or millions of people at virtually no cost.
   The so-called "Broadcast Machine" will be free web software built on top of the PCF´s open-source project Blog Torrent. The PCF claims that it will make video publishing with BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file sharing technology, or http, as "simple as attaching a file to an email".
   April 2005
5. Philip Hodgetts: RSS, Vlogcasting and Distribution Opportunities [Edited]
   Note that I am not, basically, talking about computer-based viewing. My expectation is that software and hardware solutions will evolve into something usable as a home entertainment device. “TV” is a kick-back, put your feet up experience, video on the computer is a lean-forward pay attention experience. While both could be used for the end target of this publication model, what I’m really talking about is content for that lean back experience.
   Mar. 2005
6. Philip Hodgetts: What are good visuals?
   This is what worries me about vlogcasting - even basic video production requires some time - more time than most people want to put into a blog or podcast, so what’s going to happen? Gigabytes of bandwidth occupied by badly lit, poorly edited shakey-cam that is virtually unwatchable?
   Mar. 2005
7. Internet TV is Open and Independent
   Broadcast Machine: Publish fullscreen video on your website to thousands with virtually no bandwidth cost.
   DTV: A desktop video player application that brings internet TV to the fullscreen. Subscribe to channels: videos download in the background and the player notifies you when they´re ready to watch.

The Long Tail

1. Economist: Profiting from obscurity: What the “long tail” means for the economics of e-commerce
   The shift towards electronic sales and distribution, however—music can already be purchased and downloaded instantly, and movies will be next—means that content providers can afford to be less discriminating. “The long tail says rather than trying to guess what the market wants, put it all out there and you´ll find demand you hadn´t anticipated,” says Mr Anderson.
   May 2005
2. USA Today: What´s ahead for Net, digital entertainment
   The Internet and digital technology are changing entertainment at lightning speed. The coming years will scramble concepts of music-making, movies, TV networks and advertising.
3. Wired: The Long Tail
   Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
   Oct. 2004
4. Chris Anderson: The Long Tail Manifesto
   The above article (it seems) rewritten as a Change This manifesto
   Dec. 2004
5. Chris Anderson: The Long Tail - A public diary on the way to a book
   Website, with LOTS of links
6. Cringely: There´s No Show Like an Old Show - Reinventing Television Might Mean Looking Back Rather Than Forward
   There is an audience, however small, for just about every show ever made. What we need to do is to find a way to make the cost of keeping those shows available less than the benefit derived from people seeing them. And that brings us to the economics of Blockbuster Video.
   March 2005
7. Wikipedia: The Long Tail
   The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article [1] (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.
8. Seth Godin: Thinking about the Long Tail
   Our instinct is to push, to pull strings, to advertise, to hustle, to do whatever it takes to get to that top 3%. Hey, if you can write the Da Vinci Code, more power to you.
   The better path, though, is to figure out how to be: patient / persistent / and low cost
   enough to be quite happy with a whole bunch of long tail scraps. A dollar here and a dollar there and soon, it all adds up.
   March 2005
9. David Gratton: What´s Really Happening to the Music Industry
   So what has happened in the last 5 years?
   1. The computer has made the recording of professionally engineered music in your basement not only possible but affordable to almost anyone.
   2. The Internet has made the distribution of music almost free. And what did major labels do pre-1999? They produced and engineered music. They distributed music. (They stopped artist development sometime in the 80s.)
   April 2005
10. Washington Post (registration): Smithsonian´s Song Catalog Is Available for Sale Online
    Much of the original Folkways collection has been released on CD, but a majority of it has not been commercially available because the demand is so low. Of the roughly 40,000 tracks in the catalog, only about 5,700 have been commercially released, said Atesh Sonneborn, the label´s assistant director. Smithsonian Folkways makes copies of anything from its collection on request, and now every track will now be available on MSN Music.
    Jan. 2005

Video content

1. Wired: Check Out This Video Clip!
   Fortunately, those days are gone. In the past few months, must-see video has taken off - you can now stream Jackson´s peekaboob stunt, Ashlee Simpson´s lip-sync debacle, or Jon Stewart´s riveting Crossfire appearance at the click of a mouse. So many are watching that iFilm - a dotcom-era startup that once specialized in independent short films - is banking on its new viral video channel.
   So what kinds of clips go viral? Here are six genres... Jan. 2005
2. Wired: Rockers Flex BitTorrent´s Muscle
   With MTV and VH1 now crowded with programs like Date My Mom, The Ashlee Simpson Show and Celebrity Fit Club, there´s little room for music videos, especially from independent artists. That´s why one up-and-coming group, the Decemberists, opted to release its new music video, Sixteen Military Wives, for free using BitTorrent. The high-quality video file has logged more than 1,700 downloads since it was released over the weekend. Mar. 2005
3. Wired: ManiaTV: MTV for the Web?
   Think early MTV, only this time it´s "broadcast" live online for worldwide audiences. "The whole mission is to do with internet TV what Ted Turner did with cable," said Massey, 35. In August, ManiaTV went live from a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Denver with a roster of green "cyberjockeys" or CJs, recruited mostly through craigslist and hired more on personality and looks than experience. The production booth was put in an old school bus.
   April 2005
4. Wired: Search Battle Heads to Video
   Yahoo, Google and MSN have each rolled out services designed to make it easier to upload or locate video online. The portals´ rollouts come as a handful of startups and independent film sites are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text.
   Apr. 2005

Digital TV / HDTV

1. PC World: HDTV: What´s On, What´s Next
   Once you´ve seen TV in HD, you won´t want to go back to standard definition. Here´s the scoop on today´s shows and the best ways to get them--and a preview of your high-def future.
   * In and Out of HD
   * The Cable Lineup
   * The Satellite Scoop
   * Free TV in HD
   * The Road Ahead for HD
   * What´s On in High Definition?
   April 2005
2. PC World: Even Higher-Definition TVs
   That great high-definition television set you just bought may no longer be the best on the block. While most high-definition sets sold today have native screen resolutions that support the 720p high-def screen format (720 lines of progressive-scan video), a new contingent of 40-inch and larger sets offer native support for the 1080p format. The effect of the higher resolution is debatable now, but these sets will eventually mean improved pictures.
   May 2005

Mac Mini

1. Eweek: What the Mac Mini Is and Is Not
   Opinion: It´s definitely no rival to entry-level PCs, but Apple´s new Mac mini - combined with the iPod - could be the basis of a perfect Trojan horse strategy.
   Jan. 2005
2. Cringely: The New Mac Mini is All About Movies
   Everyone seems to think the Mini is a media PC, and it has the basic characteristics of one. Though the box has no TV tuner, Apple does offer an analog adapter. And you can burn DVDs with it if you get the optional DVD burner. Still, there were hints in that MacWorld presentation of something bigger to come, and the Mac Mini is a big part of that. Here´s my thinking, and it is just thinking -- I have no insider knowledge of Apple´s plans, I haven´t been diving in any Cupertino dumpsters, and nobody who knows the truth has told me a darned thing. I think the Mac Mini is a fixed component in a system that will extend iTunes to selling and distributing movies.
   Jan. 2005

Links of general interest

1. Prasad Boradkar, Arizona State University: Material Things, Immaterial Music (pdf)
   This study, which investigates the materiality of music, forms a segment of a larger investigation entitled, "Image Music Object," a project that undertakes the examination of the culture(s) of everyday life by studying people and their means of negotiating meanings with specific items in their environment. While this larger undertaking sifts through and investigates the objects, images, and music(s) that constitute the landscape of material popular culture, this paper will the focus on MP3 players. These new popular objects designed for mass production and consumption, reflect the styles, attitudes, and concerns of the social groups that acquire and use them. They are also closely tied to digital means of distributing and consuming music.
   date missing, probably 2003
2. Peterme.com: Genres Hamper Mobile Internet
   I´ve long been frustrated by how people seem to think that content is this formless mass that you can pour into different devices, like water into different glasses. And my thinking around document genres lead me to begin articulating a framework for thinking about content in different devices, as a way to better understand why we´re not "browsing the Web with [our] mobile phone[s]."
   Interesting March 2005.
3. Cringely: Big Old Stupid Telephone Companies Are Throwing Away Their Only Real Asset
   Everyone from Microsoft to Intel to Apple sees digital content delivery as the next big business, and I just think that the telephone companies and their circuit-switched networks are in a prime position to dominate that industry. [...]
   The optic nerve is composed of approximately one million stringy cells called ganglia that fire in parallel over a distance of two to three centimeters with the actual visual signal travelling at about 4,400 feet-per-second. Taking into account recovery time between signals, the optic nerve has a total bandwidth of approximately 100 kbps.
   June 2004
4. Wired: Waiting for DVDs, the Sequel
   The answer is high-definition DVD. These high-capacity DVDs can take advantage of the improved resolution of a high-definition television.
   Status report on HD-DVD, Oct. 2003
5. IT Facts: Music Facts
6. dr reinhold grether´s directory to mobile art and locative media
   A large collection of mobile art research and mobile art projects.

The following is a collection of links regarding my study "From digital music to digital video".

This page was used as my bookmarks collection at the time.