A few take­aways from today’s Get­ting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Tele­vi­sion con­fer­ence in Berke­ley, CA:

Inter­est­ing tid­bit: Some­one pointed out that the Min­now — the name of the boat in “Gilligan’s Island” — was a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to New­ton Min­now, the FCC com­mis­sioner who in 1961 described tele­vi­sion as “a vast waste­land.” I didn’t know that.

Brew­ster Kahle, founder of the Inter­net Archive and a mem­ber of the Our­me­dia Board of Trustees, gave the keynote address. (I did a video inter­view with him and will post it shortly.) Brew­ster said of the archival process: “Preser­va­tion with­out access is point­less. If it’s not loved, it’s not going to be pre­served. Access dri­ves preservation.”

He pointed out that keep­ing items up to date in the Archive requires two things: pre­serv­ing the bits and keep­ing cur­rent with for­mat changes. He said the Archive replaces items every three years or so, tape to tape, disc to disc. “This mag­netic stuff is a lit­tle iffy. One mag­net can ruin your whole day.”

Con­sul­tant Peter Hir­sh­berg showed a video (which belongs on Our­me­dia), “Day of the Long­tail,” which recalled Bob Garfield’s “The Chaos Sce­nario” arti­cle. Peter said inter­ac­tive TV never took off because it just offered a cou­ple of but­tons and required a set top box, “but peo­ple began get­ting their ya’yas off the web.”

Alex Cohen pro­vided some met­rics for the site he founded, Undergroundfilm.org. (Alex is on Ourmedia’s Board of Advi­sors.) The site, with two to three staffers, draws 150,000 vis­i­tors a month who watch a down­loaded movie in full. It has 1,200 titles and is adding 100 new titles a month.

Cory Doc­torow, the author and EFF activist, warned that our dig­i­tal rights would be greatly scaled back under a bill drafted by Hol­ly­wood and set to come up in an appro­pri­a­tions bill near the end of this ses­sion of Con­gress. The bill would res­ur­rect the broad­cast flag for both dig­i­tal TV and dig­i­tal radio. He also raised aware­ness about another exe­crable piece of inter­na­tional leg­is­la­tion being con­sid­ered by WIPO: the so-called broad­cast treaty, which would wipe out var­i­ous rights cur­rently enjoyed by Web­cast­ers (nat­u­rally, it’s being pro­moted as a Web­cast­ing bill of rights).

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Just got back from the day­long Get­ting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Tele­vi­sion con­fer­ence in Berke­ley, CA. Wanted to blog from the event, but the wi-fi was iffy.

I expe­ri­enced a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism moment at mid-day when I received an email about Blinkx TV.

If you go to the Blinkx web­site, you’ll see just two men­tions of the global enter­prise search com­pany Auton­omy. (The About page men­tions that CEO Suranga Chan­dratil­lake worked there for three years. And in a Decem­ber 2004 story, the Wall Street Jour­nal reported, “Blinkx’s TV search (www.blinkx.tv) uses tech­nol­ogy licensed from Britain’s Auton­omy Corp. for ana­lyz­ing audio tracks of video.” But the rela­tion­ship seems to go much deeper.) Mean­while, on the Auton­omy site, you’ll see this page, which makes no men­tion of any asso­ci­a­tion between Blinkx and Autonomy.

But James Whit­taker of the United King­dom emailed with this report:

As a reader of your blog I have noticed that you seem to be a fan of blinkx. I have also noticed that you have a cer­tain pas­sion for the truth, an open dis­cus­sion and all things jour­nal­is­tic so I thought you may be inter­ested in what I know about blinkx. As some­one who has spent more time than is healthy in the search mar­ket I thought that you might like to know that the ‘tiny inter­net startup’ blinkx is in fact a front for global enter­prise search com­pany, stock mar­ket listed cor­po­ra­tion and dot­com boom dar­ling Auton­omy. Whilst blinkx paint them­selves as a small com­pany, which is an oem of Auton­omy, this is actu­ally com­pletely untrue. Blinkx actu­ally IS Auton­omy. The blinkx soft­ware has been entirely devel­oped by the Auton­omy devel­op­ment teams and clev­erly mar­keted by Auton­omy and more impor­tantly is wholly main­tained by Auton­omy. Suranga Chan­dratil­lake and the blinkx brand are merely a clever front. I have had my sus­pi­cions for some time, which have been con­firmed by an Auton­omy employee with a loose tongue. I wasn’t going to do any­thing but I was for­warded an arti­cle in a mag­a­zine here in the UK from a mar­ket­ing mag­a­zine (below in ital­ics) and thought that there may be some interest:

Comms mix-up at Autonomy/Blinkx

On a inter­net we noticed Char­lotte Her­bert, whom we reported as Mar­ket­ing Man­ager for search engine Blinkx last March, was listed as the press con­tact for soft­ware firm Autonomy.

We rang Her­bert, who said she hadn’t worked for Blinkx, but that a cer­tain Char­lotte Fildes did.

But a mes­sage left for Her­bert through Autonomy’s switch­board was quickly fol­lowed by a call to us from Fildes.

Fildes reas­sures our con­fused news­desk she is not the same per­son as Her­bert, who ‘prob­a­bly earns more than me’. Glad to see though that com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Auton­omy and its inde­pen­dent busi­ness part­ner, Blinkx, are so seamless.

Maybe Auton­omy is deceiv­ing peo­ple because they are scared of a repeat of their first attempt at web search, called Ken­jin which they released in 2000, say­ing it was going to be the biggest thing ever, before it was shot down in flames as it didn’t work.

To be hon­est me and my col­leagues think blinkx is sim­i­larly flawed – it isn’t scal­able (it only searches a very small index of video that Auton­omy actu­ally have signed agree­ments with such as the BBC etc and not the web at all – note how the orig­i­nal web index has dis­ap­peared from the site.) Should any major acquirer become involved (as Rupert Mur­doch has been hinted at) they would find that the Auton­omy infra­struc­ture sim­ply wouldn’t scale to search the web, as it has not been designed to do this. Other points of inter­est are how come blinkx claims to use ‘con­tex­tual search’ (see the white paper on the site) to find you the most rel­e­vant answer for the user, which is not true. For exam­ple by enter­ing ‘Jack­son’ I get results for Michael Jack­son, Jack­son Hole, Samuel L Jack­son, and no option to refine this search even fur­ther. It is based merely on on dates and statistics.

Also blinkx claims that it is per­form­ing ‘speech to text searches.’ This is again lies. The speech to text is seem­ingly only per­formed on a cou­ple of the sources that it is search­ing, and for the rest it is just per­form­ing bog-standard key­word search on terms around the videos (basi­cally on the names of the video.)

I’ve spo­ken with Suranga and emailed him a few times over the past few months, and I couldn’t let this pass, so I raised it at his ses­sion today. He responded by acknowl­edg­ing, in gen­eral terms, the links between Auton­omy and blinkx. He basi­cally sug­gested that blinkx was a spin­off of Auton­omy and that Auton­omy devel­oped the soft­ware, but that blinkx was now a com­pletely sep­a­rate company.

But it’s an impor­tant point. Blinkx is con­stantly por­tayed as a small, inde­pen­dent com­pany up against search engine giants like Yahoo! and Google. (Indeed, some of the ban­ter at the ses­sion today was about under­dog Blinkx up against the likes of Yahoo.) If its ties with Auton­omy go much deeper — that is, Auton­omy cre­ated the soft­ware, does the mar­ket­ing, and works out of the same offices — then that’s a rela­tion­ship that the tech press needs to look into more closely.

Also, if Suranga would like to pro­vide fur­ther details, he’s free to email me or post a com­ment here.

Adden­dum on Oct. 10: James Whit­taker just responded to my query about whether he was sat­is­fied with Suranga’s descrip­tion of the rela­tion­ship between blinkx and Auton­omy. He wrote:

I would have to dis­agree with him say­ing blinkx is a spin­off — it is owned 100% by Auton­moy and in my opin­ion would be bet­ter described as a divi­sion of auton­omy! What else would you call some­thing that is 100% devel­oped, owned and mar­keted by Auton­omy? If you do a google search you can see they are con­fused about this because blinkx has been called an oem, a spin­off, absolutely noth­ing to do with auton­omy and a whole heap of dif­fer­ent things. Does the fact that it is in a dif­fer­ent office con­si­tu­tute it being a spinoff?

i think it is a bit smoke and mir­rors really.

Today at SearchEngineWatch, Gary Price sheds some more light on the blinkx-Autonomy rela­tion­ship, includ­ing this response from Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake:

Auton­omy is not one of blinkx’s share­hold­ers. We [blinkx] enjoy a close rela­tion­ship with them (Auton­omy) but that’s because (I was there for years (includ­ing as US CTO) and have lots of friends there, (b) we are an OEM cus­tomer of theirs, and so depend on them in a num­ber of ways tech­no­log­i­cally. Under the terms of the OEM agree­ments, under cer­tain cir­cum­stances, Auton­omy does have an option to invest in blinkx.

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Mitch Rat­cliffe has posted a long text and audio piece on the mean­ing, cre­ation and poten­tial upside and down­side of influ­ence in peer net­works. “The Era of Para­me­dia” is worth a read and a lis­ten.

Notes Mitch: “The text and audio are some­what dif­fer­ent, because I ad lib. The audio file is a com­pact freely playable Audi­ble file (it will
work in iTunes, Win­dows Media Player and on your iPod, among many
portable play­ers; you don’t need an Audi­ble account to listen).”

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I enjoyed spend­ing Tues­day and Wednes­day at Duke Uni­ver­sity in Durham, NC, for the first aca­d­e­mic Sym­po­sium on Pod­cast­ing. I’m get­ting burned out a bit on con­fer­ence blog­ging (espe­cially when I’m speak­ing at the event), so I did some videoblog­ging ser­vice jour­nal­ism. Here are two short videos (really enjoyed chat­ting with Tony and Mur); more next week.

Here’s Tony Kahn, orig­i­nal host of “The World” on WGBH radio in Boston and NPR (31MB video in MPEG-4; Our­me­dia page | play video).

Here’s a 4-minute video of Mur Laf­ferty, pro­pri­etor of the Geek Fu Action Grip game pod­cast and I Should Be Writ­ing pod­cast geared toward those who’ve suf­fered the slings and arrows of a publisher’s rejec­tion let­ter. “It’s OK to write badly,” Mur says. Besides, pub­lish­ers and edi­tors some­times don’t know squat. (15MB video in MPEG-4; Our­me­dia page | play video).

Tech­no­rati tags: pod­cast­ing,  videoblog­ging, per­sonal media, Duke, Tony Kahn, Mur Laf­ferty, Hon­orTagJour­nal­ism

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Today and Wednes­day, Duke Uni­ver­sity is pre­sent­ing live audio cov­er­age of its sym­po­siuim on pod­cast­ing. Here’s the scned­ule. I’m on around 10 am ET tomorrow.

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I had writ­ten a long post on Sun­day about the Webzine 2005 con­fer­ence I attended Sat­ur­day in San Fran­cisco, but the com­puter ate it just as I hit the pub­lish but­ton, so you’ll have to look else­where for a wrap-up on the well-done indie online pub­lish­ing event.

Now I’m in North Car­olina (for the first time since I vis­ited Wake Uni­ver­sity dur­ing my col­lege years at Rut­gers) for Duke University’s sym­po­sium on pod­cast­ing. Just left the won­der­ful Danah Boyd and Jason Schultz of the EFF. Looks to be a first-rate con­fer­ence. More soon.

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I spent a lit­tle time at the Lovepa­rade in San Fran­cisco yes­ter­day. A great scene of music, danc­ing and gen­eral rev­elry — this is one of the great things about liv­ing in the Bay Area.

Lovepa­rade was born in Berlin in 1989, with the idea that techno music would help bridge the cul­tures of East and West Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It then spread to other cities around the globe. This sec­ond San Fran­cisco Lovepa­rade had 24 floats and more than 200 DJs, includ­ing Paul van Dyk, Carl Cox, Lee Bur­ridge, Ferry Corsten, Crys­tal Method, Bad Boy Bill, Lee Coombs, DJ Dan, Hyper, and DJ Keri.

Here are 31 pho­tos on Flickr.

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Just watched Bill Maher on HBO and caught Bush apol­o­gist Christo­pher Hitchens for the sec­ond time in a month. If there’s a more con­de­scend­ing blowhard in all of cre­ation, I’m not sure who it would be. Per­haps he’s being paid by the word.

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In Ziff Davis’s Pub­lish, Sean Gal­lagher comes to the defense of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism after the ill-informed attack on cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism by ZDNet’s David Coursey.

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If you’re inter­ested in yoga, relax­ation, well­ness and bal­anced liv­ing, then you may want to tune in to what Yoga Jour­nal, Susan Mer­nit and a small group of blogerati are up to. They’re cre­at­ing almost real-time cov­er­age of the 10th annual Yoga Jour­nal con­fer­ence in Estes Park, Colo., as well as the visit of Mr. B.K.S. Iyen­gar, father of yoga in the West.

They’ve already started a con­fer­ence blog, and they’ll be post­ing pho­tos, video and audio of the goings on. More info here.

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