I’m a great admirer of Miro on both my Mac and PC. It turns your com­puter into an Inter­net TV, as their catch phrase says. Here’s the lat­est from Nicholas Reville:

I’m just blown away by the things that are com­ing together around open video.  There are now more that 3,440 free chan­nels in the Miro Guide and just in the past 3 months the breadth and qual­ity of what you can find has grown really quickly.  The HD chan­nels are gorgeous.

The move­ment for open video online is gain­ing incred­i­ble momen­tum.  Here’s just some of what’s been happening:

* Today three cus­tom ver­sions of Miro launched!  The TED Con­fer­ence, Deutsche Welle (Ger­man Pub­lic Broad­caster), and the amaz­ing Revision3 online net­work are all launch­ing co-branded ver­sions of Miro that come with a cus­tom start page and are pre-subscribed to their con­tent.  For each of these orga­ni­za­tion, cus­tom Miro gives their view­ers a high-resolution, immer­sive desk­top expe­ri­ence with their con­tent.  And we’re thrilled that they are pro­mot­ing open-source. http://www.getmiro.com/blog/?p=363

* From browser to Miro.  We’ve built a new fea­ture for Fire­fox that’s now in the Fire­fox 3 pre-releases.  The fea­ture dis­tin­guishes between text feeds, audio feeds, and video feeds which will make it eas­ier than
ever to take a feed from your browser into Miro or your audio pod­cast­ing pro­gram.  It’s a great exam­ple of open-source projects work­ing together.  Fire­fox 3 is due in the next cou­ple months and look for a new Miro Fire­fox exten­sion com­ing soon that will make inte­gra­tion even better.

* Norway’s Pub­lic Broad­caster recently started putting pre­mium con­tent online for free (and DRM-free) with Bit­Tor­rent.  And guess what?  They are pro­mot­ing Miro as the best way to watch.  We hope the era of the BBC-style DRM desk­top player is over.  …  

* Miro 1.1 (which we announced a cou­ple weeks ago) has got­ten great reviews.  Miro 1.1 has incred­i­bly fast Bit­Tor­rent per­for­mance– as good as nearly any­thing on Win­dows or Linux and– we are pretty sure– the fastest ever tor­rent per­for­mance on Mac.  As always, get it here: http://www.getmiro.com 

* Hun­dreds of peo­ple have already installed our I-Heart-Miro Fire­fox exten­sion.  Do you know any­one who shops at Ama­zon?  If they install our Fire­fox exten­sion, every time they buy some­thing it will help
sup­port Miro.  Give them this link: http://www.iheartmiro.org.

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Ven­ture­Beat: Google’s Marissa Mayer: Social search is the future.

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Dean Taka­hashi at Demo 08 in the San Jose Mer­cury News blog:

Education.com Red­wood City has aggre­gated a lot of infor­ma­tion for par­ents about school­ing. Among the tools is school finder, a tool that, if you’re mov­ing, helps you find a good school in a good neigh­bor­hood for your kids. Roughly 3.5 mil­lion par­ents search online for infor­ma­tion about schools each month, the com­pany says.

Inter­est­ing, but I guess the proof is in the pud­ding on how well this works on a local level. You can find the school finder at www.schoolfinder.education.com. It gives access to more than 100,000 pub­lic, pri­vate and char­ter schools nation­wide. It will be avail­able to the pub­lic in mid-February. The finder allows you to explore and com­pare schools eas­ily, review­ing things such as teacher qual­ity, extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, par­ent involve­ment, safety and dis­ci­pline, and over­all child experience.

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Lon­don Times Online: The anti-Facebook move­ment. A grow­ing num­ber of stu­dents at British uni­ver­si­ties known as “Face­book refusenicks” are boy­cotting the social net­work­ing site — but with con­se­quences, says our stu­dent writer.

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From the February-March issue of the Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review (where I used to be a colum­nist): In Your Face­book. Why more and more jour­nal­ists are sign­ing up for the pop­u­lar social net­work­ing site.

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Mark Potts at Recov­er­ing Jour­nal­ist: The future of Face­book. Excerpt:

A group of us were talk­ing about Face­book today, and we kicked around a bit the idea of what Face­book could become. This is some­thing I’ve been think­ing about a lot, and I have a the­ory that could be sig­nif­i­cant for news organizations.

It goes like this: Face­book, which already func­tions as the default home page for a lot of peo­ple, could morph into some­thing really pow­er­ful: a sort of highly per­son­al­ized per­sonal portal/home page, bring­ing together the util­ity of My Yahoo with the inti­mate per­sonal power of Facebook’s social net­work­ing roots.

Imag­ine being able to alight on Face­book and find out not only what your friends are up to, but what’s going on in the world, in sports, in your neigh­bor­hood, with your invest­ments, even the local weather. That means adding to Facebook’s exist­ing friend-based “news feed” the abil­ity to include broader feeds, per­haps even from tra­di­tional news providers. Voila: The pub­lic and per­sonal Daily Me, all on the same
page. …

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The DEMO con­fer­ence is under­way in Palm Desert, Calif.

Flickr pho­tos here (and may I say, it’s just lazy not to attach cap­tions to your pho­tos?), and a few videos on Bright­cove, but there’s the usual tight con­trol that makes look­ing for blog feeds about the con­fer­ence on the con­fer­ence site fruitless.

So, read about it in your favorite tra­di­tional media out­let, or hunt and peck on Tech­no­rati.

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Net­Squared announces a Mashup Chal­lenge.

Says Britt Bravo: “We’re look­ing for inno­v­a­tive, cre­ative ideas for mashups that can be tools for social change, and we have cash prizes to offer for the best projects.”

Appli­ca­tions will be accepted Feb. 1-March 14.

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UK’s Online Jour­nal­ism Blog: Mak­ing money from jour­nal­ism: new media busi­ness models.

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Rebecca Mack­in­non is quoted in this story in the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune: Before Olympic Games, China quells dissent.

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