The Rose d’Or (or Golden Rose) is a highly prestigious television award, given annually since 1961 at the Festival Rose d’Or in spring each year. Since 2004, the festival has been held in Lucerne, Switzerland. Before the festival was held in Montreux, Switzerland, thus the Golden Rose of Montreux.

(from Wikipedia entry on Rose d’Or)

The festival also has seminars and presentations on different subjects. This year monday is internet day, tuesday mobile day, and wednesday covers “How to create and produce world class entertainment televison?” and “Scripted formats: A new era”.

My presentation

I will also post from other interesting presentations at Rose d’Or. Come back here for updates later this week.

Feel free to contact me in Lucerne. I’ve made a Rose d’Or group at Facebook. And guess what: No one else has joined. Heh. Now how could that be? TV-people don’t use social sites like Facebook?

Pictures

I’ve put up pictures of the other speakers at Flickr. I will post about their actual presentations too, as soon as I have typed everything and sorted my pictures. Some very interesting days.

In English, that would be something like “NRK’s new “sandbox” for all technology, gadgets, new media and other important things in life.” Have a look or subscribe to the NRKbeta feed.

I’m the daily editor, so if it sucks, I’m the one to blame. Feel free to tell me if it does (also if it doesn’t I might add…) We’ve just started so expect things to speed up the next weeks, it’s a little slow and thin at the moment. But hey, it’s a beta!

Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Vi vet ikke om gutta kommer levende fra det.
Vi vet ikke hvem som kutter tauet.
Vi vet heller ikke om hun i vinduet hopper.
Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
For dette er ingen film.
Dette er en reklamefilm.
For DnB NOR.
Og vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Akkurat som i livet.

(Nowegian text at the end of the movie)

Very clever. I’m curious to see if they are brave enough to NOT show it on tv. Just use the site and the viral world to spread it.

Why? Because TV advertising is STINKING expensive. And why hassle people with ads on tv if they come to see it on your site because they WANT to see it?

Special invited guests saw the NBA All-star game in 3D HD on February 18th, and now attendees to the NAB exhibition in Las Vegas, get to see the game and hear about the advanced technology behind it.

“Thomp”, at NowPublic saw the All-star game. And is convinced this is the new thing:

…made me feel like I paid 6,000 dollars to sit among the stars on the floor of the hardwood court. The up close FUSION 3D HD action made me forget I was miles away in a theater wearing 3D glasses and the sound was to as if I sitting at courtside. I felt I was so close that when Jay-Z bent over to whisper to Beyonce, I wanted to tap his shoulder and say she with me! Action seemed so close that when a loose ball flew in to the crowd, several people in the theatre (including me) put our hands out to catch it!

He also has some thoughts on the future of the system:

In summary I can see this technology being a big hit in the future especially to the common folk like me who can not pay the large sums of money to partake in these events live. PACE should not limit itself to major sports events like the Super Bowl or the NBA. This technology can be used to see high priced concerts or highly publicized Las Vegas shows. This can be another viable revenue stream for artist and promoters. Instead of booking a plane and hotel ticket, you can jump in your car, drive to your local IMAX Theater and save a couple of thousand dollars.

And – saving the planet while having a great time, I might add.

How is it done?

The technology behind this is exciting. James Cameron is shooting both his forthcoming movies with the same 3D cameras. The $200 million “Avatar” (2008) and the movie adaption of the manga series “Battle Angel Alita”, called “Battle Angel” (2009), are both shot in 3D HD. Cameron and Vince Pace are the founders of Pace 3D technologies that makes the special versions of the camera. Vince Pace is also director of photography, second unit on both movies.

The cameras are customized versions of the US$115,000 Sony HDC-950, in a specially designed rig. The camera sensors are placed 70mm apart to capture left-eye and right-eye imagery seperately. Pace is also developing the camera system to include the newer Sony HDC-1500 HD cameras.

NBA used six Sony cameras to capture the All-star game:

These camera feeds were distributed via fiber to a portable HD fly-pack system (provided by Bexel) in the arena that included a Sony MVS 8000A switcher and an EVS XT[2] server.

The Sony switcher includes a feature that allowed the director to aggregate multiple camera feeds and lock them together. The director then switched the multicamera production as he would a typical game broadcast; but, to get the full 3-D effect, he often held on shots longer than usual. Instant replays and graphics were also presented in 3-D, using the EVS server.

The output of the switcher (two uncompressed HD signals at about 3Gb/s) was sent to the Mandalay Bay ballrooms via fiber cabling. The larger ballroom was set up in a stadium-seating configuration, on risers to give the full effect. The smaller space was standing room only. Images were displayed with two stacked Sony SXRD 4K projectors in each room on 47ft and 30ft screens. The projectors were fitted with a special polarizing filter supplied by 3-D specialists Real D. Audience members wore special polarizing glasses to get the full 3-D effect.

Sports and concerts

Both Marilyn Manson and Gwen Stefani has used this new technology for music videos, and Universal Music Group’s Interscope Record has signed a deal with Pace to use the technology for concerts. Expect to see Dr. Dre, Eminem, U2, Gwen Stefani, 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow and Pussycat Dolls doing their things in 3D at your local cinema soon.

That is, if your local movie theatre can show 3D. Only 700 of 37 000 US movie theatres have 3D projection screens (I have not been able to numbers for the rest of the world). But Sony do of course want to change that:

“We are ready to roll into any theater with the two-projector system.”

…said John Kaloukian, director of Sony Electronics’ professional display group to Reuters (note: Some Reuters articles only stay up for three weeks so this link may go dead after some time).

Most of 700 movie screens with 3D projection, are delivered by Real D, which even has a blog with interesting articles like this one about “Composing for Stereo: The Filmmaker’s Point of View”:

The other concern I call the strength of the stereoscopic image. That is determined by two interrelated factors. One of them is completely new to the stereoscopic cinema, and has no direct counterpart in the planar cinema – and that is the distance between the spacing of the cameras or the camera lenses. Whether we’re shooting live action, or we’re in a CGI virtual space, the distance between the camera’s lenses is a critical factor. We’re going to call whatever we’re shooting with a stereo camera. A stereo camera, unlike a conventional camera, captures two perspective viewpoints. So we’re not going to refer to stereoscopic cameras. We’re going to call it a stereoscopic camera, and we’re going to say it has two lenses – a left lens and a right lens.

The distance or the spacing between the two lenses is called the interaxial spacing – that is, the distance between the lens axes. If you think about it, if the lenses are superimposed – in other words, if the axes had zero spacing – you’re shooting a planar movie. The farther apart the lenses go, the deeper the image looks. The use of this control is closely related to the focal length you use. Wide angle lenses tend to stress perspective, because objects that are closer to the lens appear to be proportionately larger, and the background appears to be smaller. The stereoscopic depth sense, which is technically known as stereopsis, is weighted or scaled by extra-stereoscopic cues – that is, by non-stereoscopic or monocular cues. One of the strongest of these is perspective – and perspective is often determined by the choice of focal length. So it turns out that with wide angle lenses you can use a reduced interaxial, and for telephoto lenses you can use a larger interaxial.

New tools = New ways of thinking! This also may be technology that take people back to the cinemas. If you have a 50″ plasma/LCD screen at home, a blu-ray or HD-DVD player, a great chair and your kitchen nearby – why go to a movie theatre? With 3D HD you have a new reason, as I don’t think there will be a home version of Sony SXRD 4K projectors anytime soon. Not to mention the players delivering the actual movies.

Editing?

I’m curious, how do you edit this? HD with two seperate cameras, one for each eye? What are your options for post processing? Do you need special software or do you edit in “normal” tools like FCP or Avid systems? Feel free to comment below if you know!

Update

Camcorderinfo.com made a video from the Sony/NBA event at NAB, as seen below (you may have to click through to brilliantdays.com/3d-hd too see the video if you read this in a newsreader).

When the internet really starts to shift the flow of money in the media industry we are up for some groundbreaking change…

I’m not sure that the flow of money needs to change before the groundbreaking change. Two things have happened the last days that gives a hint of the change to come:

Evidence #1: iTV

Apple does something very un-Apple: Talking about a product before you can actually buy it. The name will change, but it is a box that takes videos and music from your computer and plays them on your tv screen (and plays the sound on your tv or stereo). MacWorld explains:

Enter the iTV, which connects to your television and stereo and provides the remote-control-driven interface of Front Row without the keyboard-and-mouse issues of a full-fledged computer. Once it’s hooked up, the iTV connects to the network in your house and displays, right on your TV, a menu of options, all geared toward letting you play back digital content—stored on a computer in your house or somewhere out on the Internet—while sitting in your living room. That content includes movies, TV shows, and music downloaded from the iTunes store; other audio and video content you’ve loaded into iTunes; movie trailers from Apple.com; and perhaps other kinds of stuff that Apple hasn’t talked about yet.

So the videos don’t have to be stored on your computer. They can be streams from websites. And this is where your head is supposed to go “bing!!!”. This means that you’ll have thousands, maybe millions of channels available from day one. In no time there will be channels for every single interest, hobby, subject or event imaginable. The adult industry will of course be running ahead of all the others, but then you’ll have video streams with knitting, kittens, collecting stones, hybrid cars, wool socks and klingon language classes. And as always when the revolution comes: The ones who starts first will get the best seats. So which traditional tv-companies will get this first? And deliver their quality content via the web? Formatted for this kind of “television”? And compete? I’m not sure if they will understand it at all in the beginning. They’ll just notice that their younger audience is disappearing.

(TV by Horrortaxi)

There are reports that Apple and Google already are negotiating about putting Google Video on the iTV from day one. Which means that when you turn on the iTV in your living room, you’ll have everything on Google Video available on your tv-screen with a remote. Think about it.

Now think if everything on YouTube were in there too. And every video all your friends puts on their sites. Ok, some of them make really lame videos, but who cares: It’s your friends and you’ll be watching it for fun. And calling them, chatting with them online while watching it. Who needs tv?

Evidence #2: The Yahoo! Current Network

Today Yahoo! launched the The Yahoo! Current Network, four broadband video channels, called Buzz, Action, Driver and Traveler. It works like this: People (like you) submit videos you’ve made to Current, according to their guidelines. They put them up on their site, and viewers on the web vote. The ones who win are aired on tv (in the US) and on the braodband channels on Yahoo! If your video is aired, you get paid. Which of course will raise the quality bar a lot. Read more about how it works at the Current TV FAQ.

I call it a BIG HINT when a huge company like Yahoo! starts projects like this – and pay people to submit quality content.

I don’t think a happy amateur in Iceland will make something like Sopranos or LOST in his bedroom. But if YouTube already uses 5% of the bandwidth on the net, imagine what will happen when you can watch all these videos on your TV, relaxing in the sofa.

But it’s only crap?

Thomas Hawk has this comment in the above mentioned TechCrunch article:

People will not want to watch low quality non HDTV at $10-$15 a movie on their new $300 iDongle when you can get a Netflix subscription for the price of less than two movie downloads a month.

Nor will people want to watch low res crappy Google Video content on their new $4,000 plasma (on the video iPod, laptop, handheld device, PC, etc. yes. Just not on their plasmas).

Even with Google Video on the iDongle, it will still flop.

I think you’re wrong Thomas. At first you will be right, then you will be totally wrong. Who will watch low-quality videos of old men telling about their lives without even looking into the camera? Or young men dancing at student shows and famous locations? Millions. And millions. And every day new ones will find it. And everyday new content is uploaded.

In a few years quality will have improved a lot: Faster lines, bigger disks, better compression. I also think one of the reasons YouTube became so popular is because of the low quality: Everyone can watch the videos on their crap PCs. People will love watching the same stuff on their TVs. Play HD-quality games one second, watching pixelated crappy homemade videos the next.

And if you do, do you think it’s important that “normal” media – meaning radio, tv, newspapers and magazines – covers gaming? Why?

What are your reasons for playing games? And what reasons are there for media to cover caming?

Use the comments below!

The site should be bulit up around usergenerated content like blogs and videos, hoping to become the public service version of MySpace.com. BBC also plan to their entire programme catalogue online.

Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology says the new site will allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, according to Guardian Unlimited.

At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want.

Either the BBC plans a new clever DRM model, or they simply drop the whole DRM thing and let their users do what they want with their programs. If the latter is true, it will be a whole new way of thinking from a major broadcasting company. And a way of thinking that will challenge other public service channels and also commercial channels.

See what other quality sites say about this at TailRank.

Search

BBC today also unveiled a search engine with everything they made: Their own words: “Info about every single BBC programme, ever. It’s a vast catalogue, but it’s not comprehensive. A guarantee of accuracy. We’re very proud of it, but we know there are mistakes.”

Creative future

Now, imagine if all DRM and copyright rules were dropped for one month. All over the world.

Just copying others work and selling it would still be illegal. But making your own versions… Editing it. Adding. Subtracting. Changing. Mix. Fix.

What would happen?

The world would see the most creative month in the history of the world.

Yes, lots of money would be “lost” for the people holding copyrights.
Yes, it would be impossible to change the rules back after a month. Because the results would be mindboggling.
Yes, it would the legal mess the size of Jupiter.

But if I’m elected “One ruler of all humans and planets orbiting the sun”, I would gather the wisest women, men and dolphins on the planet and have them think how this can be done – letting creative people still make lots of money. And at the same time let you and me explore and find new ways to use all the signals surrounding us.

Update

The TV series spin-off of the Stars Wars film franchise will run to at least 100 episodes, according to producer Rick McCallum.
He told BBC Radio 1 the writing team would soon be meeting to start on the project, which would begin filming in 2008 and be ready the same year.

BBC has more here and here. Seems like each episode will be an hour.

The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga. It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers.

In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only surprised that it took this long” for a service like this to emerge.

True. Why did it? The concept of tagging things is amazingly simple and still very effective. Now coaches in NBA teams can search any tag and combinations of tags and get video of their team up on their screen. Find “3-point lastminute leftside” or whatever.

Tagging tv

Now let us take this a step further. What if you could search for anything a broadcaster (like NBC in the USA, or BBC in the UK) broadcasts? Search for “laughter” and you get every good joke that made people laugh, in a talk show, a movie, a sports programme etc. Search for “shot”, “goal”, “kiss”, “man”, “woman”, “joke”, “sad” and so on.

Is it possible? Is there a business in this? Why would someone want to do this? Sales? Reuse of material in new programmes? I just find it fascinating, and I would like your comments on what this could be used for.

Tagging movies

What if videos had a system where people could tag them? Ok, let’s say that IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) made a system where every scene in a movie were listed under the movie. And the movie companies let them do this. They were not to whow the actual movie, just a picture illustrating the scene. Then people could add tags to that scene. “Carchase”, “man”, “sun”, “orange”, “horse”, “Kim Basinger” etc. I’m pretty sure that lots of people would tag their favourite movies in no time.

What could we use these tags for later? Sales? Rentals? Dating? Any ideas?

This database then could be used for rentals, and soon internet downloads. Amazon.com has added tagging of the products they sell, but you can only add tags to the whole product. Would it be useful if you could tag chapters in books?

With the access Apple will no doubt get to Disney (Research)’s vast library of movies and TV shows, iTunes is about to get a huge boost toward becoming the front end for our digital TV and movie experience too.

“What happens when you can beam shows from your computer or iPod wirelessly to your TV?” he asks. “You have a Tivo (and a music player) that you can take anywhere.” IPods and TVs don’t have that ability yet but they will soon, he believes. “iTunes will be the software that runs your living room.”

Fred Vogelstein of Fortune thinks Steve Jobs already owns your living room:

Skeptical? Talk to Jeff Zucker, the new CEO of NBC/Universal. In an interview with Newsweek he said that iTunes had generated $2.5 million in download revenues just in the last three months. He also said it was helping him decide what to air. Because of the unexpected popularity of one show, “The Office,” on iTunes, TV viewership shot up and it won a coveted Thursday night prime time slot.

I wonder how long it takes before Scoble comments on this…

In the newsletter Pamela Robinson continues her series on successful interviewing, and also answers questions from readers of the newsletters. Like this answers from a woman thinking about how having a baby could influence her career.

If you are in the creative arena, there is more of a tolerance and acceptance of kids… in fact many of the creative execs, writers, & directors bring their children to work at times, and have the flexibility to take time off when needed – for a doctor’s appointment or a soccer game. However, the more corporate positions (on the business side) tend to be less tolerant of catering to the children’s needs, and of course this varies from company to company.

I think she is right. In the creative arena, where I work, there IS a bigger tolerance of kids. And their parents! And exactly that is why many of us are so creative. Yes. It’s as simple as this: People who spend a significant amount of time with kids get a new way to look at things. And also learn that there is no need to take themselves so seriously all the time. Not to mention perspective: After washing poo or nursing a fever sick child, you do think differently the next time you sit down with your Wacom tablet. Taking your small kids to work also helps you see things that you didn’t think about at all before: Why did you put that thing over there? Why do you have to do it like that?

I even let the kids make promos with me. They loved it, the result was excellent, and my boss was happy. And the show got lots of viewers.

How to make amazing circles

You make your own amazing circles, the full instructions are here. And do post them on the Amazing circles group at Flickr.

Promax members – upload your pictures!

Promax BDA has conferences all over the world, in cities like Vienna, Dubai, Jakarta, Mumbai and New York this year. If you’re attending on of these conferences, take pictures and upload them to the Promax group at Flickr. So far there are only pictures from Promax Athens 2005, so find those pictures and upload them! See my post about sharing your Promax BDA pictures.

The picture is from a presentation by Carlos Ferreyros, Creative Director of ca square, USA. The slide reads “Vision without action is daydreaming. Action without vision is a nightmare.” I think it is a Japanese proverb. Do you know?

Update: The picture used in the article is also at Flickr, here.

Live broadcasts of gaming on national tv will be huge in 2006..

Yes, tv channels will air live games, with the top gamers of the world playing. With commentators, experts, statistics and interviews.

There are so many reasons for this:

1) Some of the best customers for advertisers play games: Males in the age 15-45, and lately also lots of woman in the same age. Which will make advertisers wanting to have their advertising around these shows.

2) The quality of the games are so good that “normal” people could watch this and enjoy. I can understand that my dad in the early 80s couldn’t figure out which of the tiny pixelated figures on the screen were us, and which were the bad guys.

But now: HD and glorious surround sound. Xbox 360, highend PCs, PS3 and games like Project Gotham Racing 3 makes this very close to the real world (not quite but close).

Add to that: Amazing replays and camera views you never get in “real life”.

3) The way the games are built fit with the way sports are made today: You have tons of statistics, you have people playing games for a living, and thus becoming very good at it.

There are of course some hurdles too: The geek factor, the quality and the development of new tools to make gaming better for tv.

1) The geek factor. The production I’m watching now is quite geeky. They use looots of special words only known to gamers, and try too little to inform normal people about the concepts of the game. The three guys in the studio are the ones you would playing games everywhere: Guys in t-shirts, not too fit, and 2 of 3 had glasses. Heh! But they knew what they were talking about!

2) The quality. This was lowcost production. Two static cameras and the game. If one produced it like an NBA final or a Champions League final it would something else of course. Lots of cameras, replays of crucial points in the game, experts on all strategy commenting moves (bringing in people from tha army and the air force commenting the game in Battlefield 2 would be cool), live cameras on the gamers gaces as they play, lots of on-screen statistics presented in a readable way. All the data on the gamers screens are made to be watched quite closely to the screen. People are not sitting that close to the tv so it needs to be bigger to be readable for television.

Game servers for broadcasters
3) Special servers. I think the developers of the games will start making special server software just for the tv broadcasts. When NBC airs the world finals in Project Gotham Racing 3, they would like to have access to all views and cameras in the game in their control room. All. So the tv producer can produce this like any normal Indy 500 or Formula 1 race.

Same with Battlefield 2: Several times during the game they missed important things because the guys in the studio happened to be on another camera when it happened. And they didn’t have replays. With special server software for tv companies, they could replay any event in the game, from any angle, not missing a thing.

As for now, this is quite geeky stuff. But still so mainstream that the website of Norwegian Broadcasting almost chrashed during the web-tv transmission. Over 15 000 streams were sent out, and 6 000 unique users were watching it live, making it the most popular live webcast in Norway ever. Even NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange), the hub of all net traffic in Norway, had problems because of this. See the graph and read about it at NRK.no o (in Norwgian).

(picture by NRK)

The final is still available in NRK’s web-tv here (Windows Media streaming). So have a look and see what you think. How long do you think it takes before a major US or European airs a game live in primetime? My guess, within two years or before.

Related: The best gamers in the world channel

Excellent campaign from the Swedish government. On Flicka.gov.se you can read about how we are being surrounded by messages. About retouching, video effects, clever advertising slogans.

Today it’s on Boingboing. Good thing. This is important. Not because of the Photoshop work done, but because young people need to be shown how they are manipulated thousands of times a day.

This is what is going on with downloadable television at the moment. Although PVR ownership is growing there is still far too much money on the table for television executives to offer us anything compelling. Why innovate when there is still tons of dough to make in commercials and DVD sales? To offer us a truly compelling service would mean disrupting their current rich, but declining, revenue streams and they are still too lucrative at this point for them to do this. Unfortunately.

So what do they do instead? They offer us a bunch of very limited crap alternatives that people won’t end up using to pay lip service to the idea of video on demand. And whether it’s the crappy “start over” service from Time Warner (hey, it’s great, people can’t skip the ads) or a download service from Apple (but with expensive sucky low res versions of shows) or these two latest offerings from NBC (NBC’s service will only work with DirecTV DVRs, uh hello McFly) and CBS (their service will contain commercials), these are all stupid offerings that have no or limited appeal at best.

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today’s newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It’s a fact. This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?

The logic of this is amazing. Windows has a 90+ marketshare, Macs about 4%. And then it turns out that all media is controlled by Mac-loving fanatics? Wow.

Scoble does of course agree:

At blogging conferences you’ll see something like 60% Macs. So, will they be able to write authoritatively about anything that comes down on the Windows side of the house?

More great logic. Because 60% at conferences use Powerbooks, Apple will get better PR than Microsoft? Hmmm.

I have read lots of rave reviews of Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. And people have slaughtered the iPod. Of course people can write that something they use themselves is crap. Or needs to be improved.

I think the there are two reasons why Apple sometimes are more hyped than Microsoft.

1) Steve Jobs is better communicator than Bill Gates. He knows how to put up a show. Bill Gates is an amazingly clever person but hasn’t the charisma of Steve Jobs.

2) Apple delivers. When Apple show a new product, it is available in the Apple Store the next hour most of the time. The biggest example of this NOT being true is faster G5 processors. So they change to Intel next year.

This commenter on Scoble hits it right on the head:

Look at the difference in the announcements from Apple and Microsoft. Apple is very secretive about future products. When they do make an announcement, you can order their product from their web site. Microsoft hypes their products for years telling everyone how great their software will be in a few years. When they do have a sincere announcement about a new product, it gets lost in all their old hype announcements and Apple’s real announcements.

BTW, I love the mac, and use Windows XP over 20 hours a week. I love the Xbox, and will can’t wait to get the 360.

I even asked Scoble for countdown bagdes to put on my site, but never got some. So there you go. Apple are better marketers. Dvorak should watch some movies. Smell some flowers. Have some wine. So tired.

Update: And if you didn’t know – Battlestar Galactica is now available for download in the iTunes Music Store! Watch on the bus, at work, in class, in the pool (oh wait…)

I can’t even start to explain how amazingly stupid this person is.

Mixing up belief and knowledge is always dangerous.

If you have missed the Spaghetti monster, read the articles at Boingboing or read the Wikipedia entry on it.

Stay Free! Daily has wonderful parody stamps. And this is the leader of the only superpower of the world? Scary.

(via the f blog and Boingboing)

“[Journalist]: – And the name Leah Isadora…?

[Märtha]: Ari took the initiative to it because he always has been fascinated by the dancer Isadora Duncans life and tragic death. He has traveled a lot in the Middle East, and the Leah name has its origins there. I have to admit that I always have been a big Star Wars-fan, and princess Leia has always been the most beautiful in the world.”

Illustration by Eirik Solheim at Eirikso.com

Isadora Duncan died when her scarf was caught in the wheel of friend’s car. Read about her at Wikipedia. Read more about Märtha at the site of the Royal house of Norway.

This is the little Leia Isadora:

Photo: (Dad) Ari Behn, Kongehuset.no

Princess Leia has her own databank entry at Starwars.com. Did you know that she is only 1.5 meters tall?

As you may know, Cory is science fiction author, a Boingboing blogger, and European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He talked about the case which started up EFF, the Steve Jackson Games case.

Here are some of my “impressions”, the things that I found interesting and thoughtful.

During that case, police stated that e-mail was like conversation in a bar, while EFF stated that e-mail maybe is one of our most private ways of communicating.

Cory was happy (and got applause) with the fact that the Broadcast flag was struck down by US Court of Appeals.

The speech was about “The politics of openness”, so Cory talked briefly about how he lives what he preaches (not his words!), by putting all his books on the net for free the day they are published, in all kinds of formats, and with rights for people to translate them to other languages.

“Copyright is a policy for regulating technology”
Cory recommended “Copyright communications policy” by Tim Wu. A must read.

In the old days, the composers were the “music industry”. The performers were basically trained monkeys, just playing exactly what composers had written. Having a famous performer were as unthinkable as having a famous piano. Then “technology” made it possible to save music the way it was performed, and performers became famous. Which made composers like John Philip Sousa freak out, claiming our vocal cords would fall off, like tails fell off when we stopped being monkeys.

Same thing happened again when radio came: Performers were afraid they would lose everything, as people could hear radio for free. They wanted a radio that charged people for listening.

Luckily, a way to compensate all parts were made. I think Cory said composers were paid 2 cents a composition for being played on radio? Anyway, radio generated 1000 times more money for 1000 times more people, and generated 1000 times more creativity and art.

In the years from 1976 to 1984 the VCR was the hot thing to discuss. Jack Vilanti, former chairman of the MPAA, told a Congressional panel in 1982, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Laughter.

NOK 10000
If you bought CDs for 10 000 Norwegian kroner 10 years ago, you can listen to them, make mp3s of them, back them up, make ring-tones from them, put them on your mobile/iPod/alarmclock etc (Cory said this much more elegant than I managed to write down!)

If you buy DVDs for the same amount, what can you do? Watch them. That’s it.

When Disney copied Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Will jr.” in 1928, to make Mickey Mouse “Steamboat Willie”, it was legal.

When Disney copied old folk fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers, to make “Snowwhite”, it was legal.

When Huckleberry Finn was published, a theatre play was up immediately, because all books at the time could be adapted to theatre – legally.

But you can’t take a photo of the Eiffel Tower and sell it anymore. It’s illegal. Apparently because then there will not be built any more Eiffel towers.

And DJ Danger Mouse couldn’t mix the Beatles “White album with Jay-Z’s “Black album”, making the highly acclaimed “Grey album”. That was illegal.

He also talked about Creative commons, geese with red ribbons (and then no ribbons), Charles Dickens being pirated until Mark Twain was, Canadians stealing US broadcasts – legally, harmonized copyright laws, WIPO (“a trade association pretending being a UN agency”), DRM (and how it’s NOT selling music), and the funny story about how the Russian state department warned Russian scientists going to USA, because in the US, scientists are put in jail for talking about the wrong type of maths.

The best way to keep a lock safe: Tell everybody how it works. Then, when someone finds out how to break it, patch it up again, and inform all the users what happened. Not telling how it works just leaves users in the dark.

The fact that ISP take down sites, when someone supposedly puts up copyrighted material, is a big problem. Why is it this way? Are car makers arrested for making cars used by bank robbers? Are restaurants owners arrested for having people talking about crime there?

Boingboing.net has about 150 000 unique readers every month. And close to 1 TB in traffic. Many ISPs can get you that kind of traffic for US$ 150 a month. Boingboing’s ISP has enough lawyers to not give after when someone wants to take down the site. Price tag: US$ 1 500.

Cory recommends “Collective licensing”. I think that means that one tries to figure out what percentage of the income each artist should get according to what percentage that artist is played on radio, tv etc. So if lots of people downloaded a track from the net, that artist would get better paid than artist not being downloaded.

Correct me if I misunderstood this!

Why remove Bit-torrent sites??? The only thing that happens, is that they go underground, where they are much more difficult to find. It’s like making an anti-resistant bacteria on purpose.

One person in the audience asked about Cory’s thoughts on the fact that copyright seem to expand every time the first Disney movies are about to loose their copyright. Cory answered that you can’t base your business on a 90 year business plan. That’s not a good way at all to run a business.

There were of course other things talked about, and Cory’s English language skills obviously are better than mine. I enjoyed his speech, and hope to see him back in Norway soon.

UPDATE: Lots of Norwegian bloggers have posts from the speech: Alf Kåre Lefdal, Jorunn Danielsen Newth, Børge, Håkon Styri and Erik Newth.

Gisle Hannemyr has an English post, with lots of pictures on Flickr too. Erik Newth also has uploaded pictures to Flickr.

And finally; Herman Robak recorded the whole thing, and has put up a mpeg file of it. It didn’t respond when I tried tonight.

The article tells that the new software is a combination of internet, ip telephony and mobile phones, and so far works on mobile phones from Siemens, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Jon Lech Johansen and his father are working with solutions for other mobile phones.

The software will be released within a month. DVD-Jon’s blog does not mention anything about the new software.

UPDATE: It seems that the product is a way to send text messages for a very small fee.

PS. Do you have links relating to this article? Tag them “foroyvind” at Del.icio.us. See how to do it here.

It was very hot, about 30-35 Celsius (86-95 Fahrenheit). Big buzzing bees were flying past me, not a cloud in the sky. And almost no tourists or other visitors. A perfect day in June.

I walked through the buildings where the working prisoners were kept, saw the bad beds and the very thin walls with no isolation at all. And the horrible toilets, where people on occasions were drowned. In shit.

I visited the gas chamber and saw the meter thick walls and the special construction of the door to make the gas stay in the room. And the wardrobes where people had to undress for the last time.

The scratches on the walls.

The displays with prisoner’s hair, shoes, clothes and luggage.

And the very detailed logs where all this killing were written down.

It’s easy to agree: Auschwitz was “the scene of one of the worst crimes in human history.”

Norwegian daily Aftenposten calls the series “full of details and convincing”.

Here in Norway, many school classes raise money to go with “Stiftelsen hvite busser” (the White buses foundation) to Auschwitz. They are guided by Norwegians that survived the camps. There are not many of them left, but they do a job that can’t be valued enough.

“In the camp Treblinka, 90% of all prisoners were killed within 2 hours of arrival.” (from the BBC program). 900 000 people were killed in Treblinka. In camp that was 400 x 600 meters.

Hicksdesign is also a nominee. Jon Hicks is confused – and flattered.

“Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young.”

Take a guess: Would all these smart people go into Del.icio.us if it was a bad idea?

(via Joi Ito)

This afternoon my friend Eirik‘s site Trendmapper was featured on John Batelle’s Searchblog.

Try it for yourself. Go to Trendmapper and enter your search phrase. Every night Trendmapper will search for you, and make a nice graph to show the number of hits. It doesn’t work backwards of course, so the search will only go from the date you enter it. But if you are launching a campaign and want to track how well it’s going. Or check the popularity of a word/product/product, just enter it into Trendmapper.

One very nice feature is that you can put a small trendmap on your site. You can see mine to the right. Setup a search, and when it’s “live” the next day, you can just link to the gif that Trendmapper makes for your search.

UPDATE: G-metrics has been doing this for quite some time. Nice interface too. I’ll check it out. Strange I never found it when googling everything related to google statistics some months ago.

Funny and unexpected. Inspiring, awful and beautiful. Often irritating and frightening – even injurious. We are surrounded by pictures and messages. In the mirror, at school, in newspapers, advertising boards and at home in front of the tv. Many of them talks bout how we are or should be. Slimmer, prettier, faster.

Which picture is the strongest? How are girls, boys and adults affected by all the different pictures, values and messages? Do you feel angry or happy? Uneasy and sad or energized? Or maybe everything at once? Is this something we should involve in? Flicka thinks so.

Check it out. Most of it is in Swedish, but the flash animation showing how a cover girl is photoshopped to look better is very good. There are also two ads that Swedish television channels TV3 and TV4 wouldn’t air. One of them shows a typical rap video: Cool rapper in front of bikini silicon babes washing his cars. Then one of the babes turns to the camera asking “Why do we behave like this?” (in Swedish). Then shows the phone number of a Swedish record executive, so you can call him yourself to ask why. Clever!

This is important. I think most people know that they are being “fooled”, but not how much. And exactly how it’s done. It’s important that kids learn about these things, and even learn how to use the techniques themselves. Some may think this sounds silly – why teach them how to make even more fake cover pictures?

It’s the same as with other tools: Learn people how to use them, and they will spot when someone tries to influence them. We teach our kids how to analyze texts, so they can find the message, and figure out how the author does it.

I have a feeling that the written word is well covered in education. Video and pictures not. I can understand why: Teachers don’t have the knowledge, and schools don’t have the equipment.

So that leaves some work to do for techie parents: Teach your kids how to make retouched covers. Teach them video editing. Teach them about camera position, gaussian blur, lighting and color correction. It really should be second nature to them if they want to withstand the pressure that advertising and modern mass media puts on them.

Update: Small followup posted December 2005.