A good video tutorial I just finished over at FlashExtensions.

Very, very easy.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: News: Google To Launch Online Video Playback This Monday

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been
uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged
as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player,
which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday
morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the
open source community as part of their Google code project.

BTW, in unrelated news, did you know Jim Romenesko makes $152,163 a year? From his blog? Me neither. Despite what other bloggers think, I feel it’s well deserved and it helps to show you what becoming a recognized must-read in a on demand subject is worth as a blogger.

PBS | I, Cringely . June 23, 2005 – No Flash in the Pan

…Conventional wisdom says that Adobe needs this acquisition to bulk-up for the inevitable conflict to come with Microsoft. Conventional wisdom is occasionally wrong, however. I’m not saying that the acquisition makes no sense. Quite the contrary, I support it. But the lack of competition from Microsoft in Adobe’s traditional graphics markets comes down primarily to Bill Gates realizing that Microsoft simply hasn’t been in a position to compete with Adobe on a technology-for-technology basis. Gates tried to undercut Adobe’s PostScript with Microsoft’s TrueType fonts back in the late 1980s and was taken to the woodshed by Adobe. The professional graphics market wasn’t willing to give Microsoft the three tries it generally needs to get something right.

What’s changed is not the companies (brain-for-brain Adobe is still smarter in its niche), but the market. Microsoft’s endless quest for new revenue lines has settled on PDF as a target for its new Metro product, not just for graphics professionals, but for all of us.

The other thing that has changed is the mobile market, especially mobile phones — the PCs of tomorrow. Macromedia is making progress in the phone market and Adobe, for the most part, isn’t, hence the acquisition.

So it is a good deal all around, especially if Adobe can learn from Macromedia how to have fun.

But let’s get back to Flash for a moment, because I really do believe it is the key to this deal. What’s key about Flash is not just that it is installed on nearly every computer in the world, and that its influence is extending now into mobile phones. What’s key is that we all upgrade to the latest version of Flash as a matter of course, making it the ideal Trojan horse program of all time.

Let’s say Adobe/Macromedia had some little bit of code – a VoIP client, for example — they wanted to bring to market. Just make it part of the next version of Flash. Over the course of a few months and practically without effort, that little program would be installed and ready to go in hundreds of millions of computers. Then all Adobe would have to do is to announce it and the service could be up and running practically overnight. That’s the kind of market clout that not even Microsoft has. And that’s what makes Macromedia a bargain for Adobe even at $3.4 billion.

Peter adaptive path: Peter Merholz: how i learned to stop worrying and relinquish control:

…Again and again, the history of the Web shows us the value of relinquishing control. Amazon’s customer comments were originally thought foolish by those who believed negative reviews would hurt sales. Instead, they increased trust, which drove more transactions. eBay’s open marketplace eschews centralized control of buyers and sellers, instead favoring a distributed management system where individuals rate one another. Not coincidentally, Google, Amazon, and eBay have all made available their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that others can leverage their information in unforeseen and innovative ways.

Many designers find it remarkably difficult to relinquish control. As Jeff found out when judging an interactive design competition, designers will go to great lengths to control the user’s experience – popping up windows or resizing them, placing everything within Flash, cueing music. They get so caught up in controlling the superficial form of the product that they neglect to appreciate the context of the experience.

The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our business?

…Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways.

There is a great article on Philly Future‘s content management system (CivicSpace) and the people behind it at NewsForge.

eWeek: Microsoft has decided that subscribing, via RSS, will join browsing and searching as the third leg of its information-access triangle.

Well it’s about time.

Daniel Rubin at the Inquirer has put up a post about U.S. Code: Title 18: Section 2257.

A reply to me in the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy weblog warns:

Karl, my understanding is that even the lawyers are having trouble making sense of this. Most people seem to think that a webmaster could be held accountable for any image that appears on his web site, even if the image is hosted by another source. You might need to hire a lawyer.

But this will definitely impact more than just the porn industry because so many mainstream companies make money either directly or indirectly from porn. HBO and Showtime could be affected because of shows like “Real Sex” and “Family Business.” And what about that explicit oral sex scene between Vincent Gallo and Chloe Sevigny in “The Brown Bunny?” This is a movie that got a three-star review from Roger Ebert. It’s not a porn film, but it will have to comply. And so would all the web sites that reported on the controversial billboard that shows Sevigny performing oral sex on Gallo.

Dan Gillmor is asking contributors to Bayosphere to agree to a pledge before signing up. This is raising a few eyebrows around the web. This discussion is relevant to Philly Future so I opened up a a discussion there.

From the man who brought you The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999!):

…1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

…We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan made a huge splash with their hypothetical look at the future of news reading and gathering with their Flash presentation – EPIC 2014. Read their short, but interesting interview at unmediated.