Lawrence Lessig has consistently been one of the most important figures in the debate over copyright reform, ‘piracy’, and remix culture over the last decade. He’s recently switched his energies to battling the corrupting effect of PACs, lobbyists and outright bribery in the US political system, so it’s rare these days to hear him talk about how the law is prohibiting the development of culture, criminalising creativity and creating and extremism on both sides of the debate. A development that Lessig argues, has led to the social normalisation of copyright …

Barcelona from dbspin on Vimeo.
A few weeks ago I travelled to Barcelona, capitol of the Spanish province of Catalonia. On the last day, I cycled through the city and took a few low quality videos with my phone. These were too shoddy to post anywhere, so I had a play with them in final cut. The track is ‘The Weight of My Words’, by King of Convenience. Remixed by Fourtet. Most of these videos were taken in the cities oldest quarter, the Barri Gotic.

Social media, user generated content, folksonomies, Web 2.0. Geeks usually view these emerging phenomena in a glowing light – as ways for individuals and groups to co-operatively contribute to the generation of technology, culture and information. To cynics such buzzwords define methods for private companies and corporations to build products and databases without needing to pay for the work involved. Either way, social media has become ubiquitous online, with topic specific social networks connecting the audiences of most major websites, while user generated content (from Facebook posts, to Google Maps …

Filmed last weekend in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, with some kooky individuals.

I spent about eight hours yesterday working out how to do this. A working method was surprisingly hard to come by, so hopefully this will be of use to someone. Luckily it’s really easy once you know how. This technique should work not just for YouTube, but any other flash video site, like Google Video, DailyMotion etc.

The Venice project, a mysterious beta application from Kazaa and Skype creators Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has being variously hailed as the future of television, and the application which may finally bring to its knees the aging last mile bandwidth of the internet itself.
Retitled in mid January to ‘Joost‘, TVP is an IPTV application. That is, a program designed to carry high resolution video direct to consumers via the internet, rather than through satellite, cable or terrestrial broadcasts.
On the technical end, Joost uses both the UDP (to stream video …