Most video on the web is published using the H.264 format
"Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access 'the full web' because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web's video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others."
(Steve Jobs, April 2010)
Fig.1 video of iPhone mugging attempt on Steven Levy's phone.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Posterous: CMS for simple web publishing via email
"Posterous is the easy way to get content online using e-mail. You can e-mail content of just about any type (such as rich text, photos, music, video, Word/Powerpoint/Excel/PDF documents, and zip archives) to us. We will post it online in the most web-friendly format, then reply with a public URL that can be forwarded or shared with friends. Account creation is never required, but if a user does create an account, posts from your various e-mail addresses (work, home, and mobile phone) can all be integrated into one blog."
(Posterous, Inc.)
Fig.1 Susie Blackmon's Posterous weblog [available at: http://susieblackmon.com/].
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Xtranormal: Text-to-Movie authoring tool
"xtranormal's mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century.
Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill-typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop."
(Xtranormal)
[The Xtranormal Text-to-Movie authoring tool allows you to produce short films. It does so through adding your typed dialogue (in the form of 'text to speech') to supplied animated character assets.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Ken Loach gives away entire film catalogue on YouTube
"Ken Loach has been one of the world's most-admired film-makers for nearly half a century but in Britain he has increasingly wondered how to attract an audience.
Now Loach and his producer, Rebecca O'Brien, have come up with a radical solution: they are giving away all of his films free on YouTube.
The Ken Loach Films section of the video-sharing website offers five of Loach's feature films available to download, along with Carry on Ken, a documentary about the director made to mark his 70th birthday in 2006.
The aim is to add a film each week with a view to converting the site to a modestly priced pay-per-view service once a core audience is established. Films less than five years old are not included to avoid compromising DVD revenue."
(Times Online, 29 May 2010)
Fig.1 Loach, K. (1966). Cathy Come Home. UK, BBC.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Research: a process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared...
"The proposals for a new approach to the assessment and funding of research - set out last year in the Higher Education Funding Council for England's consultation paper on the research excellence framework - have sparked more than a few rows.
Much of the conflict has revolved around whether or not the economic and social impact of research should feature in the regime that will replace the research assessment exercise. ...
Our starting point should be to remember that the RAE was deeply flawed. It was dominated by vested interests, was embarrassingly subjective and seriously undervalued those scholars who bridge the worlds of academe and practice.
The REF is, then, a major step forward from the RAE not least because it broadens the definition of research. To suggest, as the REF does, that research is 'a process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared' invites all scholars to think afresh about how they communicate their research findings and to whom. ...
Yes, there are challenges in research impact assessment. New thinking, around, say, research 'possibilities' is needed. But once academics recognise that research findings should be 'shared', we have made a significant step forward. By definition we are now discussing research impact or, at least, potential research impact.
However, the intellectual argument relating to research impact, rather like the debate about the expansion of university public engagement activities, goes much deeper than a discussion of how scholars can improve the manner in which they communicate with different audiences - important as this is.
Rather it concerns a reshaping, for some disciplines at least, of the way scholarship is conceived. It heralds a move towards the notion of 'engaged scholarship'. Many UK academics - medics are a classic example - are already actively engaged with stakeholders outside the campus in the process of defining research questions and co-producing new knowledge.
This is not to suggest that all scholars should be 'engaged scholars' - indeed, that would be a bad thing. But the research impact debate can open up the possibility of broadening the definition of scholarship."
(Robin Hambleton, 4 February 2010, Times Higher Education)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
