[iDC] Introduction; online video, virtual worlds etc.

[Valentin Spirik]

Hello everyone,

I've been invited to join this list and here is my short self introduction
incl. comments to some of the recent discussions and a couple of related
links that might be of interest.

I'm a writer/director/editor and since June 2006 also experimenting with 3D
animation using the free and open-source blender http://www.blender.org/.

More about me and my work on my blog http://indiworks.wordpress.com/, I have
a video feed (subscribe to it like for a podcast) and all of my recent works
can also be downloaded individually via the "works/downloads" page on the
blog.


Audiovisual P2P Wiki

I am very interested in all aspects of D.I.Y. publishing on the net,
specially video and multimedia content and maintain the Audiovisual pages of
the Peer to Peer Foundation Wiki:

http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Audiovisual

This is a very extensive overview and introduction to all things related to
online and audio/video publishing. If you find it useful please link to it,
recommend it to friends, bookmark it at del.icio.us etc...


Open-source film making

Last December I tried to document the open-source film making scene (incl.
some financial aspects) and wrote a four part blog entry about it:
*Part 1*<http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/online-video-getting-paid-open-source.html>,
*Part 2*<http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/online-video-getting-paid-open-source_23.html>,
*Part 3*<http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-about-open-source-storytelling.html>,
*Part 4*<http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/open-source-film-making-contest.html>.
Maybe Part 2 is the most interesting one, basically I argue that a good
story is still the key ingredient for a successful project (surprise,
surprise...) and that a well meaning democratic scriptwriting process might
actually not bring the results one expects -  a script for a fiction movie
is not Wikipedia where people can agree relatively easily on certain
"facts". Stories have their own logic, some of it is personal and has to do
with the writer, but most of it I think is inside the original idea and the
writer's job is to ask questions and discover the details of the story, the
characters etc...

Mass collaboration on fiction movie projects can work, but the solution
might not be to write a traditional film script via a Wiki. It can work if

a) someone (or a software) edits/limits/makes choices for plot/characters,
or

b) everyone makes their own movie and the sum of them will of course be much
greater than the individual contributions. In this context see also *
Part 1<http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/online-video-getting-paid-open-source.html>
* of my look at open-source film making where I ask: Is YouTube A Dynamic
Interactive Movie?


Users vs. Services/(Game)worlds/VR etc

A while ago there was a discussion about del.ico.us on this list. My view: I
deleted all of my del.icio.us links - one by one - after the announcement on
the blog that told us we would now all be part of the "Yahoo! family". I did
not want to be part of that family - I had been using del.icio.us a lot up
to then because I felt it was this small independent, yet powerful
link-community, kind of like a "secret" link-hype-machine that reflects and
influences the way people surf the net - and this while being outside of the
mainstream. Of course the "Yahoo! family" was exactly the kind of online
empire that I had tried hard to avoid. (One reason at the time was the
"Yahoo! family"'s collaboration with the Chinese authorities
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4221538.stm.)

Recently I seriously thought about giving up my del.ico.us boycott and
opening a new account since the service itself is great and no one does this
kind of thing so well and simple at the same time. But then I thought of the
recent M$/Yahoo! acquisition rumours and there is no way that I will ever
use a web service that is owned or run by The Monopoly.


Since I am doing some little Virtual Worlds research on my own at the moment
here a couple of related links, some probably not new to the readers of this
list, some maybe of interest:

An overview of services (from a web 2.0 user's P.O.V.):
http://www.masternewmedia.org/virtual_reality/virtual-worlds/virtual-immersive-3D-worlds-guide-20071004.htm


Virtual worlds research etc: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/

Personalize Media, not strictly about virtual worlds:
http://www.personalizemedia.com/

pasta and vinegar, "emerging technologies usage/research/ foresight":
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/


Writer Response Theory: http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

And one of my all time favourite blogs: information aesthetics, "data
visualization & visual design" - very fascinating...

A couple of related video tips:

"A new way to look at networking", very technical but also very interesting:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840

The South Park "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode - very funny and quite
clever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love%2C_Not_Warcraft ; a YouTube
search gives these results:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=south%20park%20wow&search=Search


.hack//Sign, a rather unusual anime set inside a virtual world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hack//Sign
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hack//Sign>;
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hack%2F%2Fsign&search=

One possibly quite interesting software related link:

Croquet Consortium http://www.croquetproject.org/index.php/Main_Page -
"Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the
creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D
applications and metaverses"


And one last link, more general, my "remixlinks: open media culture"
http://remixlinks.ning.com/index.php linklist, open for contributions. (This
one was actually set up as an alternative for my del.icio.us account since
the service/host, ning.com, supports Creative Commons licenses and does not
expect me to turn over all sorts of rights.) While I'm not 100% happy with
the ning powered solution I have tagged all of my links in a way that should
give you good results when you surf "remixlinks" via tags.

I'll try to comment on some of the older and newer discussions on this list
once I've had time to read a bit more of what's been written so far - it
looks all very interesting...

Valentin Spirik
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