I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.

April 28, 2009: Kickstarter is live! I wrote more about the launch here.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter’s a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)

I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They’re a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.

Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.

To help them on their way, they’re currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I’ve been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we’re looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.

If you’re interested, drop me an email or IM and I’ll introduce you!

After recording last week’s interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it’s always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.

Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.

The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.

This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.

Here’s how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes of setup per job.

Continue reading “Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk” →

First, the bad news. Two days ago, I received a polite email from David Winton, the director of Code Rush, asking me to take the out-of-print documentary off of Waxy.org. As promised, I immediately complied.

Now, the good news — In my reply, I asked David if he’d mind being interviewed, and he agreed! He’s an accomplished director and producer, the creator of the Big Thinkers series for TechTV, and the cofounder of Winton/duPont Films, located in San Francisco’s Presidio.

We had a wonderful conversation about the film, which revealed for the first time that he’s planning on not only re-releasing Code Rush digitally, but considering releasing the original outtakes (100 hours of footage) to the public domain on Archive.org.

I wish all my takedown notices were like this! Read on for the full interview, with selected clips from Code Rush, used by permission.

Continue reading “Interview with David Winton, Director of "Code Rush" Mozilla Documentary” →

Ethan Diamond, co-founder of the pioneering webmail service that became Yahoo! Mail, today lifted the veil on his new startup and gave me an exclusive first look.

Bandcamp is a free hosted publishing platform for musicians, taking the technical challenge out of setting up a site — transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics, payment processing, and so on.

Band websites are often pretty bad, hacked together by a friend of the band with Flash and Dreamweaver, or worse, by the record label. There are exceptions, but mostly, it’s a sea of Flash intros, popup windows, mystery navigation, and 30-second sound clips.

Bandcamp is trying to change that, giving every album and track its own page with clean URLs and semantic markup, with the accompanying SEO benefits. Even before launch, they’re topping Google results for many searches for song titles of participating bands.

As an infoviz geek, I’m particular fond of their analytics and audio visualizations. Detailed stats let bands track recent activity on their songs and albums, including where people are coming from, trend tracking, and which songs were skipped, played partially, or played in full. A number of real-time audio visualizations in Flash are available on each song’s page, which can be shared and embedded on other websites.

Like Oddpost, the team’s small and nimble — only four people, all splitting engineering and design duties. Co-founder/CTO Shawn Grunberger (also formerly with Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail) and two engineers working from Seattle and Vermont round out the distributed team.

Ethan was kind enough to sit down with me on launch day to talk about their inspiration and process developing Bandcamp.

Continue reading “Oddpost Co-Founder Launches Bandcamp, Publishing Platform for Musicians” →

Election coverage, natural disasters, and Wall Street meltdown got you down? Let’s go back to a simpler time — 1984! It’s morning in America again, and the dawn of a new information age.

Fortunately, one unlikely celebrity couple is here to guide us through the brave new world of spread sheets, data banks, and modems. In Computability, an instructional VHS tape from 1984, comedian Steve Allen and actress Jayne Meadows “take us on a light-hearted but detailed tour of the ways a home computer can change your life by simply using the correct software packages to suit your needs.”

The video was originally inspired by the couple’s Grammy-nominated “Everything You Wanted to Know About Home Computers,” a vinyl LP released by Casablanca/Polygram Records in 1983. The LP’s completely unavailable, but thanks to Sammy Reed’s wonderfully strange podcast, I was able to recreate the full album. (Stream it below or download the 11 MB MP3.)

Continue reading “Computability: Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows' Computer Video from 1984” →

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music. Gregg Gillis created a beautiful, illegal mess of copyright clearance hell, which you should download immediately. (It’s free, but I kicked in $20 for Gregg’s legal fund and a copy of the CD.)

Last month, Rex Sorgatz asked about collecting metadata on the album for data crunching. After spelunking through Billboard’s chart history, that sounded like my idea of a good time.

So I compiled all the data into spreadsheets, used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to collect some additional information, and pulled out a few charts. As always, I’ve provided CSV downloads for all the data along with the original output from Mechanical Turk, for those interested in experimenting with the platform.

Update (October 30): Here’s the official sample list.

Continue reading “Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals"” →

Back in 2004, I wrote about how high-quality videos from the Olympics in Athens were being digitized and posted online, in defiance of the networks and the IOC’s rules.

At the time, NBC’s online coverage was restrictive by today’s standards — mostly highlight clips and no live video, delayed until after the events aired on TV, and required a valid credit card to verify residency in the United States.

But that was four years ago! YouTube hadn’t launched yet, HD-quality streaming video on Vimeo was three years away, and BitTorrent or HDTV were only popular with early adopters.

This year, it’s much improved, albeit with some caveats. NBC’s official video is great quality, if you and your computer can stomach Silverlight (unavailable on non-Intel Macs). Their coverage is fantastic, though still tape-delayed. And, because of IOC regulations forbidding international distribution, NBC won’t allow you to download, embed, or transcode any videos for your iPod or phone.

Is this availability enough to satiate the pirates, and what does the quality look like compared to 2004? I went poking through Usenet and some public and private BitTorrent trackers to see.

Usenet

Back in 2004, the place to go for illegal Olympic videos wasn’t BitTorrent, popular trackers like Suprnova, or mainstream P2P clients. The best coverage, surprisingly, was found in the old-school Usenet binaries. It was a mish-mash of events, skewed heavily towards events with bikini-clad women, Brazilians, or bikini-clad Brazilian women, but other popular events and the opening ceremonies also showed up.

Today, the event coverage in Usenet is just as sporadic, but the quality is dramatically better. Compare the three videos below. The first is a sample from the gymnastics high bar finals from the 2004 games, followed by the same footage of Michael Phelps’ win from Saturday’s 400m IM final, as seen on NBCOlympics.com and a 720p HDTV rip found in Usenet.

Sample Videos (right-click to download):

• Men’s Gymnastics High Bar Finals – Usenet, 2004 (25MB MPEG1)
• Men’s Swimming 400m IM Final – NBCOlympics.com, 2008 (5MB MPEG-4)
• Men’s Swimming 400m IM Final – Usenet, 2008 (15MB MPEG-4)

Here’s the full list of Olympics videos currently up on Usenet, as of this evening:

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony (720p)

Football – Group A – Ivory Coast vs. Argentina Extended Highlights

Football – Group B – Netherlands vs. Nigeria Extended Highlights

Football – Round 1 Highlights

Gymnastics – Men’s Qualifying – USA

Shooting – Women’s 10m Air Pistol Final

Swimming – Men’s 100m Backstroke Semifinals

Swimming – Men’s 100m Breaststroke Final

Swimming – Men’s 200m Freestyle Semifinals

Swimming – Men’s 400m Individual Medley (720p)

Swimming – Men’s 4x100m Freestyle Final

Swimming – Women’s 100m Backstroke Semifinals

Swimming – Women’s 100m Breaststroke Semifinals

Swimming – Women’s 100m Butterfly Final

Swimming – Women’s 400m Freestyle Final

Volleyball – Women’s Preliminaries – China vs. Switzerland

Most of these are in alt.binaries.tv, but some are also posted to alt.binaries.multimedia.sports. I’ll update this list at the end of next week.

BitTorrent

But the trend for this year is clear — Usenet passed the torch to BitTorrent.

A quick search on Mininova or BTJunkie returns a huge list of every video found on Usenet, plus dozens more and growing hourly. Beyond public trackers, I’ve seen extensive activity on several private communities. On one of them, its members compiled a list of every event and were slowly adding their own recordings to create a massive archive of Olympics video.

And this is only Day 4! It’ll be interesting to see how much of the Olympics was captured, digitized, and uploaded by the end of the games.

Also interesting: If this chart from Mark Ghuneim is accurate, the thirst for pirated Olympics coverage is greatest in China.

How often is Friendfeed hitting Flickr, and how many Friendfeed users are on Flickr?

We now have a glimpse into Monday’s traffic, thanks to a snapshot provided by Kellan and Rabble’s in their talk, Beyond Rest: Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub, presented earlier today at OSCON in Portland:

On July 21, 2008, Friendfeed hit Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users, of which 6,721 visited Flickr in that 24-hour period, and could have potentially uploaded a photo.

Three million requests for 6,000 updates. Clearly, polling isn’t ideal. Don’t miss the rest of the slides.

(Also, at its peak, Flickr is currently receiving 60 uploaded photos a second, “roughly 10 times the number of people born on Earth per second.”)

With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It’s designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)

The idea’s simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you’ve opened a window to another world.

I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it’s like being a programmer in a journalist’s world.

The Big Picture’s become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it “the best new blog of the year.” What inspired it?

Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC’s photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn’t reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

Continue reading “Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture” →

In honor of the release of Firefox 3.0, I’m offering up a video that documented its very beginning in 1998 — the first open-source release of Netscape’s browser and the foundation of the Mozilla project.

Independent filmmakers followed the Mozilla team from March 1998 to April 1999, as they worked to open Netscape Communicator’s source code to the world, in a last-ditch effort to save the company. The result is an amazing snapshot of computer history, capturing the people that worked on it, the first internal beta test, the moment Jamie Zawinski uploaded the first builds publicly, the launch party, the all-hands meeting announcing the AOL acquisition, and so much more. It aired on PBS nationally in March 2000, the same month as the beginning of the dot-com collapse.

Out-of-print and never released on DVD, the used VHS copies start at $50 on Amazon. Like all the videos I release on Waxy.org, this material is commercially unavailable. If they ever come back into print, or the copyright holders contact me, I’ll take them down immediately.

Important Update (September 16): At the request of the the director, I’ve removed the video from Waxy.org and Viddler. I’ve interviewed the director about his plans for releasing the film and the unreleased footage.

Update (July 31): The documentary is back online, legally released under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve done my best to annotate the video, but many people in the film aren’t identified. I’ve left Viddler annotations open to everyone, so if you want to identify the people, places, or notable objects/events/trivia in the film, then please add your inline comments the video! (Or IM/email me and I’ll take care of it.)

The video’s now offline, but I’ve saved all the annotations. Thanks to Tman for creating the subtitle file, which can be used in video players like Media Player Classic or VLC, or simply viewed as plain text.

Now go download Firefox 3.0 and help make history!

Interviews and Appearances

• Jamie Zawinski: Left Netscape on April 1, 1999, now the owner of DNA Lounge in San Francisco
• Jim Barksdale, CEO
• Michael Toy
• Jim Roskind
• Tara Hernandez: Now an infrastructure engineer at Pixar
• Scott Collins: Now works on the Slashdot engineering team
• Jeff Weinstein
• Marc Andreessen
• Stuart Parmenter (and his parents)
• Brendan Eich: CTO at Mozilla
• David Readerman, Tech Analyst
• Po Bronson, Wired Magazine
• Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal
• Gregg Zachary, Wall Street Journal
• Ellen Ullman, Author of Close to the Machine