Sin City, the most accurate comic book adaptation ever

Elijan wood as Kevin in Sin City

I dont usually post reviews of films on my blog unless I'm in love with the film (matrix series). Anyhow last weekend I watched some of the most stylised violence and cut throat dialogue since Kill Bill the japanese cut, which is in colour through-out the House of Blue Lights fight. Yep Frank Miller's Sin City. Honestly even before seeing the review on the same page, I was thinking there has never been a more accurate comic book adaptation ever! Its so odd because I usually do not like Robert Rodriguez's style of films but he's really took on Sin City and let the film do the talking. Watching the film is almost exactly like reading the comic books from the look to the dialogue, my own critism is the story lines could have done with a liitle more twist but you got to get new people into it. And it certainly does do that well, there's good character development but not too much for those who who know already. I will be watching this film in the Cinema when it finally reaches the shores of the UK, I highly suggest you do the same…

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New video distribution platforms

This April feels like an innovative month. While Google ready there video distribution platform via slashdot. The great people behind Downhill Battle have launched a new open source video platform which is based on there BattleTorrent system. This certainly beats Nullsoft's NSV system and but makes me wonder why there is no join up between ourmedia and participatoryculture. This all fits quite nicely with my past post about the creative archive which got its day on slashdot, plus Hollywood is finally getting it and thinking about Bittorrent for distribution.

For myself almost every single piece of video content I consume is through the net now, and this has opened up an chance to get stuff which relates better to myself that usual TV. For example Kevin Rose from the Screensavers fame creates short videos for a narrow audience of geeks and hackers. Such a market is very badly served by TV and some what Radio. But thebroken.org and his new systm (yet to see any videos) are good to watch form part of my usual video consuming lifestyle. Talking of which, the scene is also forming part of my crowded train time on the pocketpc. Its perfect because its short and theres not a lot of talking to be missed by a delayed train announcement. I treat it like Hollyoaks or someother soap, which is light entertainment and drama. I'm hoping more of these types of narrowcasted shows and documentary's as such will be created by the tools and distribution methods introduced people like Downhill Battle. And of course I'm thinking very hard about creating my own shows which have a narrow audience.

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The UK Creative Archive launches

After many rumours and articles in the guardian. The Creative Archive has been launched to the world. It claims to be a pilot but I think it will be out stay its 18 month timetable. Good to see Channel4, The British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University on board. I do however wondering how much media content will actually come from the partners of the Creative Archive Licence Group.

The site is a super styled Moveabletype blog and contains everything anyone would need including FULL TEXT RSS feeds and trackbacks dotted around here and there. I know Ben Metcalfe is behind this and he's done a good job of keeping it away from the Blog style. It would have been nice if it was not set to 800px width. There are nice large pieces around the site suggesting people should Tell us what you think!, which leads to a short form. My first thoughts was, where's the media content?

Theres a thorny issue which I'm sure will not go away, so I'll talk about it frankly…
The difference between the Creative Commons licence and the UK Provisional Creative Archive Licence is the No-Endorsement part. I know the reasons why but this is almost unenforceable (quoted from Miles in a recent chat). They can't possibly endorse fair use and rule out satire, irony, and lampoon. All are legitimate artistic uses. And he's right, some of the best pieces of work these country has made are mixes of satire and irony. The lawyers are going to be very busy on this count.

End of the day, this is a great move forward and I'm really looking forward to media content being introduced soon. Thanks to everyone involved and I look forward to mixing, sharing and ripping sometime real soon.

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The Scene? a new form of soap entertainment?

So its all about the scene. No were not talking about the dating scene which tickled a few slashdotters. And were not talking about the clubbing and music scene which I would usually consider as the scene. No its a site which was picked up by a few people a while but I kinda of skipped over till recently. So basicly its a Television show about the underground network scene of suppliers, rippers and coders who bring the latest films to the public networks of the internets. Yes that means you can easily and freely download each ep via torrent, gnutella, etc etc… Its not a new way of thinking but it seems the whole thing is being funded by Sony, which is quite interesting.

The.Scene.Episode.1.TV.XviD-SCENE was released December 2, 2004 This video was created by Sony (www.sony.com) towards the end of the Video there is a name that appears Rebecca Brandt if you google Rebecca Brandt you get http://www.sonyplaza.com/ny/reporters_5.html [sonyplaza.com] apperently she is some sort of reporter for Sony if you continue to look at the page you can see who else she works with Seth Hochman http://www.sonyplaza.com/ny/reporters_4.html [sonyplaza.com] Look at his picture. Its the guy from the video with a haircut.

From there it drops into the usual slashdot bashing but I'm not so quick to bash it. I have only seen the first ep which I watched on my ipaq on the way home but its not badly done and the product placement and advertising is not terriable, plus add the factor that you can easily skip it because the video is a plain xvid file not a DRM junky file. Which assures everything will be able to play it, which strikes me as good move on Jun Group's part. The advertising site has reported that it has recieved more attention that it could actual handle which has to be a advertiser's wet dream come true? Executives at show sponsor Freebord phoned Jun Group two hours after the premiere to report that their website was “being swamped with traffic.”

What makes the show most unique is the fact that it is being distributed solely through the P2P community. “File sharers have made it very clear that this is their preferred method of consuming content,” Mitchell said. “We are the first ones who have found a way to truly meet that demand.” He added that the file-sharing audience is a highly desirable demographic of affluent and largely male young adults. Businesses pay for placement based on the number of people who are inspired by the show to visit a sponsor, which is both quantifiable and verifiable. “Our sponsors will only be paying for the people who download the show or the people we drive to their websites,” he noted. “They won't have to rely on outdated ratings systems.” There's no reason to copy-protect the shows, Mitchell said, because the whole idea is for people to copy and share them so that advertisers reach the highest possible number of consumers.

And this is the thing, if you dont like the scene which is really a soap for file sharers, then dont watch it! But honestly, it still beats watching Eastenders and Hollyoaks for myself. I would almost start to say that this season of 24 up till recently (ep 13) has not been great and its been too generalising for my liking and I welcome something a little more technical and tech savy. The scene is light soap entertainment and its popularity has spawned a copy already and proves that even developers, filesharers, hackers, etc still want or maybe even need a little light entertainment now and then. The question is, do you want it from the mainstream or narrowstream? I know which one I perfer.

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Traditional downloading and beyond torrents

My wife refered to downloading using peer 2 peer networks like kazaa and winmx as traditional downloading in a conversation about Shareaza and bit torrent. I personally think the term Traditional downloading is so funny for all the right reasons, and it should on wordspy under networking or communications. Honestly I can not even start to explain why its funny.

Anyway in other thoughts, I've been looking around for new torrent sites since two of the best have gone offline. Suprnova and Torrentbits went offline at the same time during last week, which has something to do with the raids by the MPAA? Anyway things have moved on and there will be an announcement by suprnova tomorrow at 9pm GMT. I personally think its something to do with Exeem. I mean even the unofficial faq has this flashing lights.

When will SuprNova.org be back?
Never as it was. If it eventually does come back up, it won't feature ANY links to torrents at all.

However theres no mention of Exeem here, and I have yet to listen to the Novastream mp3 which is still sitting on my ipaq after days. But theres tons more links here and theres even screen shots of the beta here. By the way just incase you not read it yet, stop reading and check out the wired interview with Bram Cohen.

On the Torrentbits side of things – theres already movement around a torrentbits2 site but were all too late already… Anyway here's a few sites I've checked out and like so far…
http://www.tvtorrents.tv , http://torrentspy.com , http://torrentreactor.net , http://elitetorrents.org , http://lokitorrent.com and couple more. This list will get you started. I've also found RSS and IRC very useful during this time of unrest in the torrent world. Looking past Bit torrent, there are already people building systems which work in the same way as bit torrent but keep everyones ip hidden. My favourate p2p technology has to be PDTP which looks pretty much like bittorrent but with added bonuses. I mean a piece proxy is a novel concept in its self, I just hope there more protected than trackers in a traditional bit torrent network. Also on the plus side, lets not forget Freenet and darktorrent. As the Engadget guys said today, there are people working on better and faster ways to get information around and Hollywood will not be able to stop them.

Cluetrain #57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner

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Podcasting on the BBC culture show tonight…

A quick reminder of a programme being shown today at 7pm on BBC2.

Finally, if you havent yet heard of podcasting, you soon will. It's the latest new trick on the internet and it has the potential to shake up the way we listen to radio. You can hear about it first on tonight's Culture Show, BBC2 at 7pm, or 8pm in Scotland.
Best wishes
The Culture Show team.

According to Adam Curry's podcast yesterday (Wednesday). They have cut the segment down from 9mins to 6mins, which is pain, but what can you do? Anyhow I will reserve judgement till after the broadcast. Oh and if you miss it tonight, you can watch it here soon afterwards?

Ok I missed half of the culture show due to a late train from London Bridge but those great Engadget guys put up a torrent file for the mpeg4 version. So I was able to watch the whole lot again. First thoughts, it wasnt that bad. They didnt actually show much of how Adam does it but thats cool, it wouldnt make the best TV for the general public. 7mins and a couple of seconds gave enough time to talk to UK podcasters and chat with Adam Curry. Actually it was kinda of slick, and up there with the quality of usual BBC programming. However, i have complaints.
The first guys introduction sucked, very boring and I would have been deeply worried it was going to be like that through-out if I never saw the rest first. The graphic podcasting thingy was pretty good, and I'm wondering where they got that from? I was tempted to take a screen shot. I also didnt like the fact it was all focused around the ipod, even though zina and adam curry did mention mp3players and 3g mobile phones. The emphase that this is all very camp and amateur was kinda of offensive I felt, I mean would you call webtalk radio or engadget amateur? I also thought there was no mention about Dave Winer who also helped kick off podcasting. On the whole it wasnt at all bad and did more good for getting the name around that anything – thumbs up to the culture show guys for a good segment. I just hope it works well with my presentation in two weeks time, when I talk to worldservice about podcasting…

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The Amazon theatre

Portrait with minnie driver

Interesting thing amazon seem to be doing on there site. Amazon theatre is basiclly a way of showing off small 5min post-independant films by large names. I heard nothing about it in the blogsphere, but I personally think its just interesting that Amazon is doing this, what is the business model? Maybe it drive traffic to amazon or they can sell extra books off the back of them? who knows, but the short films business is dominated by ifilm and I wonder what they make of the whole thing?

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Audio and PDF Excerpt

Doug Kaye's post about Audio Excerpt Blogging is great reading and put a smile on my face. If it is possible to grab a subpart of a mp3 file using a RESTful interface, i would be very happy.
However, something hits odd about using all this other methods to do it (flash, quicktime, etc). Why not just use Smil to do this? It has features to deal with snips of audio already. Plus it has features which you guys will be pleading for soon. I mean who wants to listen to a 2min piece at 56k when there on a T1 connection. Using the switch element you can draw from different sources based on connection speed and other things. Hell, you can even use the same method to take a subpart of a video file… Smil is the way forward for sure, trust me on this one gillmor gang.

However Jon Udells post about Page addressable PDF is pretty cool and I'll be using that more from now on.

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The Evil Anime giraffe

After the axon run around in piccadilly yesterday evening, most of us went to to eat. So we got to know each other alot better. Despite the terriable service in Deep Pan pizza we had a good time. And I got speaking to Flidget Jerome. Well theres a lot more to Flidget, than meets the eye. But one of the most interesting facts about her, is shes a very good Anime artist.

The Lady of the Silences, Patron of Those who have Sold, Traded, Lost or Otherwised Misplaced Their Souls
You can find more at her website evilgiraffe.

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Getting free music legally?

Friends with benefits image

Just recently I've not been consuming enough music. I use to follow dance music alot but I've been consuming too much Television and Movies from UKnova and Suprnova. They do have music too but usually popular albums rather than the edgy underground stuff I listen to. Plus they rarely do tracks rather than full albums. So I've been thinking about using a p2p client like Shareaza again to share and trade tracks.

But then again I was reading Xeni Jarden's article about putting the share back into filesharing. I keep meaning to check out the links and see if its any good. However the ripping off live radio is back in fashion and much more accessable than ever before. Streamripper seems to be the application which all others is copying. Streamripper is Opensource (GPL) and runs on Windows and OSX, so there seems to be little reason why you cant compile it for other platforms? For those new to all this, basicly this application will rip what it hears streamed. It will use ID3 tags to create the individual mp3 files with the right meta and filenames. Plus its actually not against the law to record it for personal use. I have yet to try it yet, but I'm going to try it this weekend for sure… I've been tempted to do it at work, except I would have no way to take all the tunes home after work. Maybe this is a good time to get that 160gig drive (55 pounds plus vat is going rate at the moment) for my external harddrive enclosure?

Update, installed the version for Winamp 5 and it worked like a dream. Creates nice folders for each stream. But you can configure all those options. My main problem is once again bandwidth, I had 3 torrents going on while doing streamripping and so any long dj mixes ended up as parts in the incomplete folder. But any tunes shorter than 10mins long were fine. I highly recommend streamripping over kazaa or any other weird p2p app. Lets just hope the induce act isnt copied over here in europe.

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Getting free music legally?

Friends with benefits image

Just recently I've not been consuming enough music. I use to follow dance music alot but I've been consuming too much Television and Movies from UKnova and Suprnova. They do have music too but usually popular albums rather than the edgy underground stuff I listen to. Plus they rarely do tracks rather than full albums. So I've been thinking about using a p2p client like Shareaza again to share and trade tracks.

But then again I was reading Xeni Jarden's article about putting the share back into filesharing. I keep meaning to check out the links and see if its any good. However the ripping off live radio is back in fashion and much more accessable than ever before. Streamripper seems to be the application which all others is copying. Streamripper is Opensource (GPL) and runs on Windows and OSX, so there seems to be little reason why you cant compile it for other platforms? For those new to all this, basicly this application will rip what it hears streamed. It will use ID3 tags to create the individual mp3 files with the right meta and filenames. Plus its actually not against the law to record it for personal use. I have yet to try it yet, but I'm going to try it this weekend for sure… I've been tempted to do it at work, except I would have no way to take all the tunes home after work. Maybe this is a good time to get that 160gig drive (55 pounds plus vat is going rate at the moment) for my external harddrive enclosure?

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The Summer Olympics, people downloading it now

This Wired article Let the web games begin. Working at the world service on Friday I recieved a call from a guy in Denmark quite upset he couldnt hear the BBC world service news online. Anyway I quickly realised from others that we were blanking all programmes which could be classed as breaking copyright with NBC. Now this is only my own view, not of the BBC but I can not believe NBC own the rights to all internet broadcasts from inside the Olympic village, how on earth did some a deal get done without anyone questioning it? So in actual fact – if there was an act of terroism in the olympic village (i really hope there wont be), the bbc realisticly could not use video or audio from the olympics online (my own thoughts not the BBC). Even though its a news story not a sports story. This is something else, i think you'd agree?
Anyhow, we (the bbc) officially replied with this official page on Friday lunchtime.

The whole debate over is it technically possible to restrict Internet broadcasts within specific geographic boundaries? is a difficult one, as the internet is not about geographic boundaries and it makes regional seperation questionable. Proxys are very common just like web scraping…

Moving away from Proxys to Bit torrent just like in the wired article. I've already noticed postings of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Athens, only problem is its not live. And theres some serious demand for live webcasting! Sure some enterprising person with bandwidth and linux video capturing working will setup a proxy and start the cat and mouse game of blacklists and proxies. *Smile* let the games begin indeed…

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Palmtop readable pdf

I wrote a email to Dan Gillmor the other day, thanking him for his great new book we the media, which I am currently reading. I also wanted to ask Dan if it was ok to distribute his book in a different form – aka tagged pdf. I already noticed the book is under the creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, but i thought it would be good to ask anyway.

Anyway Dan's fine, and is interested in the url, maybe so he can post it up with the other derivative versions, like the audio version which is currently being worked on.
And it looks like I was just in time, Danny already asked for a version to read on his pocketpc. Well here it is for all to read. The free culture ebook is also there to download, if you havent read it yet. Oh and if anyones after more stuff to read on there palmtop, check out my little selection of tagged ebooks. Enjoy…

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