dataesthetic: the aesthetics of networks and data

Well, it was bound to happen. Dataesthetic’s servers crashed over the weekend, taking a few weeks of posts with it. We’ve restored the site from back ups, but unfortunately some comments and posts were lost entirely.

Fortunately, many of these still live on my local drive, in slightly different form. So, give me a minute, and we’ll restore them as we sort through the wreckage. Apologies to all whose valued comments were lost.

-d-

Well, sort of anyway…

As we frequently note, dataculture solves many problems through brute force computation. While organization and refactoring databases often shakes loose associations or solutions, many issues only respond to modelling or trial and error methods, which our hardware fortunately excels at. Diseases, weather, signal analysis and complex interactive systems are such problems. Early on, as funding was cut to the space program, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence pioneered the use of idle processor time on home computers for sifting through collected signals. By connecting complex problems with many individual computer’s on the internet, many more signals could be sifted through in any given amount of time. Over time, this project slid off the institutional funding radar, but the effort has persisted through private efforts. Today the search continues, powered in no small part by interested individuals lending their computers to the effort. (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/)

While this approach may be good for finding alien worlds, it’s definitely useful in curing disease. Pharmaceutical research is the most computational intensive of fields. As we begin to explore the genomes of humans and diseases, the need to study the structures in motion, as they exist in nature, arises. One notable project is Stanford University’s Folding @ Home (http://folding.stanford.edu/). Like seti@home, unused cpu cycles of home computers are given computational tasks. One popular approach (there are many ways to participate) is via a screensaver, which computes “molecular folding” parameters, and displays the results as a screensaver (later sending them back to the server for reintegration into the dataset). While the type and logos of the screensaver are distracting and ugly, the molecules themselves make fine screen images in your downtime. More important, your machine is helping researchers fight diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

This work truly matters. It can help millions of people right away, and eradicate diseases into the future. Our contribution, a few pennies of electricity and bandwidth, provides researchers with computing power collectively equivalent to only the very largest, most powerful mainframes. Not only do we speed up the discovery process for treatments, we drive down the cost of discovery itself. This is one key to slowing the rise of drug and health care costs.

Over the long term our willingness to donate spare cycles will create new markets as well. Conceptually this is the next logical step away towards dataculture: now our computer’s attention and focus as worth, just as our personal attention has value. Amazon.com’s “Mechanical Turk” project created a market where we can sell microslices of our personal time and skills to companies on an ad hoc, as-needed basis. Companies offer projects and the price they’re willing to pay to accomplish them, individuals bid to take them on. Folding@home suggests the same kind of market, where our computers can autonomously accept and complete projects in their spare time. Like the telephone switching network, our computers rarely employ all available circuits in normal use. And, even when we are using machines to their fullest, they may be entirely unused while we sleep. It’s inevitable that the collective idle computing power of a nation will be harnessed to deliver greater benefits to that society, in exchange for goods, dollars or services. Today we lack the transparency in operations and our networks to fully exploit these ideas in a secure way. That’s a temporary problem though - Mac OSX is already secure enough, and open enough to go much farther than the examples cited. Windows clients seem to be equally polite if not as secure, so we’re not far off.

For the time being though I urge all dataesthetic readers to explore, and hopefully support these projects. Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/, download a screensaver or standalone client, and put your computer to work right away. Just don’t wait until you get Alzheimer’s and forget!

In 1984 Afrika Bambaata and John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon looked ahead to the 21st Century. Reaganistas and conservatives dismissed the politically charged rappers and punks of those days as narrow-minded anti-progress reactionaries and luddites. Even college kids and twentysomethings exchanged liberal values for credit cards, large screen tvs and 401Ks, launching a Cult of Me. The greed and avarice of those times cooled somewhat as first the economy, then the health care system, and eventually our public schools began to collapse. The collapse slowed a bit more while President Clinton worked with a Republican Congress. But once Republicans consolidated control of all three branches under George W. Bush, and 9/11 handed them total control, it became an avalanche. Today our economy is in shambles (unless you’re rich, in which case times have never been better), our health care system has itself become a cancer, and public education was cynically torpedoed by the unfunded “No Child Left Behind” act. Banks, health insurers and government legally prey on the poor and powerless for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Religion is a wedge separating people by race, and rationalizing all manner of prejudice and hate.

In 1984, World Destruction was considered a humorous over-reaction to the conservative policies of the time. At the time this song was written most Americans were unaware that their tax dollars were being given to Saddam Hussein by Donald Rumsfeld to pay for poison gas attacks on Kurds and Iranians. Back then Saddam was our biggest friend in the region, personally vouched for by Cheney, Rummy and the Elder Bush. Blithely ignorant that Wasabi Islamists already hated us, we funded Osama Bin Laden as well (he hated the Russians more at the time, so he was Reagan’s friend). Most people saw superpower struggles as the primary threat to security. In 1984 it was not a problem that most people on the planet hated us and our President because we felt our nuclear weapons could protect us by threatening them. We never paused to wonder what happens when people lose all hope, and have nothing left to lose.

This view changed dramatically after 9/11, but we remain incapable of responding to the underlying problem that caused the attack. We burn more oil in the US today than we did in 2001. SUV sales are slowing, but there are millions who believe it their right as Americans to destroy the planet, and burn oil subsidized by the blood of other people’s children. As long as they have a yellow ribbon magnet, they’re supporting the troops who die to fuel their SUV. At one time the children of the elite considered military service an obligation of their class, an opportunity to pay back the country for their enlightened opportunities. Today the children of the Republican elite are shielded from military obligations, and no one dares ask why the Bush Twins are too good to serve as their father and grandfather did.

Reactionaries or prophets? Read on and make up your own mind…

World Destruction (by Afrika Bambaata & John Lydon, 1984)

Speak about destruction.
This is a world destruction, your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
Countries are fighting with chemical warfare.
Not giving a damn about the people who live.
Nostradamus predicts the coming of the Antichrist.
Hey, look out, the third world nations are on the rise.

The Democratic-Communist Relationship,
won’t stand in the way of the Islamic force.
The CIA is looking for other detectives.
The KGB is smarter than you think.
Brainwash mentalities to control the system.
Using TV and movies - religions of course.

Yes, the world is headed for destruction.
Is it a nuclear war?
What are you asking for?

This is a world destruction. Your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
The rich get richer.
The poor are getting poorer.
Fascist, chauvinistic government fools.

People, Moslems, Christians and Hindus.
Are in a time zone just searching for the truth.
Who are you to think you’re a superior race?
Facing forth your everlasting doom.

We are Time Zone. We’ve come to drop a bomb on you.
World destruction, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom!

I’m going out of my mind (that makes two of us)
I’m going out of my mind

This is the world destruction, your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
Nationalities are fighting with each other.
Why is this? Because the system tells you.
Putting people in faceless categories.
Knowledge isn’t what it used to be.
Military tactics to control a nation.
Who wants to be a president or king? Me!

Mother Nature is gonna work against you.
Nothing in your power that you can do.
Yes, the world is headed for destruction.
You and I know it, the Bible tells you.
If we don’t start to look for a better life,
the world will be destroyed in a time zone!

I’m in a time zone
Speak about destruction
I’m in a time zone
Speak about destruction

Did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed really plan every major terrorist attack in the past 20 years, including 9/11 from “A to Z”? Did he personally behead Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl? Who knows? Not me, and certainly not his CIA inquisitors. Sincerity is rarely the product of torture, but that’s not the biggest problem with the story found in the heavily redacted transcripts. Sadly, the liars formerly known as the Bush Administration have a credibility problem.

It’s been nearly six years since 9/11, and we are farther than ever from capturing Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone, and our military is too stretched to respond to Kim Jong Il. In short, we’re fresh out of easy scape goats and our nuclear-armed ally, Pakistan, has provided a base of operations for the real culprits to grow and continue killing. American troops are targets for hit-and-run attacks in Afghanistan while the bulk of our Army polices the civil war we started in Iraq. President Bush’s already disastrous administration is at it’s nadir by every measure. Just this week two Republicans have called for the head of his Attorney General.

Enter the captured prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his long, specific “confession” to a secret military tribunal. The words are cloaked heavily in process: reading them is like reading a real court transcript. But ultimately they’re just words, and the individuals to whom they’re attributed are entirely unknown to us. Who knows whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was ever at such a tribunal? No one can know because unlike Nuremburg, there are no witnesses to this court.

It’s all too convenient. And the reputation of this administration precedes these revelations. They knowingly lied about WMD in Iraq, and attacked any and all who dared speak truth or challenge the falsehoods they spread. They lie reflexively and easily, often without reason or need. Alberto Gonzales’ lies concerning the replacement of U.S. Attorneys were unnecessary, but trotted out to craft an air of propriety around raw politics.

Look at the facts on the ground:
- the administrations long-failure to capture Osama Bin Laden and other top leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban responsible for on-going terror
- low approval ratings across the board
- loss of control of Congress
- economic slowdown

Given the current circumstances, wrapping up 9/11 might be a good thing for the team. Whether this confession was tortured from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or made up from whole cloth, it cannot be trusted. The sources are known liars and manipulators, willing and able to say or do anything to further their program. Torture is not investigation, and secret tribunals are not due process. Unless they are willing to publicly try Mohammed for his crimes, we cannot accept this confession as anything but fantasy or wishful thinking.

The following post was originally submitted to NPR’s “This I Believe” series

The most radical change in the human condition since agriculture is well underway.. The network-data driven economy has changed our most basic assumptions. Past “isms”, feudalism, merchantilism, and industrialism, were merely evolutions of agriculture, founded on the presumption of scarcity; our planet was a zero-sum game, with finite acreage and resources. But networked-data makes scarcity a myth - winners are no longer defined by control of atoms but of bits. And the dirty little secret of our new age is that it is a new age. So as wealth and opportunity blanket the planet, the wealthiest opportunists seek to make their advantage permanent.

When we set aside rhetoric, we can see the depth of change. Pick any problem, today there is a solution. We may not like the answers, often at odds with our ideology, but they clearly exist. What US city lacks enough food to feed every individual? There are none. What justification is there for a health care system that locks people out of preventative treatment, while tax payers pick up the tab for much more expensive acute care when disaster predictably strikes? How can we rationalize the inability to come up with a few billion dollars in hurricane relief, while we spend trillions destroying Iraq? Some solutions are hard, others obvious and easy, but no one can deny our capacity to solve these problems. Only our will remains in doubt.

Aggressive competition made sense when there was one fixed-size pie (the planet) to be divided among all. In those days, might made right. But it makes no sense at all in an open-ended world, where wealth is created from thin air and the size of the pie is limited solely by imagination. Iraq and Vietnam prove conclusively that might is irrelevant versus determined human will. Not only are we connected electronically to every neighbor, our economy is co-dependent on people we oppose. In such a world, everything is negotiable except cooperation. Whether we like it or not, we can’t force anyone to do anything whatsoever, over the long haul.

Republicans used to accuse Democrats of social engineering, and redistributing wealth. Once they took control of all 3 branches of government, their first order of business was using the tax code to redistribute benefits to those at the top! Changing the rules helped the wealthiest Americans shift painlessly from atom to bit-based wealth. Bankruptcy laws were changed to benefit banks - in the middle of a housing bubble, ensuring the banks could benefit as people went upside down on their loans. Copyrights were extended for the benefit of corporations, counter to the very idea of copyrights. They re-engineered the armed forces to funnel billions of tax dollars to the Vice President’s “blind trust”, AKA Halliburton. Now Democrats are getting in on the act too… Diane Feinstein introduced legislation to restrict our fair use of digital media like MP3s and digital movies - the intent is to drive consumers back to the artificial limitations of 1960s technology, cassettes, for the benefit of powerful companies and contributors in her home state of California.

It’s time to insist that those at the top accept the change that’s already happened. Stop beggaring the planet for the benefit of winners, and admit once and for all there’s plenty to go around. No one needs to be impoverished to eliminate poverty. No one needs to go hungry to cease hunger. No one needs to lose a dime to treat aids in poor countries. Really! C’mon… if India makes it’s own AIDS drugs, and gives them to people who can’t afford branded products, or Grandpa fills his prescription in Canada, who really loses? This is reality.

We’re being rolled by our leaders and their real constituents, those who paid to get them elected. The world has changed, deeply and irreversibly. So we have to change the dialog in our country once and for all. That means we have to stop listening to the excuses, and start demanding solutions. When blow hards start blowing their old wind, stand up and ask the questions they don’t want to answer. When they spew zero-sum nonsense, point to Bill Gates, the richest man in the history of the planet, whose empire is built on imagination. I believe we must recognize where we stand before we can begin to move forward.

…is that they require both literacy and time to consume. While email and the web certainly enhance basic literacy, they actively consume free time. Ruthlessly Darwinian decisions are constantly made about what to read, view and consider. In many (most?) cases the rawest sensationalism will beat depth or accuracy. Of course this view comes off as sour grapes in the context of dataesthetic.org, where we spew ideas to no one. But it’s equally true for The Daily Kos and the New York Times. For many reasons, raw meat trumps meatloaf on the web. So what’s a blogger to do?! Short of “sexing up” one’s posts with inflammatory or sensational headers and content, the answer may involve expanding the concept of literacy to other media, including video and audio, so ideas may be consumed at other venues and times. Podcasting, in all it’s forms, is one such solution.

Of course simply reading this post into a microphone will not make it more interesting or compelling. Likewise, while “powerpoint” style visuals and text can improve retention and comprehension, they do nothing to attract and hold interest. In today’s media market, high production values matter more. You Tube user-generated content seems to contradict this notion, but consider the nature of viral videos: they tend to be short, and derive or assume legitimacy through low production values that suggest a “regular person” and not a professional created and delivered the package. The ideas of the author are enhanced by the individual’s autonomy from a corporation, indicated by the home-made look and sound of the work. This is just one contemporary tactic though. At the other end of the spectrum are professionally produced pre-packaged news stories, distributed on DVD, tape or via the net, and delivered by local news personalities as “original” reportage, and corporate media. This content also enhances messages in the public eye, by disconnecting the audio and video elements of the program, and augmenting the “canned” images and sounds with fresh narrative. Somewhere in between lies traditional documentary and journalistic forms. One powerful solution to our “blog problem” lies close to those classic formats.

Talk radio, all-news and sports radio formats, as well as NPR programming, attract big, loyal audiences. Part of this is content driven: Sports and news junkies will always find a fix. But just as important, time and venue (car, bus, office) encourage rich audio-centric formats. Interestingly, monologues are rarely valued. While bloviators like Rush Limbaugh fill the majority of their time with their own wind, they rely in equal measure on listeners, to provide appropriate echos of their themes, or targets for their venom and reaction. When you remove the callers, talk formats only succeed through guests. Good guests draw, no guests or outside sounds drive listeners away. Really!

By contrast, even the most popular blogs have a tiny fraction of the audience of most major metropolitan radio stations. We may frequent dozens of blogs, but visit none as frequently as we hear radio, or watch my favorite network TV series’. Podcasts fare a little better since they’re “pushed” via subscription to iPods and PC music libraries, but even there time is a critical variable. Some shows are “stale” or superceded by a new episode before we ever hear them. Still, it’s the user who decides when to delete, or listen.

While I’m not suggesting blogging is dead or obsolete (quite the opposite, we’re at the front of this curve), I am saying it may not be the most effective tool to communicate with broad audiences. The intimacy and closeness of blogging can be attractive but the fact is many people already have plenty to read in their lives. Time is a real barrier. Formats that can be delivered and consumed with less active attention from the user can overcome that barrier. Podcasts can be delivered to passive users via subscription. Many people can’t read on cars, busses or trains without getting sick, but these same folks have no problem listening to music or audio programs while riding or even driving. Podcasts don’t lash the listener to a fixed seat, nor does their quality degrade over time and distance like broadcast. Programs can be shaped and sized based on the needs of the message, or the listener, or both, instead of being clocked to wastefully fill pre-determined “time slots” and program grids. Audiences for podcasts, like blogs, are self-selecting and potentially self-qualifying, but for all the reasons mentioned, capable of attracting much wider audiences in the manner of broadcast. But unlike broadcasts, the cost/eyeball is knowable, controllable and scalable.

As potential podcasters recognize these benefits, production values will certainly increase. Competition in the iTunes Music Store between free podcasts and paid video content is heating up, and more companies are tasking capable in-house production teams or freelancers with producing content. We see this already when established podcasts are “adopted” or “sponsored” by corporations. Typically the look and sound improves dramatically as a condition of sponsorship! This is good news for creatives, and savvy companies and individuals. Podcasting remains a natural meritocracy, where quality and content trump pervasive placement.

Podcasting combines the benefits of broadcasting and blogging, but it’s solutions to the biggest problems of those media is more significant than the similarities. Podcasting has evolved to encompass everything from entertainment to corporate communications, incorporating still imagery, web-links, and more recently, full-motion video. This richness expands the market for podcasts of all kinds, as do advancements in player technologies. Even many cell phones can deliver content these days. Podcasting and podcast players, along with digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo, shuffle the deck. While blogging remains a good way to communicate with the most engaged users and clients, podcasts hold greater potential to reach the masses. We can apply this potential to meeting their many and varied niche needs.

Dave Davis
Media Designer . Sound Images
www.soundimages.com

Earlier this week I began working on an article about dataesthetic news-gathering and journalism, but before I could edit it, the sabbath arrived, so I set it aside until the end of the rest. This week’s torah reading was from Exodus, when God lays down the Ten Commandments, and as usual the rabbi held up the scroll to show us the calligraphy, and the words laid out on the screen. For those who’ve never seen a scroll, the type is laid out in a very specific way. While there is some variation in hand of each scribe, they are remarkably accurate and consistent in layout. One concern of dataesthetic design is to maximize comprehension with layout. Line length plays an important role in how fast we can comfortably read. Today, I noticed the Ten Commandments easily from across the room. They are not bigger, but the white space around each commandment is increased in specific ways, and like the rest of the scroll, each line is limited to what one can easily take in at once time.

This is nothing new - it’s why newspapers are laid out in columns! But it occurs to me that electronic displays present some new opportunities with respect to how we write. And by write, I mean how we compose, edit, and present our ideas in text, end to end.
I immediately began putting it to work in the article
I was working on, manually dropping in line breaks.
I realized that while this helped, I could take it farther.
I could return to a more classical poetic form,
making each line a meaningful text unit,
standing alone.

This shift changed everything.

It immediately made editing more focused…
a different kind of activity, and a new tool. In this sense
it could be used more classically, when the text was
returned to more-normally formed lines and columns.
I was amazed at how much sharper it made my prose.
And in delivery I see some great opportunity to add
comprehension through organization (more later!).
But in composition it has even greater power.

Thinking in lines is like thinking in verse.
My eyes organize and balance my words.
There is an economy of thought
and great respect for the readers time
built into the process. We can see it clearly.

Give it a shot. Try to write by the line.
Look, at worst it’s back to Shakespeare,
and I can think of worse places to return!
Each line is a conceptual unit to be read at once.
Paragraphs should maintain the classic form:
An introductory statement in the first line.
A summary conclusion on the last,
and in between, the support and meat of it.
Tabs work well to suggest a hierarchy visually,
at least for Western readers, used to it,
allowing major items to be signified by place,
and supporting lines tuck neatly beneath.
When concepts are complex and difficult
we’re forced to break them across two lines.
When rhythm gets too regular
we see the words piling up.
When there’s a duality
space and balance split worlds.

So here’s your experiment:
1) Cut something you’ve already written up. Lay it bare to the grid. Use these techniques to organize and optimize your words, and see what happens to things you think you know.

2) Write something entirely new from your heart. Use this technique to focus your prose and drive your pen and structure. See what you get.

Once you try BOTH, pull out the crutches, and collapse the paragraphs to something more familiar, you know, old school. Read it. Compare it what came before. Is creation and editing easier or harder, faster or slower? Does this change how you write?

I’m not sure.
I think it might.
Please comment.

Meanwhile I’ll finish my new post, and work out some bugs WordPress or this template, which are causing the text to look different than I intend, and messing up my example! The intended version is linked to a pdf here for those interested: linetypeunderstanding.pdf

Awhile back we posted an article that the tipping point had been reached in the 2006 election: going forward, mass media will be replaced by network-delivered micromedia for communications, especially when legitimacy and truth matters. For a couple months, we wondered whether we were premature in calling the game. While the Republicans burned through millions in vain last year, they had plenty of excuses to fall back in: the war, the income gap, and government spending and oversight were all issues that worked against their message. But since November, the shift has continued, if anything picking up steam. At the end of last nights Super Bowl the smoke finally cleared, and reality began to set in: Industrial era communication techniques and media have lost all momentum, and TV is rapidly becoming a blipvert for richer interactions and relationships on the web.

Over the past two months major candidates for the Presidency have eschewed TV and mainstream media, and announced their candidacies via the web where they could control all spin. One candidate, Joe Biden, went old-school, with TV and newspaper interviews for his launch; due to a poor choice of words, his stumble out of the gate became a global humiliation.

Outside of politics, audiences shrank in bowl games, while retail holiday sales were disappointing to the largest conventional advertisers. Google’s leap into conventional advertising took advantage of the chaos in the media market, focused on large, wholesale ad-buys at discount prices, which it re-sells to tightly targeted clients. In many markets, web-based couponing tools, like Couponbug.com, relied on TV ads to make their presence known. If successful, these new players will render big, tree-killing Sunday papers entirely obsolete. Thus, even print ads are merging with the web.

All of that looks like a warm up act today. On the ad industry’s equivalent of the Super Bowl, no one showed up to contest the title! Even a $1.5million price tag was not enough to focus creatives, and deliver good spots. While there were a couple humorous commercials, creativity and wit were in short supply. There were few traditional campaigns, and virtually all the spots aired led eyeballs to the web, and away from the TV. Locally, advertisers didn’t bother to put together new spots at all; most re-hashed tired old campaigns they’ve been flogging for ages! In short, Super Bowl commercials were more disappointing than any year in recent memory, more of a forced march than a celebration. It was as if the agencies on Madison Avenue simply concluded that no one’s watching anymore.

Last November we couldn’t imagine a 2008 campaign that didn’t rely heavily on traditional TV advertising, alongside the new guerilla tactics. In our Tipping Point article, we tentatively suggested a gradual shift through parity to a dominance of new media forms. Today that shift looks a lot less gradual. It’s fair to wonder whether TV as we know it might be closer to extinction than we realize!

Having considered the principles suggested by dataesthetic design, obvious questions arise in practical production. For instance, short of video “aquariums” like MTV’s The Real World, or Big Brother, what are the available options and approaches for producers? Obviously there can never be enough coverage, if you begin with the assumption you need it all. But design is about making choices. Being pro-active about those choices can simplify the equation.

Lets start at the end. For programs primarily destined for TV or DVD, conventional NTSC DV-quality is sufficient for delivery, in terms of frame size and rate by most measures. Similarly we know that while audio might be delivered across as many as 7.1 speakers, those channels can be derived from 2, 3, 4 or 5 source channels (depending on needs), and are nearly always split from a sweetened mix. Historically, analog audio and video formats followed a simple general rule: you started at higher resolutions, and edited/processed to progressively lower resolution or quality for delivery. In dataesthetic world this notion still makes sense, especially when pushed to extremes: dataesthetic principles presume that things of interest to an audience or director happen outside the center of the frame or our intended area of focus. We know for sure that interesting, important events happen when and where they occur. Providing directors/creators with the ability to retrospectively refocus attention is critical. Starting with lower resolution targets allow us to use 21C HD/DV technology to greater advantage.

It seems axiomatic that shooting HD-DV formats for DVD release suggests a need for something larger for HD release. While audio demands are the same, HD needs greater coverage. The most economical way to provide it might be to simply add more cameras. But secondarily, post-production techniques, like montage or collage, including split-screen/multi-screen, and matte views, can create an HD-worthy image that is enhanced by dataesthetic technique. Again: more is more.

As an audio mastering engineer and DVD author, I’m not sure of the extent to which these practices are applied in current field production. Some aspects are traditional: static shots of locations, pre/post action, room tone, close up samples of in-situ sound and visuals of set objects. Good camera people and location sound recordists do these things as second nature. But should these techniques become more standardized, at least from a director’s perspective? Should there be a standard set of inserts, elements and parts that are shot or recorded without need for a request? Should the shooting format be included in discussion, specifically with respect to the useful “live area” or delivery channels they are shooting to?

The question is whether we can make more content better and/or produce it more efficiently by developing a standard set of techniques that intentionally provide directors/creators with more freedom and discretion in post, not to mention allow the footage to be refocused specifically for delivery to screens of different shapes and sizes, from iPods to PSPs to phones.

This seems to be an important multi-disciplinary conversation to have. It involves, cinematography, sound recording and design, post production video processing and editing, and authoring. Would any or all of these disciplines be helped with through cross-standardization? There are many real world indications that modularity is a critical quality of new media, and techniques that support automation scale more smoothly. This could well be broadly true for all media from the moment of creation, through delivery.

So we need to talk about this. And I have a proposal…

Let’s start here online, and establish whether these ideas have any merit through comments. Maybe I’m way off base here. But, if they matter, lets proceed to a real world conversation, over a beer or something. Finally, let’s propose a set of simple, broad production standards, that cover a range of production needs flexibly; from TV and DVD, to web, to mobile. They would not be limits, but a minimum set of expectations, designed to enable a database-driven editor or designer to deliver a coherent program from any given set of assets captured to the standard. The standards would be scalable, to support nearly any budget, exposing the specific trade-offs.

The lurch into a purely digital world has disrupted traditional channels of value. It doesn’t have to. Communicators simply need to re-orient themselves to both the business and the aesthetics of networks and data. Data driven value streams have different forms. The fundamental problem in the music and entertainment industries is that contracts are structured according to value streams that presume industrial models (one:many), in a world that presently operates under a network model (many:many). Failure is predictable and inevitable. The value stream of TV is only a little closer to the mark, as it’s driven by similar models.

In a data-driven world consumers seek out products. Entertainment products are as likely to be a network, cable or YouTube video as a book, a DVD, a meal at Chucky Cheese or Benihana or music CD. If we want it, we get it, one way or another. People pay for convenience, even when they can get content free. Value here is entirely in packaging and concept. Ethos water makes people feel better about paying too much the help Starbucks give to the charity of their choice (or creation?). We want it we get it. People buy free network TV shows from the iTunes Music Store to watch on a 2” screen. Make a good show, they’ll watch it… IF they ever hear about it. But make no mistake: Content remains king. If you have no content, you have no vehicle for carrying any coherent message in today’s culture.

And so we have filters. Those filters used to be networks or a few dozen cable channels and periodicals. Now we have blogs, Google rank, Amazon reviews and lists, Craigs List, MySpace, and home pages for every Tom, Dick and Creepy Uncle Harry. All filter and shape our perspective on a mediated world.

Any and all fiters can be useful. Using filters is unfortunately not an automatable task, but there are things we can do to enhance our standing. Still, at the end of the day, for individual communicators, it requires a lot of rote work and time. Some key strategies:

ACTIVE professional associations and formal and informal networks including trade groups as well as myspace. Your goal is visibility within field, understanding of state of the art, and the market at large.

Regular assistance provided to people on the best forums in your industry establish you and your staff as expert. Always respond to FAQs, and use a tasteful but clear and linked signature, never flame. Maintain contact with people AND your own posts… Rewrite history! Revise your own ignorance! Or, at very least, update your sig with current contact info, so when someone google the frequently asked question they can respond to your brilliant reply with their personal followup!

Don’t forget to encourage employees etc to participate as well - expand and expound your expertise.

Instead of pitching a single idea to millions of snow-blind eye-balls, networked communicators deliver and connect more complex messages in many different venues at once, and rely on the market itself to sort/discover/expose them. This can only be accomplished through old fashioned grunt work: companies devote armies of telemarketers to blanket markets via cold-calls, or primitivly targeted numbers. Direct mail, Spam, same thing different channel. Data-driven systems substitute real human presence and pseudo-customization for raw numbers.

This is why product placement is somewhat effective (to whatever extent it may be - I’m not convinced it is, but this explains that perception - ): Marketing messages are stored and delivered in the props and script of a program. This can be disruptive to the narrative when taken to extremes (think Disney), but if nothing else, product placement assumes lifestyle-driven, imitative forms build brand or product awareness (think Starbucks).

The most powerful brands are built around products. Apple’s computers remain also-rans in computer sales, but their iPod reshaped the music delivery, consumer electronics, and computer markets all at the same time. Products can define function, but functionality determines success (ie acceptance or market dominance). iPod not only just worked, simply and elegantly, it looked cool, and connected your unwired world of stuff (your CD collection, your photo album, your little black book) to the wired ones (not just your computer desktop but your stereo, and now tv!).

TV marketing will be entirely absorbed by content. This does not imply it will disappear. It will grow. Product podcasts, comparison charts, digital tools and gadgets that connect products, people and marketing to the web at once must be concieved, created and delivered. Each is inherently more resource and knowledge intence than old-school commercials. In the new world we face simpler choices:

• deliver neo info-mercials on demand to prospective customers and clients when your product is needed (via your web site and YouTube)
• pay someone to push your content to queries that best imply demand (Google AdWords).
• pay for inline placement and old-style name drops (no or minimal content creation necessary).

TV Commercials are already effectively the walking dead. But the need to deliver the messages they carried remains as alive as ever. The aesthetics of delivering information are begining to emerge. Lets be clear: Aesthetics are related to function as well as form in a networked, data-driven culture. Hence the need for a new term describing the unique aesthetic systems for products consisting of reliant upon networks and data.

So here’s the bad news: We are beyond the tipping point. Attention is currency. While old-timey industrial media corporation wrestle society to invent and assert perpectual intellectual property control, all of mankind has moved well beyond them. Anything that can be seen, heard or played on a digital device can be copied easily at no cost, with sufficient quality for most casual purposes. The genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be stuffed back in. The corporations themselves will be dismantled and outlawed before people accept novel and draconian regulation, or buy crippled, criminalizing products.

The good news is that adaptation is well underway. Commercials and marketing are more necessary than ever, and clever campaigns never more important or valuable. Communicators with solutions are rare, but the solutions emerging are ever more obvious.