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1. Mapping Toronto's Sound Ecology: From Architecture to Santa Claus.

   While the City of Toronto unveils a material-culture scrapbook of 176 years of history, designers Greg J. Smith and Max Ritts map what Toronto sounds like today.

   

   Toronto just celebrated its 176th birthday by cleaning out its closet. The city gathered up 100 of the 150,000+ objects in its historical collection and put them online in an awesome, interactive, object-based scrapbook of Toronto's past called the Toronto Museum Project, designed by Ecentricarts with York University's Augmented Reality Lab. Each item gets both the curatorial treatment and, in a Storycorps-like touch, the memories of a local Torontonian it inspires. Plus, some of the objects are grouped into online exhibitions, organized around things like architecture and, uh, Santa Claus.

   Lately, we've been telling a lot of stories about ourselves, and our history, based on our stuff. Over at the aptly-named Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn has been tracking the meme in advertising (figures: he wrote the book on it). Most notably, the BBC is in the midst of a two-million-year journey through our cluttered attic, telling the stories of choice items like Dolly the sheep, a guillotine, and a piece of the first trans-Atlantic cable. But we're more than our things, aren't we? Toronto is.

   

   Consider Greg J. Smith and Max Ritts's just-launched Toronto Sound Ecology. It's pretty slim pickings so far, but imagine its scope: Smith and Ritts (and any number of local collaborators) plan to hike around their fair city, recording their treks as audio files, and linking them to an interactive map that you can browse and search. Click on a street, and you feel like you're there... with your eyes closed. It's sonic Street View. NY Soundmap's Sound Seeker was a similar effort in New York. Have you heard of others?

   [Via Coudal]

   
   

   
   (03/10/10 09:00 AM)

2. White House Tweets, but How Many People are Listening?.

   

   Cast your minds back to 2008. As well as the traditional settings of TV, radio and print, the race for the White House saw a new battleground: that of social media. The presidential campaign of Barack Obama used Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to good effect, alongside a massive online push for fundraising. Fifteen months on, Twitter is still being used, but this time as a tool for spreading the President's message. But, post election, does it work?

   The White House's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is a voracious tweeter. With 33,000 followers (his deputy, Bill Burton, boasts 6,000) he uses those 140 characters for anything from the US's prowess in the Winter Olympics, announcing Obama's first press conference, to posting links to articles that reflect government policy. But, given that someone like Ashton Kutcher can boast over four and a half million followers on his Twitter account--POTUS has, at the time of writing, 3,384,285 followers--just how useful can Twitter be to a government in power?

   We all know that the birds do it (but let's not forget about the bees and the educated fleas), and even the US state departments have twitter feeds. Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the UN has got an account--although maybe her somewhat Lilliputian 1,496 followers can be put down to the fact that she's only been tweeting since January. But maybe it's more than that. Only last week the Environmental Protection Agency started tweeting, and Lisa P. Jackson has already got one call wrong: she thought Avatar would win Best Picture at last night's Oscars. Oops.

   I have a little theory about why social media works so well in an election campaign. It's because it's war, chaps. Every four years the country gets enthused about who's going to be roller-skating down the corridors of power next (but let's not forget the age-old adage of not voting governments in, but voting them out) and a clever campaign (Obama enlisted the services of Chris Hughes, who'd lent a hand to classmate Mark Zuckerberg when he was starting up Facebook) and red goes mano-a-mano with blue.

   Once a new administration is in, however, the hubbub dies down--and the figures support that. People just want the powers that be to roll up their sleeves and get on with the job of improving people's lives. If you think that just 60,000 people watched Obama speak on the subject of healthcare to Congress, with 20,000 of them staying behind to quiz officials about the speech, that's not what I'd call interaction with the public on a grand scale. Director of New Media at the White House, Macon Phillips, claimed that it gave the administration "a taste of what questions the actual public had in raw form, rather than simply the questions cable news and Beltway pundits have." Which begs the question: just how many non-journos and policy wonks were watching?

   [Via Breitbart]

   
   

   
   (03/08/10 09:00 AM)

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5. What's the Difference Between HDMI Cables, Component Cables and RCA Cables?. Taking a look back into the change of technology over the past ten years, it is hard to incorporate some of the new technology with old. Even though you bought a brand new TV that does not mean that e... (03/03/10 09:00 AM)

6. Time Warner Cable Tries to Turn Back the Clock on DVRs. Please, just give me back that one hour... Originally uploaded by SylV - like Sylvie... Cable companies may hate TiVo, but at least they've come to accept that digital-video recorders are here to stay. Or have they? Time Warner Cable is introducing a DVR-like service called Look Back that lets viewers time-shift shows but doesn't let them fast-forward through the ads. (Time Warner Cable is a sister company of my employer, Time Inc.). From a viewing-experience point of view, Look Back is a step backwards compared to a full-throttled DVR like TiVo. You can only watch shows from earlier the same day and you are forced to watch the ads. The whole point of DVRs is that they allow you to watch shows when you want to watch them, which might include catching up on a whole week's worth of The Daily Show at 3 AM on a Saturday. Being limited to one day's worth of TV sort of defeats the purpose. And don't underestimate the appeal of being able to skip through the ads. It makes the TV-viewing experience both more enjoyable and more efficient (you can watch more actual TV when you strip out the ads). So what are the folks at Time Warner Cable smoking? They are betting that people will put up with their hobbled, networked version of a DVR because it will be free. (TiVo, in contrast, charges an extra $13 to $17 a month for its service). It's amazing what people will put up... (08/13/07 09:01 PM)

7. Microsoft Plays With P2P TV. Video: LiveStation Demo Microsoft Research (MSFT) and a UK-based company called Skinkers are developing peer-to-peer software called LiveStation for streaming live television over PCs. Think of it as a Slingbox Without the Box. (See demo video above). Except that TV stations would have to sign up to stream their broadcasts over the service. Using P2P networks is the most bandwidth efficient (and least costly) way to deliver video over the Internet. Joost, Babelgum, and Veoh also all use P2P distribution techniques in one form or another. But they all deliver videos that are already stored somewhere (their servers or the computers of their members), as opposed to live streams. I'm not sure how difficult it would be for any of these services to offer live streams as well. It doesn't seem like that big a deal. Joost, for instance, is working on (or already has) the ability to synchronize the streaming of a particular show so that you and all of your friends can watch it at the same time while chatting over Joost. Making that a live stream should be easy enough. The bigger question is: On the Internet, does live TV even matter any more? The TV schedule is a product of the historical limitations of broadcast television, where you have to broadcast the same shows to everyone at the same time. But those limitations are falling away. Even in cable and satellite TV, the growth of pay-per-view and on-demand channels proves that if you give consumers more... (07/06/07 09:01 AM)