John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Technology’

From Yahoo News. One is art, the other, not. Maybe.

A few months ago I received my invitation to use Joost, a new, legal peer-to-peer distribution software for Web video. Although hyped (by Joost execs) as both the future of television and streaming video, my initial experience was extremely disappointing, mostly due to the exclusive presence of corporate content. Thinking Joost might expand its content in the coming months, I decided to let some time pass before I tried it again. Last night I checked back, and sure enough nothing has changed. Crucially, most of the programming available to watch is already on the cable stations I refuse to pay for in the first place. I watched about 10 minutes all together and closed the future of Web TV for yet another three months.

The biggest problem with Joost is that the software is open source, but the content is not. Everything you watch is vetted, and the system only utilizes peer-to-peer technology to solve bandwidth issues. There is the much bragged about, and much yawned at, chat function, but as has been said before, I hope someone at Joost HQ brought up during the design meetings that you can already chat while watching TV. (I personally don’t do either separately very much, let alone together.) Otherwise, it’s like TV with a search function, except instead of the search returning surprising results, you get MTV and Comedy Central shows you already knew about and don’t watch.

So what is this software all about? How can small content producers have anything to do with such a locked-down distribution system, and would they even want to? This all could be some highly out-of-touch corporate fantasy, a kind of inverted Kazaa or YouTube, but even if we compare Joost to preexisting television, and ignore the Web, it still makes little sense. Why, if I can watch cable television at a higher resolution and record anything I like, would I bother with hiccup-plagued, unrecordable Joost? It’s almost as if Viacom, CBS, et al. sat down and decided that the best way to conquer the Web was to help develop a system worse than the one they already have.

I’m most likely not the demographic. Maybe Joost hopes its appeal skews young, to a generation of people who might actually chat while watching television. Then again, this this could also be about catching people at a time when they don’t get the chance to watch television they can control. In other words, this is a television station for people with laptops in cafes, airports, waiting rooms, etc. Viacom and others probably figure they can get a new audience for TV that has been locked out due to spacial and technological issues, not cultural ones. For someone who likes this content, I guess it could be seen as better than nothing, but as a full-on replacement or competitor to TV, I’ll stick with the low-res, broad-content YouTube.

As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”

I’ve rarely blogged about code-related technology here, but in an effort to break with my own insignificant tradition, I want to add to the chorus of voices decrying the discontinuation of the Google SOAP search API. Not only is the SOAP API going bye-bye, but it’s AJAX replacement is abysmal. Please, Google, bring it back. I’ve installed the SOAP API on every Web site I’ve worked on since Google released it, and now, when I was about to do so again, you’ve gone and discontinued it.

Why is the new code inadequate? Oh, let me count the ways:

1) I love the ads. Cute. My non-profit clients will love them too. How can we turn them off without a clumsy CSS solution? Can someone get back to this guy? He asked his question in October of last year.

2) Formatting? Anyone? Is anyone there? Can someone please update that “Coming soon” in the developer’s guide.

3) Most clients want text (i.e. web) searches of their sites. They couldn’t care less about video or news. Why does it seem like all the developer documents foreground everything except web search.

4) And, oh yeah: Why AJAX? AJAX is wonderful, if you surf the Web with javascript enabled, and if you can install any browser you want on your machine… but these two things aren’t always possible, hence, a broken search page. Why is this thing only in AJAX?

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to spend some time fooling around with an AJAX-based API for search. I would even spend some time messing with one in alpha let alone beta version, but please, Google, if you are going to replace a great product, replace it with one that at least has a complete instruction manual. Otherwise, Yahoo beckons…

Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.

One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”

Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”

Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?