They Promised Us Convergence, part 4

The great plodding march toward complete convergence continues. TV and movies are merging with the digital world. This series on my blog tracks many of the companies, creators and video sites that have joined this quest for convergence. Below are links and quotes about many of the sites I didn't cover in parts 1, 2 and 3.

The goal of CastTV is "to index every video on the web (from YouTube to iTunes, and everything in between) and to help users find videos that matter to them."

"Viddler is a fresh, creative web application that lets you upload, enhance, and share digital video quickly and easily inside your web browser. Sharing your story. Making search results relevant. Bringing users together."

"LiveVideo is where you want to be to find original and exclusive content, weekly video contests, and great videos. Essentially, LiveVideo is your ultimate video destination on the web. We are a customizable video streaming community that allows users to watch, upload, search and share videos, allowing you to have a completely interactive video sharing experience!"

Stickam is "driving the next wave of business communications with rich media meetings that liberate users from time and geographical constraints." They provide "Web communication services... designed for the delivery of multimedia Web communications."

Qik lets you "stream live video fast to the world. Right from your phone."

MoveNetworks is calling themselves TV 2.0.

"WorldTV is an entirely new concept in the world of web video. More than 10 years in the planning, it realizes a long term vision to empower anyone, anywhere to become their own media mogul, and to create their own fabulous TV Channel."

Adobe Media Playerlaunched a media player that works great for finding, cataloging and watching your videos.

Also see my recent post about the DIY Video Summit.

Remember that the deadline for the mandatory shift to digital television draws ever closer. See my recent post T-Commerce, Digital TV and the Digitization of Content.

The set top box market continues to take in new players. "VUDU is the revolutionary new movie on-demand service that provides instant access to more than 6,000 movies and TV shows, with hundreds of titles in high-definition. Whether you're in the mood for a top Hollywood new release or an art-house classic, VUDU lets you rent or purchase and starts playing faster than you can grab the popcorn." FOXTEL has a pretty great box. And this month also saw a widly publicised rumor that Blockbuster Video is about to announce a set top box of their own and this rumor appears to be true.

Maven is "the power of internet TV" and was bought by Yahoo for $160M. "Introducing the first and only complete online video advertising solution to dramatically increase video advertising inventory and revenue via new ad formats, an intelligent and dynamic video ad insertion engine, and sophisticated video ad inventory management tools."

Live Universe, the latest venture from MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, bought Revver, in February 2008. LiveVideo.com is another project by Live Universe.

BuddyTV is "original and fresh coverage on TV Shows, TV News, TV Spoilers, Live TV Commentary, TV listings, Forums, and Community."

"MeeVee is the first destination to bring together traditional TV listings and online video from hundreds of sources in one place. Using innovative new technologies, MeeVee has changed the way viewers find TV programming and online video by enabling them to personalize their guides to surface new programming choices based on individual interests."

Beet TV continues to crank out great video coverage of many of these topics.

Mogulus is "giving users the power to create live, original television programming, all done on their own global broadcasting channel."

PermissionTV will give you the tools to monetize your video assets.

ViralVideos displays "the web's most shared viral videos."

YouTorrent, is a meta search engine that finds you bit torrents.

Stay tuned for more in this ongoing series. Check out the previous posts:
They Promised Us Convergence, part 3
They Promised Us Convergence, part 2
They Promised Us Convergence, part 1

Wired Science: Free Video for Geeks

"Take the DNA of WIRED Magazine, the first word on how science and technology are changing the world. Add the giant-robot might of PBS. Result: WIRED Science, a new weekly series that brings the magazine’s award-winning journalism, groundbreaking design and irreverent attitude to public television."

Ray Kurzweil: Outrageous Inventor, Entrepreneur, Thinker and Doer

Filmed in 2005 "Prolific inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why -- by the 2020s -- we will have reverse-engineered the human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline the ways we'll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever blurring the lines between human and machine." From TED.com.

On the list of contemporary creative thinkers I'd like to eat a sandwich with, Kurzweil is near the top. I appreciate and respect a person who can simultaneously dream fantastical notions and also perform practical technical feats. He not only thinks, he does. He thinks about the power of cell phone cameras years before the technology is mature. Then he does a project and works with the American Foundation for the Blind to create a working product that will speak the text of photos taken with a modern cell phone so that blind people can read pasta box labels and street signs and love letters.

Check out Kurzweil Technologies to learn about his numerous successful business ventures. He's been building and selling companies since he was a teenager. He's started music product companies, the FatKat Artificial Intelligence investment tool and educational technology companies.

I've always been curious about his thoughts on the coming technological singularity. This is a point in the (near?) future where technology will be accelerating at such a super fast rate that culture will reach an almost magical point. Our tools and combined intelligence will make almost anything possible, including (near) immortality.

A recent Wired article has a current look at the modern Kurzweil. He is making sure that, when the singularity arrives, he's good and healthy. He rides his bike, he's lost 30 pounds, he takes dozens of vitamins and supplements every day and he's on a strict diet. (Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity)

Wikipedia says, "Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced /kɚzwaɪl/) (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism."

See some of his books on Amazon.
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
The Age of Spiritual Machines
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Adobe Media Player for Internet TV Content

Adobe is now in competition with iTunes, Windows Media Player and Real Player. Their new Adobe Media Player is a great digital media content player that helps you organize your favorites and find great video and audio.

Adobe has also teamed up with a bunch of participating content producers and suppliers such as CBS, Comedy Central, BlipTV, MTV and Universal.

Adobe has a great history of making universal, cross-platform apps that quickly become the standard. This Media Player has a chance to become the standard tool that allows digital content consumers to aggregate and control the incredible amount of audio and video that is sprouting anew every day on the web. Check out my previous three articles on the convergence of TV and the web.

"Adobe Media Player software provides control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline. You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience."

DIY Video in the Age of Digital Media

Howard Rheingold has been one pixel ahead of most people for decades now. His writings and thoughts about new media, grassroots communications and virtual communities must be digested by any serious student of the digital age. Howard and I worked together at Whole Earth Catalog in the early 90s. He's the guy who came running into the office waving a floppy disc above his head screaming, "You've gotta see this." It was the first Mosaic browser and it blew our minds.

Check out the video above from the 24-7 DIY Video Summit. You'll see an intro by Howard and some video of Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Thanks to Ulrike Reinhard for the video.

The DIY Video Summit is described below in their own words:

"We are in the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how we create, share and view dynamic visual media. This transformation is enabling a new media ecology that can support widespread amateur video creation, and peer-to-peer and many-to-many distribution to audiences both large and small. Although it is clear that there is tremendous demand for user-generated and bottom-up forms of digital video, it remains unclear how best to support these creative projects, what the implications are for artistic practice and how to build bridges between old and new media."

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

I hate folders. My files never fit perfectly into a folder structure. Many modern taxonomists are suggesting that we are seeing the demise of folders and the death of buckets. In other words, if all content can be tagged with keywords then why bother sticking it in any particular folder. How often have we all tried to file a document in a particular folder only to realize that it could actually be at home in multiple folders? With tagging, we don’t have to worry about this, just tag a document with a variety of keywords and you’ll be able to find it again one day.

David Weinberger talks about this in a much more eloquent fashion than I do. Check out his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I especially enjoy his humorous brushing aside of Melvil Dewey, inventor of the stunningly frustrating Dewey Decimal System. Check out the video below where he talks about (among many other things) how Dewey was a man obsessed with the number ten...so much so that he would arrange his travel dates so that he would arrive at his destination only on dates that were divisible by ten.


"Google Tech Talks May 10, 2007 David Weinberger's new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you'd expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen."

Digital Media Products Store

I've launched a new Amazon Affiliate store featuring products of interest to digital media enthusiasts. Check out the new Exit Strategy News Store. I've included books, DVDs and software that I've found helpful, informative or just plain fun.

5Min: How to Raise Money From VCs

This hilarious (but kinda true) video is available on 5min.com, "a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge."

In the video above, an Israeli entrepreneur shares his theories of how to raise money from venture capital investors. As he smokes his cigar, he suggests inserting the logo of another venture firm at the beginning of your Power Point presentation. Then politely apologize to the VCs you are pitching and pretend it was an accident. The theory is that VCs want to invest in companies that other VCs are interested in. Funny...but also true.

5min believes that everyone is an expert in something. So, either share your knowledge or go to the site to learn something. Where else can you get a 5 minute lesson in belly dancing, drawing and street fighting all in one place?

Nerd TV Video Interview Archives

"NerdTV (Soon re-launching as SuperNerds) was a weekly online TV show from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely. NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us. NerdTV is distributed under a Creative Commons license so viewers can legally share the shows with their friends and even edit their own versions. If not THE future of television, NerdTV represents A future of television for niche audiences that have deep interest in certain topics."

Some Guests Have Included:
Macintosh OS programmer Andy Hertzfeld
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle
Internet publisher Tim O'Reilly
Father of RSS Dave Winer
Autodesk co-founder Dan Drake
Intel Capital co-founder Avram Miller
Anina High Fashion Meets High Tech
Spreadsheet inventor Dan Bricklin
Computer mouse inventor Doug Engelbart
TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn
Internet entrepreneur, Judy Estrin

Download: The True Story of the Internet

The Science Channel is broadcasting a great documentary chronicling the history of the Internet called Download: The True Story of the Internet. Created by technology journalist John Heileman, this film is full of interviews and insights and behind-the-scenes gossip.

They describe it this way: "From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way."

Merlin Mann. Worst Website Ever. SXSW 2008

Merlin Mann is one of the big brains behind 43 Folders. He gave a great presentation at this year's SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin). He's a writer, speaker and broadcaster and this performance pokes the whole internet industry in the eyeballs. This is a really funny look at the web from a guy who's seen it all from the inside.

Microsoft Silverlight and Expression Studio Training

I am here live at the Microsoft Conference Center at a full-day training seminar for Silverlight and Expression Studio. We have 70 people from our company getting trained by Arturo Toledo who will also be speaking at our Cre8 Summit conference in Florida in April. I'll be there blogging live from Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort.

One of the coolest new features in version 2 of Silverlight is the Seadragon image technology which aims to "change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network." Check out the amazing demo below.

Presenting Perfectly with PowerPoint

PowerPoint has reached ubiquitous status in most parts of the world. Today anyone can give a multimedia presentation. Although most of these presentations are either mind-numbingly boring or brain-bendingly confusing, there are still artful public speakers who can use this tool to make magic.

David Byrne (formerly of the Talking Heads) created a great book and DVD art project called Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information that is a must see for any serious PowerPoint junkie.


Also, check out Clif Atkinson's seminal guide to presenting, Beyond Bullet Points.


Very Funny: Don McMillan on most common mistakes people make while doing PowerPoint presentations.

Zune Arts Digital Music Videos

I love my iPhone, but the marketing efforts surrounding Microsoft's Zune are catching my eye. They are funding the creation of a lot of great mini digital art pieces.

"Zune Arts brings the best creative minds to collaborate on inspiring works of art under themes of sharing, connection, discovery, and friendship. Zune Arts is continuously growing, ever-evolving, and always open to new voices, influences and ideas. Zune is Microsoft's music and entertainment brand that provides an integrated digital entertainment experience. The Zune platform includes a line of portable digital media players, the Zune Marketplace online store, and the Zune Social online music community."

MountainZone.com Early Media Coverage 1997

Here are some more retro flashbacks from the early days of the web. This montage shows how the mainstream media was covering our dot com start-up between 1995 and 1997.



These clips were pulled from the following:

MountainZone TV Commercial series

"Wild Wild Web" syndicated on CBS

CNN Financial

Seattle News on KIRO-TV

ABC Sunday Night Movie "Into Thin Air"

"Up To The Minute" on CBS

Live Update on CNN

Reebok's "PE-TV"

"Playing in Style" on FOX

For more stories from the dot com days, see posts about my personal Internet history.

T-Commerce, Digital TV and the Digitization of Content

In one year, your old TV won't work anymore. Broadcast is going digital. This is the end of the TV antenna.

At midnight on February 17, 2009, all full-power television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting in analog and switch to 100% digital broadcasting. Digital broadcasting promises to provide a clearer picture and more programming options and will free up airwaves for use by emergency responders.

Learn the details from the US Department of Commerce at DTV2009.gov. More info at PC Mag.

We've seen many buzzwords develop from this impending switch-over. One such word makes me simultaneously excited and terrified. T-commerce is the merging of remote-control ease-of-use boob tubes with the instant economic advantages of online ecommerce.

What does this mean for advertisers and the economics of television broadcasting? Accenture, the global technology consultancy, has produced a detailed study on the subject. I actually think it is great news for digital content producers and designers.

"The findings of our Global Digital Advertising Study 2007 represent a resounding call to action for participants throughout the advertising value chain. The survey also shows that the challenges facing them should not be taken lightly. Change is coming, and businesses will have to invest and change radically to get in or to stay in the game. But Accenture believes that the rewards will justify the effort. The long-term future of the advertising business — if we will even be calling it that a decade from now — is bright."

Digital Handel's Messiah, 1994

In 1994 my company won a contract to broadcast the the annual Kennedy Center Handel's Messiah performance live on the web with video. We'd barely just started our company, MediaZones, and the only reason we got the gig was because very few companies were doing live internet video. We'd had some cursory initial success with local Seattle events and that made us the default experts. So, we loaded all our digital gear into travel cases and headed to Washington, DC to try and make it work.

We were hired by a company associated with the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. They'd made all the arrangements to get our crew from Seattle to DC and all we needed to do was make a postage-sized flicker of video appear on their webpage while the live event was going on. We used a now-defunct software-hardware combo called Xing Technologies that required we lug a giant server with us, along with 4 desktops and a laptop. Not to mention our cameras, microphones and cables.

In those days we felt lean and mean when it came to equipment. When we were at events, the TV crews would gawk at us and be amazed that we could broadcast from just seven suitcases. They couldn't take us seriously because we, in their minds, had barely any equipment. We didn't even have a van. How could we be professionals? How indeed.

Back in 1995, I sketched this comic rendering of the whole adventure and I have recently posted it online.

In comming weeks, I'll post some photos of this trip...I just uncovered another box of media from those old early days of the web. Stay tuned!

Do Not Erase: My Lust for Whiteboards

I have always been pro-whiteboard. I do not miss the days of the chalkboard. I welcome the glossy white surface! I once created a small conference room where all the walls were covered with whiteboard material. We could brainstorm or write notes or just sit there and stare at the wide open expanse of board.

The other day I was driving over the Fremont Bridge in Seattle and saw a billboard for Google. They've been advertising in Seattle a lot lately, doing a bunch of hiring for their Fremont and Kirkland offices. I love the want-ad they created. It's a giant whiteboard with "Do Not Erase" scrawled across it. Sorry for the blurry photo, I was driving by and I snapped the above picture with the iPhone during traffic.

If you too feel the whiteboard lust, then perhaps you should contact Wall Talkers. These high-end, custom dry-erase gurus will create all manner of whiteboard mayhem. They make curved whiteboard walls or they'll paint all surfaces with special dry-erase paint so that literally everything is write-onable!

If you don't have a whiteboard that prints out onto paper, then you'll need to take photos before erasing. Thousands of people have drawn all manner of things on their dry erase boards and posted the photos to a group on Flickr.

Many have been inspired by the mighty whiteboard, including artists and animators who create fun hand-drawn animations like this.

Family Friendly Digital Media

I've recently made updates to another web site I created called FamilyMusicParty.com. The site publishes information about family-friendly music including videos, lyrics, artist bios and other fun stuff.

Comic: Making a Cybercast 1997

Back in 1997 I owned a company called MountainZone.com. We published outdoor sporting information on the web. We didn't know it at the time, but we were building a community.

We traveled from Seattle to Stratton, VT to broadcast the US Open Snowboard Championships. Since we were posting our audio, text, pictures and videos to the Internet, we called it "cybercasting" which sounded even sillier in the 90s than it sounds now.

We finagled ourselves into all-access media passes and we bartered a free room in exchange for a banner graphic on the event page. We were doing everything for the first time...breaking ground. Media folk and journalists rarely asked for web connections in the early 90s when we started our cybercasts, but by the late 90s it was becoming more common for press rooms to offer Internet. Although the connections were thru 28.8 modems, definitely not high-bandwidth.

We were serious about the sport and our team knew the riders, event planners and other professionals. By the end of the weekend there was underwear on the lamps, beer on top of the computers and silly string hanging from the ceiling. How we ever published anything is beyond me.

But it worked...and the visitors to the website started streaming in. First there were dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. By the time we sold MountainZone in 1999 we had millions of visitors pouring into the site to learn about mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding and climbing.

Above is a comic I drew on the plane ride home (click it for the full story). The photos are provided as proof (to myself) that it all really happened and it was not a dream. Watch this blog for more of my personal Internet history. I’ll be digging up some great dirt.

Treemo 1.0

Seattle-based Treemo.com graduated to 1.0 status today. Right on, cats. Great new widgets and some slick interface enhancements.

They Promised Us Convergence Part 3

There has been plenty of TV-Internet convergence going on since I posted the first two parts of this series. (parts 1 and 2)

On Networks is producing tons of original content.

Mojo is a high-def online site owned by Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner among others.

Vuze is allowing users to upload or watch high-def videos.

Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape
By Denise Caruso for the New York Times
"INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium."

However, CastTV and Hulu are still in private beta. I've seen both and they look very promising.

They Promised Us Convergence Part 1
They Promised Us Convergence Part 2

A Sloppy Survey of Branded Content

I see a possible future where almost all commercially-produced entertainment will be what we call today, “branded entertainment”. Whereas today we are awash with “interruption marketing” (commercials that punctuate your TV show with pauses), tomorrow we will have stories that are financially supported more directly by brands. Positive side effects may include more visibility into who is footing the bill for our content. We will also benefit, as media consumers, from the increase in variety and the decrease in interruption. However, the pitfalls are many. Dangers include the possible triumph of propaganda over free press or the diluting of all that is culturally pure. But whatever, bring on the entertainment!

It has been called advertainment, branded content, advertorial and content marketing. Some call it story marketing, capturing the imagination first and the wallet thereafter. Merchandise joins narrative. Experiential campaigns with brand integration. A new age where brands speak to their audiences thru the use of stories, ideas and characters. The much-blathered-about death of the 30 second spot.

Some modern entertainment more closely resembles a traditional TV commercial. For example, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is essentially a 60-minute Sears commercial. Sponsor and creator become one. Other branded content, while still being a commercial, feels more like entertainment. One example is the BMW Films campaign which started a massive trend back in 2001, paving the way for numerous experiments and innovations.



Back in 1995 I worked on a website project for MCI. Gramercy Press was a fictional office from their television commercials, filmed in a “reality TV” style. The website displayed clickable photos of office locations, allowing the visitor to dig into the desk or listen to the voicemail messages. The audience began to identify with the characters in the episodic TV commercials and had a ravenous appetite for online “back-story”. I remember talking to one MCI partner who was under the impression that Gramercy Press was a real company, staffed by real people and was worried that the website would be left unattended if “Sheila” from the commercial was hit by a bus or was out sick. I distinctly remember a conference call where my colleagues and I at Free Range Media in Pioneer Square, patiently explained that Sheila was a fictional character from a marketing campaign…and this was an MCI vendor close to the project. Story Power! (Evidence of this campaign is hard to come by. All I could find was this and this.)


Today giant corporations like Microsoft understand the power of story and encourage marketing campaigns such as SiteOfChampions.com, an interactive, narrative Flash/video campaign to promote their SideWinder mouse. And huge brands such as Got Milk? develop richly imagined and painstakingly executed interactive marketing art like GetTheGlass.com.



A frenzy has begun to infect all modern media. Today this phenomenon of the merging of brand and story is explored in many mainstream media. PBS Frontline broadcast a great documentary called The Persuaders which explores this world. Characters seem to be jumping seamlessly from sitcoms to advertisements and even the reverse. Caveman began as a Geico commercial and has now become a TV show. Even mainstream magazines like AdWeek have created sub-brands like Madison & Vine to explore the merging of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.



This swirling vortex of modern messaging in mutating before our eyes. Watch it unfold and you may find yourself simultaneously fascinated, repulsed, intrigued and disgusted. Behold!

The ON: Digital + Marketing blog has a page of posts regarding branded entertainment including stories about Hanes underwear, Mercedes-Benz.TV, P&G’s Crescent Heights online soap opera, Scion’s “Little Deviants”, Oprah’s product placement and more.

Gamekillers: Axe Dry and MTV team up to bring you a show about guys sweating over chicks.

Wikipedia talks about how branded content blurs conventional distinctions between what constitutes advertising and what constitutes entertainment.

A search for branded entertainment on Del.icio.us brings up almost 600 links.

There is even a Branded Content Marketing Association.

Hottest Mom in America, a reality TV series that auditions American women vying for the title of "Hottest Mom", is one of the first entries by a pharmaceutical company into Branded Entertainment. The show from Buzznation studios is backed by a single sponsor, Medicis Pharmaceutical, the makers of the Restylane cosmetic injection treatment.

Aquent is a marketing company with “the world’s largest creative talent pool”, more than 400,000 working creatives. They understand the growing need for creators to build story-driven campaigns.

Seattle-based Digital Kitchen promoted themselves via a mocumentary. Designerslashmodel.com: I love design but what i really want to do is direct.



Subservient Chicken: classic viral marketing content from Burger King

Branded Entertainment online magazine interviews R/GA, the world's most award-winning interactive agency

Branded integrations are many things, but "measurable" is not often a word that can easily be used to describe them. But NextMedium, a branded entertainment company based in Los Angeles, is bringing accountability and detailed metrics to the art of product placement.

What can actually be called “Branded Entertainment” anymore? The production of most modern entertainment was paid for by someone, somewhere along the line. Is branded entertainment simply the stuff where the brand is exposed? I don’t mind watching sponsored content, as long as it is of high narrative quality…plus I also like to be told who is paying for it.

Much of the new branded entertainment will not resemble a traditional product promotion model; in fact some entertainment may not mention a product at all. A simple brand identification at the beginning may allow the viewer to make the association. A viewer might think, "Brand A created this content. I like this content. Therefore I like Brand A."

We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors…

Technology, Entertainment, Design

Since 1984, the TED Conference has organized many of the worlds great thinkers, artists, scientists, architects and performers for an annual gathering. Each presenter gets only 18 minutes to give a talk. This forces them to crystallize their ideas into a direct and efficient performance.

Recently TED has embarked on an ambitious web initiative. They have digitized many of these speakers and are offering their talks free to the world via their website.

Some of my favorite talks include:

Dutch artist Theo Jansen demonstrates his amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures, built from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows breathtaking images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn.

In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces.

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web -- so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there.

After sweetly confessing that he never meant to be a performance artist, Golan Levin explains that his art is all about the quest to find a personal way to use a computer.

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa.

Kevin Kelly uses evolutionary theory to discuss the purpose and value of technology.

Also, don't miss The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED, a documentary about the conference, available from Netflix thru their "Watch Instantly" online streaming video service.

They Promised Us Convergence, an UPDATE

Back in June I published a list of companies that are blurring the line between TV and computer. (see original post) The march toward convergence continues as evidenced by the companies below.

iFilm was acquired by Viacom in 2005 and "is a leading online video network, serving user-uploaded and professional content to over ten million viewers monthly."

Blinkx apparently has over 14 million hours of searchable video and major partnerships with dozens of media companies. Read more about the partnership with RealNetworks (and the competition with Windows Media) in a post on Beet.tv.

The Interactive Television Alliance is "an independent trade association representing the broad interests of the entire ITV industry."

Seattle-based BuddyTV has all the info you'd ever want to know about your favorite TV shows.

For a great article on the marriage of search and TV content, check out John Battelle's post "TV and Search Merge".

Of course, BitTorrent is still going strong as some users continue to ignore the strictly legal channels and just trade huge files back and forth.

Hulu is NBC Universal and News Corporation’s joint video venture, still in private beta. They have some huge plans, which is probably why they just left iTunes to go it alone.

Wilco Live

Just a short post about the soundtrack to my summer. Wilco has been playing over and over in my car, home and iPod. Great rock, well-made, rich and textured. Attached to this post are a couple photos and a short video clip from my old Treo phone which was laid to rest right after this show. They played outside in Marymoor Park, Redmond, Washington. Bill Frisell joined them for a few songs. A lovely night for humans and dozens of freshly-hatched dragonflies.