The Secure Smart Camera App for Human Rights Video : Video For Change :: A WITNESS blog.

It’s worth a look if you are interested in the intersection of human rights, mobile technology and citizen media. It’s an open source Android project too!

I too have been having that problem as of late.  Perhaps I am not careful enough to put every tag in that I should for every entry, perhaps I am not consistent enough in my tagging and so forth.  While I could blame myself, it seems there are a couple of things that could be done to help me out, for instance, if I bookmark something, perhaps allow me to search not only the tags I have entered but also the top tags as many people do a better job of tagging than one.  That’s the power of the crowd, no?

I know, I know, Delicious gives me the opportunity to use the top tags when bookmarking.  Unfortunately, the main way that Delicious has been failing me is not recognizing when I am linking to something that already exists because the URL is slightly different therefore not giving me the opportunity to use those tags.

I spend a lot of time reading articles in the times, some of them directly from the site, some of them via RSS and many of them via email (from various news alerts that I have setup).  Each of these methods, visiting the same story on the times site yields a slightly different URL ending:

?partner=rss&emc=rss

?sudsredirect=true

?emc=eta1

?hpw

?th&emc=th

Here is the main URL for an article which is the base but could contain any of the above at the end:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04click.html

It seems that I generally come upon NY Times articles in a different way than most other Delicious users as they never seem to be previously bookmarked.  Strange..  

Doing a tag search on Delicious for something obvious in the arlticle: “nytimes” and “seeclickfix” illustrates the problem:

Since mine will be the 12th version, I won’t have the benefit of having any tag suggestions from previous bookmarkers. This makes me sad and it probably means that I’ll never find the article again.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I really really do enjoy watching and listening to many of these. Second, I have listened and watch some of these recently, just not through iTunes (or my iPhone). Most through their website or through online radio (NPR shows on WNYC).

With broadband pretty ubiquitous and even phones being able to be used for listening to or watching online audio/video, aggregators are becoming much less useful (and increasingly wasteful when considering bandwidth usage).

Since really the only reason I still have to use iTunes as an aggregator is to sync things to my iPhone for viewing on the subway (where I don’t have network access), I decided to pare down the list quite a bit.

What I took off and instead will just watch/listen to online:
Alive in Baghdad
Rocketboom
Ask A Ninja

(and a bunch that are defunct such as Boing Boing Boing, EFF Line Noise, The Show with Ze Frank, We Are The Media, WGBH Lab Showcase, <sniff>)

What I left on for iPhone consumption (mostly audio since I typically am doing something else like email on my iPhone on the subway):
Joe Frank Radio
NPR Science Friday
On The Media
The Onion Radio News
The TV of Tomorrow Show with Tracy Swedlow
They Might Be Giants Podcast
StreamingMedia.com Podcast
TEDTalks (Video)
This American Life

I also have a bunch that I haven’t decided yet for one reason or another. Mostly they are done by friends of mine and I just love to see their updates (bandwidth and space be damned):
Tech Trek TV, pouringdown, Ryan is Hungry, momentshowing, jonnygoldstein.com

(Nothing here is new, just wanted to take note of it)

Can we make this video searchable, linkable, machine readable? Unfortunately, not yet.. Hopefully soon.

<rant>
I have a mobile video blog over at mobvcasting.com and a public one over at mobvcasting openvlog. Generally I use T-Mobile for service and Nokia phones for posting. At some point in the past month I was handed a very nice Nokia N93 that shoots great video. Unfortunately, within that same period of time, T-Mobile decided to implement an automatic conversion from the original format that these phones use to Windows Media. While this is not totally unreasonable (even though QuickTime plays 3gp and 3gpp files back just fine) I would have preferred that they didn’t do this (partially since I am a QuickTime fan, partially since I want the original files and partially because it broke all of my applications). What really gets me though is that T-Mobile just made this change without any kind of notification nor any means to contact people who know anything about it. On top of that, it seems that their developer.tmobile.com site has disappeared which further dashes any hopes that I had of contacting responsible engineers.
</rant>

All right.. Enought of that..

….Later…

I put up a quick quality comparison between the original from the camera and the re-encoded version I get from T-Mobile via email. You can see it on my mobvcasting vlog.

Tom Vilsack on using the Internet and Videoblog

“This blog is for an experimental documentary that I am working on this year, where I will be shooting video of my experiences in Iran and creating shorts, interactive installations, and/or videoblogs using the footage from my experiences and the experiences of others”

Paris, a former ITP student has slowly been compiling video snippets from her visits to Iran. She is in a unique position to compare and contrast and more often show the similarities in life between Iranians and the western world.

I hope she continues.. I love watching the videos..