For the past year or so, I’ve been hearing bits of the film industry slowly wake up to the fact that the state of media metadata is a mess. The complete lack of open, common data formats leaves media producers struggling to conform their data to a variety of proprietary formats, only to result in outdated and inaccurate information left under the control of others. Worse, existing processes discriminate against independent producers by limiting what counts as a “real” movie, album or other work.

I have been working on a project called Open Media Object Format, which is a free (both as in beer and as in speech) protocol and file format for publishing rich metadata on a range of media. The protocol creates a distributed network of information on media and its participants, allowing the information to spread while every creator maintains authority over their own work. And the format is designed to store semantic data in more detail than we’ve seen before. The Open Media Object Format is an effort to address the above problems while bringing metadata away from the mere administrative, opening up possibilities for pretty cool stuff we haven’t seen before.

Details for the roundtable and the demo are below.

Open Video Conference Roundtable

Metadata Roundtable II: Best Practices
When: Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Where: Vanderbilt Hall, NYU
Conference registration required (it’s pretty cheap)
The participants are:

• Devon Copley (session leader) – Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
• Brian Chirls – You know it.
• Ben Dean-Kawamura – Developer, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Mario Pena – SafeCreative
• David Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Hack Day Demo

On Sunday June 21, 2009, I will talk through the details of Open Media Object Format and demo the first implementation of it, a major Wordpress plugin (still in early beta) that any creator can use to bring media in from almost any source (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and republish it as a blog post with OpenMOFo XML metadata output.

It will be a great opportunity to participate in shaping the metadata standard and to get a first look at a new blog publishing platform. I’d appreciate the feedback. Hack Day is at Vanderbilt Hall, NYU, the same location as the conference, and it’s open to the public for free. I’m still figuring out the rest of the details, so check back here or follow me on twitter for the exact time. Contact me if you want to suggest a time or let me know you’re coming.

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Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to make this work on a YouTube watch page but YouTube has a pretty good API, both for the embedded player and for retrieving information on videos themselves. So I was able to hack together my own watch page.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Go to http://chirls.com/v/
2. Type or paste the URL of a YouTube video into the form
3. (Optional) Enter the desired starting time
4. Click Load
5. Copy the link from your browser’s URL bar or…
6. When the video loads, play or scrub to the exact desired starting time.
7. Pause the video
8. Copy the link or embed code from the form at the bottom to get the link to this video at your starting point.

The format of the URL is pretty simple, if you want to put it together manually.
http://chirls.com/v/VIDEO_ID/TIME

VIDEO_ID is that weird string of characters that comes after the “=” in a YouTube watch page link.
TIME is the starting point in seconds. This should not be less than 0 or more than the duration of your video. It must be in whole seconds.

If people find this useful, I’ll keep updating it with new features and bug fixes. Please leave notes and suggestions in the comments section on this post.

Update (March 1, 2009): I’ve changed the URL structure so that the time comes after a slash instead of a “#”, because the old format screwed things up when posting to Twitter and a few other small problems. The old format still works, so existing links should be fine. If you leave off the time, the page will load with your video starting from the beginning.

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The video is also available on YouTube.

As promised in the video, here is a list of some of the tools I use and recommend. If you have any to add, post them in a comment. I’ll update this post if I find any others that are useful.

General Information Tools

Wordpress: This is the blogging software that runs this website, as well as foureyedmonsters.com, Workbook Project and tons of others. It’s free and open source. You can have it hosted for free on wordpress.com, or you can download it and install it on your own web server and customize it further. In addition to blog posts, you can set up more permanent “pages” for information about your film that isn’t time-based (example).
Learn more and get Wordpress at http://wordpress.org

Google Analytics: Most web hosting services provide basic reporting, but Google Analytics offers a clean, more reliable way to track your web traffic and drill down to find more information. I use this mostly to learn where incoming links are coming from and to see which pages and posts on my sites are getting the most attention. This is also free. If you have Wordpress, you can use this plugin to easily get Analytics running on your site.
Learn more and sign up for Google Analytics at http://google.com/analytics

Discovery Tools

Search Engine Optimization: This is not a specific software tool so much as a tactic for making your website easier to find through search engines. There are a few Wordpress plugins out there, but your best bet is to search around the web for articles. Andrew Peterson, who worked on the Four Eyed Monsters distribution team sometimes blogs about SEO. Some people try to game the system or cheat to get higher search rankings, but I try to use tactics that will also make a site easier and more informal for humans as well as for Google.
Learn about Search Engine Optimization on Wikipedia

Social Networks: This includes the obvious sites, like Facebook and MySpace, but many other sites have social networking components. YouTube, Flickr, Twitter or any other site that let’s you link up to other friends on the same service is a social network. Most social networks will show your friends what you’re up to, and they will show their friends in turn that they’re watching you.

Spreading and Sharing Tools

Social Bookmarking: A variety of tools exist that allow you to bookmark resources on the web and share them publicly. I use del.icio.us (a.k.a. Delicious), but there are a ton of others (Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc.), each a bit different in exact purpose and features. Encourage your audience to share your videos, posts, etc. on these sites. I use Social Bookmarking RELOADED, which is a Wordpress plugin that automatically adds social bookmarking links to every post on my blog. Also, check out ShareThis, which is what you saw on the Iron Sky site in the above video.

Subscription Tools

RSS and Atom Feeds are formats of machine-readable XML versions of websites. They’re great for reading blogs using news reader software, such as Google Reader. The idea is that posts on blogs you read are pushed to you through the reader software so you don’t have to remember to go back to the blog website. They’re also great for syndicating information between sites. The differences between RSS and Atom are subtle and technical, so for right now, they’re almost the same exact thing.
Learn more about feeds

Feedburner is a tool for optimizing RSS and Atom feeds that come out of your blog. It will also help you track how many people are reading your blog through the feed, and you can easily set up an email digest version of your feed. I use this plugin to easily integrate Feedburner into my Wordpress blog.
Learn more and sign up at http://www.feedburner.com

Twitter is a service that allows you to very easily post short updates, up to 140 characters from your cell phone, IM (Jabber/GTalk), a website or a variety of software. People can subscribe to your Twitter feed using RSS/Atom or through Twitter itself via those same platforms (text messages, instant messaging, etc.). You can also use the same RSS feed to syndicate these updates to your website, Facebook or other services. This is a great way to keep the updates coming without much time investment.
Learn more and sign up at Twitter.com

Interaction Tools

Disqus: Wordpress and other blogging software come with built-in comment functions. Encourage your audience to post comments to keep the discussion going. Disqus is a service that plugs in to your blog and enhances the discussion features. Use these to keep your fans invested, get feedback on what you’re posting and see which fans are most involved.
Learn more and sign up for Disqus

cforms: This should be obvious, but not every film site has this. I use this Wordpress plugin to create a great contact form on my site so people can email me directly and privately without me having to post my email address online, which invites tons of spam. It also tracks incoming emails in a database so I can keep an eye on who’s in touch.
Get cforms

Examples

Here are some film and media channel sites that show off some of the tools and strategies I talked about in this video.

• Four Eyed Monsters
• Nerdcore Rising
• Iron Sky
• Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
• Indoctrinate U
• Wholphin DVD

For some tips on what not to do with your site, read this article I wrote a few months ago on bad Flash movie websites.

Thanks to Alex Johnson for shooting this video.

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Brian’s a smart guy… we mostly talked about the importance of collecting information about your fans (and who’s a super-fan versus someone who’s just mildly interested in your movie). We also touched on the deal that ‘Four Eyed Monsters’ did with YouTube and Spout, where YouTube offered the full movie for free, and Spout served as a sponsor, paying the filmmakers a buck for every new member who joined after watching the movie on YouTube.

Check out Scott’s original post and take a minute to look at some of the other posts on his site.

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It’s a cool feature, but it’s extremely limited. You can’t import del.icio.us keyword tags as wordpress tags, and you can’t change that boring post title (e.g. links for 2007-11-27). Most importantly, it doesn’t let you filter which links get posted. So I’ve had to stop bookmarking things that wouldn’t be appropriate for the blog (even though they’d still be public).

So I’ve stopped it, until they fix it or until I come up with something better. From now on, if I have something to share, I’ll just write a post about it.

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I’m working on some custom software that will use cross-site data sharing. But even Wordpress, the blogging software that powers this site needs it to fully function. Wordpress will certainly run without it, but here are some key features that require it:

• Comment spam filtering. Wordpress uses the Akismet plugin. To check incoming blog comments against a database of known spammers. It doesn’t work if your site can’t access the Akismet server.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks allow your blog to automatically post a comment on other blogs that your posts reference. This is a great way to encourage cross-site discussion and make other bloggers aware that you’re writing about them. It’s also great for driving traffic to your site by creating a link on another site.
• Update services such as Pingomatic notify blog directories every time you update your site. Certain plug-ins can also directly ping Google and other search engines so your search listings are as up-to-date as possible. Great for driving search traffic to your site
• Feed Syndication. You may want to have on your site a list of links or posts from other services such as Flickr, Twitter or del.icio.us. There are Wordpress plugins that will use RSS or Atom feeds to automatically update these lists.

Even if you’re hosting service does support cross-server connections, it’s not a bad idea to make sure the above features are enabled and working correctly.

Unbelievably, my current hosting service, aplus.net, does not allow this kind of intra-server data sharing. They claim that it’s a security problem, which I understand. But it’s so important that I have to switch to a different service and question the viability of their business. So I will be switching to Site5, which was recommended to me by Lance Weiler, who uses it to host the Workbook Project. So we’ll see how it turns out. (The fact that this site has been intermittently unavailable today has me more confident that this is the right decision.)

It can take two or three days to fully move a web site to a different hosting service, so don’t be surprised if you encounter some problems with this site. For starters, I’m going to disable comments on the old server to avoid synchronization issues. If there’s anything else that’s surprising or persists more than a few days, please do let me know.

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We are well beyond denying that a film website is the most effective and often the only entry point to discovery of your film. The audience has to jump an increasingly absurd number of hurdles to see your movie in the theater. The website is an opportunity to introduce the film as quickly as possible, provide the detailed information your audience and the media are looking for, to engage your audience repeatedly, and to make it ridiculously easy for fans to promote your film for you.

Below, I’m going to explain why this ancient model fails and suggest a few starting points for an alternative approach.

Why Flash sites fail

• Flash sites are heavy and slow. It takes extra time to download and process all those big graphics and sounds, and you can’t afford to make the casual web browsing fan wait. Many of them may be browsing on computers a few years old or spotty wi-fi connections. That “loading” progress bar isn’t part of your story, is it? Nobody likes it.
• Flash sites give your site a non-standard interface. Where did the right-click menu go? How do you copy text to the clipboard? Where does that link go? Does it open in another window? What does the “back” button do? Where the hell is the button that stops that loud music? Nobody wants to re-learn how to browse the web just for your little movie.
• Flash is not searchable. If you do it right, many visitors will find your site through a search engine. With Flash, that all disappears. It also prevents searching within the browser.
• Most of these sites don’t allow deep-linking. That’s the trade-off for not having to reload the whole flash file every time you go to a different section. This is important for encouraging links to your content. See if you can find a direct link to the trailer on the Lions for Lambs site.
• Flash can’t be syndicated. RSS and Atom feeds are becoming increasingly important as easy tools for people to follow your updates through news readers, such as Google Reader.
• Those animations keep repeating. They’re cool the first time, but don’t make me watch your menu fly in every time I go to another section of your site.
• You’re tied to your designer. Most Flash sites don’t allow you to easily change around your interface without going back to the busy, expensive Flash contractor you hired to build your site. What if you want to change one little menu item? Or even redesign the entire layout without losing all the content? Even another Flash expert could have a hard time tracking down the original source files and scripts. Same goes for jpg image map interfaces.
• Most Flash sites, like the examples cited above, give the impression that the site is finished forever, that there’s no reason to keep coming back for new content. Even if there’s a news section, it’s much harder and more expensive to implement in Flash than in other HTML-based options.
• No need to re-invent the wheel. Web browsers are good at laying out text and images and performing all the functions that go along with it. Flash requires you to re-implement all that, and more often than not you’re not gonna cover all the bases.

That’s not to say that you can’t solve any of the above problems within a Flash-based framework, but it’s a lot harder.

Easy Alternatives

Set your film site up as a blog. It’s that simple. They’re searchable, deep-linkable, syndicate-able, re-designable, subscribe-able, modular and allow easy user interaction through comments. Get yourself Wordpress on your own server or on theirs. You can also try Livejournal, Blogger or Moveable Type. For the most part, they’re all free. Do a comparison.

Most blogging software will double as a content management system. So even if your main purpose is not to blog, you can easily set up fixed pages to give the basic information about your film. You may still need help from an expert to fully customize your layout, but they all come with multiple themes that should be enough to get you started.

See Four Eyed Monsters as an example. There are some things I would do differently if I had it to do over again, but for the most part, the site was a success. I wish I knew more examples of film sites that I like. If you know of some, please comment on this post.

When Flash is okay

There are some things that Flash is much better at than HTML, and I encourage using it for those specific purposes. The best example is for embedded media players, such as YouTube or any of the countless other video hosting sites. There are also good embedded audio players, like the one in the Audio Player Wordpress plugin. (See it in action on Lance’s site.) Flash is also great for games or animation, as on Homestar Runner.

The other reasons I think it works so well in those situations are that the non-standard interface is within a confined space of the specific media player and because the specific, compartmentalized rich-media experience makes it worth waiting for the download. (More on that another time.) Otherwise, lose it.

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I introduced myself and my role in the Four Eyed Monsters self-distribution. We focused on the application of traditional business principals to the changing models of media distribution. Have a look:

The video is also available in higher-bandwidth Flash or as a MP4 download on my blip.tv channel. Arin has videos of the other speakers on his YouTube channel.

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This looks way better than my null modem mezuzzah. Personally, I’m hoping they’ll come out with a Wi-Fi lulav in time for next Sukkot.

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Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms “master” and “slave” on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive.

The request — which has some suppliers furious and others busy re-labeling components — came after an unidentified worker spotted a videotape machine carrying devices labeled “master” and “slave” and filed a discrimination complaint with the county’s Office of Affirmative Action Compliance.

[...]

“We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment components that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature,” Sandoval said in the memo, which was distributed last week and made available to Reuters.

The memo did not include any suggestions for alternative labels.

How about senpai and kohai?

Get the full story.

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