NEW SEMESTER! Welcome + Syllabus

Welcome to Spring 2007 Grad EMAC class. We will focus on personal video for the web this semester. Here's the syllabus. There will be occasional updates, links, and downloads here. Check back once a week or so. For ongoing info articles see the main emac site.

Robots!

Elicia Brandon has made a series of videos about David Hanson's latest robot. Hanson is a UT Dallas Ph.D candidate and entrepreneur. Great stuff!

Elicia is graduating this semester and this is en excellent example of what EMAC is all about: integrating new media publishing into your creative, work, and play activities.

UTD Metaverse Art Gallery Opening

The opening is this Saturday @ 9PM CST. You can join us in world or come to the mac lab. We'll help you set up a Second Life account if need be.

Be there or be analog. More info here.

ATEC Showcase This Saturday!

Don't miss the ATEC Showcase Saturday night @ 7. We'll have a sneak preview of our island in Second Life. Thanks to Russell, Christi, Steve, and Jeff for their tireless work! We'll have a full opening next month.

details here

EMAC Site & You Tube Group

Here's the new EMAC site - ugly right now but there will be lots of posts, updates, news, student content, etc.

And here's a YouTube Group - so be sure to join and add your videos here if you are doing such things!

Watching Watching

Would some people rather watch two guys watch a sitcom on YouTube than watch the sitcom itself? Sure looks like it. Check out the stats.

YouTube Founders Say Thanks for the Billion.

Wow... all I can say is... Wow...



If this doesn't fill you with confidence then, well, I don't know...

An Unholy Alliance

This from Doc Searls:

Right now this tide shift isn't a smooth thing. In fact, it's a fight. That fight is between independence and dependence; between liberty and slavery; between free markets and your-choice-of-silo; between what you want to do and what Apple or Microsoft or Intel or Real or Google will let you do.

It's a fight between those who value music, artwork, video and writing, and those who wish to reduce all those goods to the container cargo they call "content".

It's a fight that has the The Net and its founding values on one side. On the other side is an unholy alliance between the "content" industries, Consumer Electronics and the carriers who still think the Internet is about delivering industrial goods in packeted forms to our TVs, desktops and MP3 players.

It's a fight between two overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The larger circle is The Net: an open noncommercial environment that supports countless commercial markets, including the one for Consumer Electronics goods. The smaller circle is the unholy alliance that thinks its circle is bigger.

The Net will win, because its circle is actually the world on which the smaller circle resides--whether or not the smaller circle likes that fact.

Our job, among many others, is to break up and otherwise thwart that unholy alliance

Remember Everything Forever?

Is this a good idea? Is forgetting part of what keeps us grounded, from wallowing in shame, grief, fear, or even an overabundance of happiness (let me know if this is you, I want advice ;-) Technology assisting our minds is not new, but some of it - like all technologies have the potential to do - make things worse.

Goob Me

Check out the latest GooberTV from your fellow classmates! Quite an improvement from the first - more natural, funny, etc. Imagine what the 100th episode will be like ;-)

This is a great team!

You and Me TV

Nice piece from David Carr on how a video chat trumped "Lost"

Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers’ attention.

The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program.

Newspapers felt the pain of technological disruption first, when people had dial-up modems capable of transmitting modest, largely text-based data. As fatter pipes developed, music performed a jailbreak, leaving behind a maimed industry. And now, with the number of ever-faster connections spreading and the advent of the Flash player, television seems positioned as roadkill, with great big movie files soon to fall after that.

Time to Shift. Time To Time Shift. Time is Shifting...