Matthew Gifford

Yesterday, Tim Bray wrote an interesting post about making movies and video's role in the future of blogging. Watch and listen (preferably with good headphones) to the movie in the post a few times. The world could use more things like this.

I noticed that Mark Pilgrim seems to think this is a bad thing because it's bandwidth intensive, not accessible, and doesn't work well with search engines. I agree that those are all problems. However, I don't think those are good enough reasons to keep people from doing new things with the web. I'm sure all three of them can be overcome.

For instance, the bandwidth problem could be solved by combining BitTorrent with browsers and news readers. I think this is going to have to happen even if the web continues to be text-based. People who host the most popular RSS feeds are having some serious bandwidth issues.

To address the accessibility and search engine issues, maybe someone could come up with a way to link each embedded audio and video object to a text file containing a transcript. It could mean a lot of extra work for the content producers. But the benefits would outweigh the cost. Of course, there's at least one big problem with doing this: people would inevitably figure out how to use this to manipulate search results.

Does anyone have thoughts? Are things already happening in this area?

If you missed Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, be sure to watch it (via Lawrence Lessig). This is what a president should sound like.

Need a free shell account? (via Julia Set)

I'd always heard that Bill O'Reilly was an idiot. But I'd never really seen the idiocy for myself. I don't watch Fox, because I prefer to stay informed. After seeing the clip linked to from this post, I have to say that I'm absolutely shocked that this madman is allowed to have a show.

I think I'm going to get a lot of use out of WireTap. (via Julia Set)

I didn't think anyone had more radical (and wrong) ideas about copyright law than the RIAA. I was wrong. There is. And she happens to be the head of the US Copyright Office. (via Boing Boing)

Sarah Allen writes:

Why not make our work a form of play?

Sounds like a great idea.

The Boston Globe has posted a story (via Lawrence Lessig) about Eric Eldred's recent run-in with the Walden Pond Reservation police.

Not feeling too great about your upcoming vote for John Kerry? Thomas Oliphant's article about Kerry in the American Prospect might make you feel a little better. (via Doc Searls)

Tim Bray writes:

If everyone’s going to write for the Web (and it looks a lot of people are going to) we need the Web equivalents of Word Perfect and Wordstar and Xywrite and Microsoft Word, and we need them right now. The Atom protocol will give them a standardized way to push the content online, and the fact that it’s all open formats will make it real hard for a monopolist to scoop out the market. So, who’s building them?

Sounds like a fun project. Anyone interested in working on this with me?