remedial thoughts

When Terms and Conditions are hard to find

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 19:46:00 +0000

When the BBC's and SeeTickets' Terms and Conditions collide...

This is a bit of personalised post and a grumble based upon buying online tickets for a musical event.

BBC 6 Music are hosting some live music event in Newcastle close to where I live. Lots of my friends were interested in going. The number of tickets on sale was strictly limited to around 3,500 people. See Tickets were the ticket selling intermediaries. Consequently, somebody was bound to be disappointed.

Believe me, I'm used to ticket sales disappointment as much as the next person. I've been attending the Glastonbury festival most of my adult life and buying tickets can be a soul destroying experience if you don't get them (which I didn't for the last 2). That in itself isn't unusual. Lots of people want the tickets and they're strictly limited, hence they sell out in 26 minutes.

I'm not entitled to these tickets. I accept this. It's a lottery.

However, there are steps you can take to improve your chances. I should know - it's been a regular thing for my and my friends to go in a crowd of around 50-80 people. We even have our own field (Shields Field!).

When you have that many people going, you get used to planning ahead. In the past we've organised ourselves with military precision. We've all shared our registration details amongst the collective; we've had enough money in banks accounts to pay for £1000+ tickets (per groups of 4); we've stayed in touch via Skype/MSN/Facebook to ensure we can make purchase after purchase to guarantee everyone goes.

We've even gone as far as securing a T1 industrial LAN connection owned by an IT company for the fastest internet connection possible, while also using their phone/call centre facilities.

But I digress... Back to the 6 Music event.

I'm used to disappointment when it comes to ticket sales, but I've never been quite this disappointed.

On the 31st of January tickets went on sale for the event at 10am. By 10.04am all the tickets had been sold. Fortunately, I'd been able to buy 4 for me and a group of friends. Unbelievably, my wife had also been able to buy tickets using her See Tickets account and her own card (different to mine). We live at the same address (obviously, but this is important for the narrative below).

Several of my friends were less lucky than us, but it didn't matter. We'd picked up 8 between us and we told our friends on Facebook and nearly everyone who wanted one was after one. Result.

Or at least that's what we thought. Here's the email I received on the 31st of January:

Dear MR ROB JEWITT, Thank you for your order

Order Details - Reference xxxxxxxxx

BBC RADIO 6 MUSIC FESTIVAL BY NIGHT -SATURDAY 21ST Sage, Gateshead

SATURDAY, 21/02/2015 at 17.00 - Doors open: 17.00

4 GENERAL ADMISSION	£38.68
Including booking fee	£3.68 per ticket

4 REFUND PROTECTION FACILITY	£2.00

Transaction Fee	£2.31
Total	£165.03

You have been charged a total of £165.03 via PayPal. You will receive a seperate email from PayPal with further details

Tickets will be despatched as soon as possible, but may not be received until the week of the event. If you have not received your tickets in the post, please contact us no later than two working days before the show date.

This event has the following age restriction: 16+ only. 16's - 17's must be accompanied by an adult

To check the status of your order, change your delivery address and contact us, please visit our customer service area. Or alternatively you can contact us on 0115 912 9105.

This order is subject to our terms and conditions.

Thanks for your booking,

SEE Tickets

So far, so good.

However, on the 2nd of February I received this email:

Dear MR ROB JEWITT

Unfortunately we have had to cancel your order of
4 GENERAL ADMISSION ticket(s) for the BBC RADIO 6 MUSIC FESTIVAL BY NIGHT -SATUR
at Sage, Gateshead on 21/02/2015 reference number
xxxxxxxxx as you have ordered over the show limit. 

As mentioned in our terms and conditions, we reserve the right to cancel 
any orders that exceed the show limit which applies per credit card/  
household/person. These limits are set by the organiser of the event.  

The refund has been credited to the card the tickets were bought with.
The refund will clear in the next 3-5 working days. 

If you have any queries please feel free to contact us at
http://www.seetickets.com/CustomerService.

Kind regards,

See Tickets Customer Services

See is a trademark of See Group Ltd. Registered Office: Norfolk House, 47 Upper Parliament St, Nottingham, NG1 2AB Used under license by the Way Ahead Group Limited. Registered in England, No. 03554468

This was pretty confusing. I'd checked the terms and conditions on the BBC website before buying the tickets. This is what it said (see the screen grab also):

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Tickets will be available to purchase online or via the SeeTickets box office on 08444122954. Calls cost 6p per minute plus standard network charges.

Tickets costs £35 + booking fees. Please note that a maximum of 4 tickets per person, with a limit of 2 transactions per card applies for all 6Music Festival by Night events.

Please note there is no readmission to the venue once the event has started.

There's a cached version of the page here

My confusion stems from the reason given by See Tickets in the refund email:

As mentioned in our terms and conditions, we reserve the right to cancel any orders that exceed the show limit which applies per credit card/ household/person. These limits are set by the organiser of the event.

There is no mention on the BBC page of a limit based on household. There's a limit based on card transactions and also on the amount a person can buy. Nothing about households. The reason I'm labouring this point is because of the next claim in the refund email: 'These limits are set by the organiser of the event"

I'd like to think that if that was genuinely the case, then it should have been mentioned in the terms and conditions. It isn't.

In fact the only place that the household restriction is mentioned is in the See Tickets terms and conditions. This was something I found only after I had the tickets refunded.

It seems to be a standard clause on their website regarding sales. It doesn't seem to be a BBC specific clause, therefore I find it disingenuous (at best) for See Tickets to refund these tickets while alluding to the claim that the BBC set the limit, especially when there is no mention of this specific restriction on the BBC sites.

I realise that I'm probably on a hiding to nowhere with this but it's a grievance I've taken up with See Tickets. You can find a copy of the email correspondence below (names changed to protect the identities of the employees etc). If anything, I hope it serves as a warning to anyone else who may make the same mistake of attempting to buy tickets for friends.

I get that this is See Tickets's attempt to ensure that hawkers can't buy up all the tickets and tout them around. But it's harmed genuine music fans. Oh well, I guess we'll just have to pay triple the cover price from some unscrupulous auction site scalper in order to attend. Clearly, the scalpers already know how to work the system while the rest of us suffer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent: 02 February 2015 18:11
To: See Tickets Customer Care
Subject: 2015-02-21 -- xxxxxxxx -- General enquiry

Enquiry Type: General enquiry
Reference Number: xxxxxxxx (xxxxxxxxx)

Customer Email: robjewitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Customer Name: MR ROB JEWITT

Message:

I'd like further clarification as to the cancellation. I thought the terms and conditions stated you were allowed 2 transactions per person but only 4 tickets per transaction? There were two transactions at my address (one by me, one by wife, using different cards) so that we could buy for a group of friends. We've often grouped together to buy tickets after losing out on events in the past - it's always a matter of luck as to who gets through to make a purchase, hence we spread the risk. To find out that we've been able to get tickets for friends, and then have to tell them "sorry, but you don't have them anymore" is a kick in the teeth. Additionally, the amount refunded appears to be ?8 less than I paid (according to my PayPal account). How is that?

Best wishes
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From:	See Tickets Customer Care (customercare@seetickets.com)
Sent:	03 February 2015 13:45:38

Hello,

Unfortunately the order was cancelled as the show limit was exceeded, for whom and why the tickets were purchased is not taken into consideration I'm afraid, we have simply left you with the maximum allowed per household.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards

XXXXxxx
Customer Services
SeeT
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent:	03 February 2015 21:45:21
To:	See Tickets Customer Care (customercare@seetickets.com)

Hello

Well, that's very disappointing. I have to say I don't recall seeing any mention of household limits in the terms and conditions. Unfortunately, the initial website with the link to purchase is no longer active.

Fortunately, there is a cached version of the page and that doesn't mention households:

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Tickets will be available to purchase online or via the SeeTickets box office on 08444122954. Calls cost 6p per minute plus standard network charges.

Tickets costs £35 + booking fees. Please note that a maximum of 4 tickets per person, with a limit of 2 transactions per card applies for all 6Music Festival by Night events.

Please note there is no readmission to the venue once the event has started.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3APg0J8Sn1g4oJ%3Awww.bbc.co.uk%2Fprogrammes%2Farticles%2F4tSgkbt172qLfJlRM7Gsq4B%2F6-music-festival-by-night+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=safari

I'd appreciate it if someone could point me to where these terms and conditions might be found.

As you might imagine, we're quite disappointed, especially when there's clearly an organised bunch of ticket scalpers selling them for inflated prices on various auction websites.

Best wishes

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent:	04 February 2015 08:46:07

Hello,

The ticket limit was reflected in the drop down menu. Purchasers were unable to place a booking for more than four tickets.

Kind regards

Xxxxxxxx

Customer Services

See™

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent:06 February 2015 18:56:23

To:See Tickets Customer Care (customercare@seetickets.com)

Hello

Well, you see, that's the main complaint here. The tickets were purchased after consulting the terms and conditions which made no mention of the household limit. It explicitly referred to the amount of purchases that were permitted per person per transaction (as captured in the previous email).

It was only after the purchase was refunded that the household limit was mentioned in the email dated 2/2/15 (see below). This was the only purchase I made. It was the only time that specific card and See Tickets account was used - which appears to be in accord with the terms and conditions as they were published.

Consequently, it appears that the tickets have been cancelled on the grounds of terms and conditions not made explicit at the point of sale.

I'd like to be pointed to a copy of the original terms and conditions which state there was a household limit before the tickets went on sale

Best wishes

Rob Jewitt

[original email dated 2/2/15]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE 9th Feb

From:	See Tickets Customer Care (customercare@seetickets.com)
Sent:	09 February 2015 09:04:10

Hello

You can view our terms and conditions here;

http://www.seetickets.com/content/terms-and-conditions

Please refer to the fourth paragraph.

regards

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent:	09 February 2015 14:39:33
To:	See Tickets Customer Care (customercare@seetickets.com)

Hello

Oh, so those are your terms and conditions? I was under the impression that the tickets were being sold subject to the BBC's terms and conditions. That's what the SeeTickets email suggested (copied below).

It would help if these additional terms and limits were front and centre on an event's webpage before transactions are initiated, especially when the cancellation email infers that SeeTicket's terms and conditions are specified by the organiser (i.e. the BBC).

It's one thing to follow the guidance set by the organiser (BBC) only to have the intermediary (SeeTickets) work to a different set of rules

Best wishes

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clementine will remember...

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:35:00 +0000

Back in 2012 when I finished playing the final chapter of Telltale Game's The Walking Dead I was an emotional wreck by the end. I know I wasn't alone judging by the critical acclaim the game received and the volume of articles dedicated to Lee and Clementine's final scene together. This was one of the best story lines I've ever seen in my 30 years of gaming and it's one that still resonates. I frequently find myself mentally revisiting the game and the decisions I made while playing it well over a year later.

This week I finally bought Season 2 of the game after some significant delay in my decisison-making process. Sony's PSN deal of the week meant that the game was under £6 so it was too good a deal to pass up.

There were a couple of reasons (other than price!) why I have been holding back from buying and playing Season 2, despite having bought the 400 Days DLC. The main reason is that Telltale were keen to continue on from the decisions each player made in Season 1, and that due to a twist of fate, my final game save from that season was erased accidentally.

This meant that in order for my decisions to have any legacy in Season 2, I'd have to play the final chapter of Season 1 over again. In order for my gaming experience of distress and sorrow to be optimal, I'd need to revisit the traumatic Season 1 finale again. However, there's no guarantee that the decisions I'd make this time around would perfectly match my second play through.

This inability to guarantee the original trauma could be repeated was off-putting in some ways. Other than not really wanting to revisit around 3 hours worth of gameplay just to be able to play Season 2 (time is precious since becoming a father!), the fact that I might not make the exact same decisions that left me so emotionally bereft the first time around also stood in the way.

I needn't have let this nagging doubt paralyse me as much as it did. As I loaded up Season 2 and the game scanned for my missing save file, I was confronted with a message that suggested that the gaps would be filled by the game rather than my decisions. This forced me to revisit the final chapter of Season 1 again - and I'm glad I did. I took this opportunity to changes some of the decisions I initially took first time around - in order to see how little or great an impact they had on the game experience. For example, my initial play through saw me take Lee's arm off in homage to Rick in the graphic novels. This time, however, I kept the arm and it allowed for a very minor modification to the gameplay. I also saved Clementine from the trauma of finishing Lee off.

Ultimately, the decision tree forces the player along the pre-scripted narrative path with only minor adjustments. Even though I know what was coming, I still felt the heart-wrenching impact of my decisions and now I'm content enough to know that my actions as Lee will have some legacy for Clementine.

And yes, I did choke back a few wet ones. Again.

Facebook's birthday and our narcissism

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 09:40:00 +0000

This week Facebook turned 10 and to celebrate it created a short video montage of every user. These montages featured things like the most liked photos or comments that had been posted on the site, accompanied by some saccharine sweet music. After watching this video users where given the option to share it in their timeline along with a link that enabled other users to make one of their own. The video was also hash tagged meaning that it quickly became a trending item on Facebook's new Twitter-esque feed.

Suffice to say, the personalised video went viral as more and more people noticed that users where sharing something that supposedly encapsulated their time spent on Facebook during the last decade (or however long you'd been using the site with your current identity).

In some ways this is what Facebook does best: it speaks to the narcissist in us. When we see our friends or our contacts posting something personal that they've liked, and by default, recommending that you do the same (or else why share it?), then you have the perfect ingredients for user engagement. Or so we may be led to believe.

The reaction to those video montages has been interesting. Some users, having seen their montage and liked it have then gone on to share it, hoping that their friends will also like it and share their own. This led to a cavalcade of spam in people's newsfeeds as more and more people posted their personalised video.

Several of my friends were quick to complain about this process, and with some justification. These videos are individualised and perhaps not really relevant to anybody other than the individual (or perhaps their significant other). When faced with this 'feed spam' they admonished other users for being so vain or narcissistic.

This highlights two or three interesting and interlinked facets of social media:

relevance
personalisation
authority

Iggy Crop

For many users, seeing a news feed full of montages about other people's 'best' Facebook moments was not relevant to them, primarily because they were personal and relevant only to a very small circle of people. If a third party doesn't appear in the 'best of' montage the they are looking at random images selected by an algorithm with deep data mining powers, but very little individual consideration.

One of my 'highlights' was a picture of Iggy Pop with his stomach cropped to be his face - a funny joke from B3ta but certainly not a highlight of the 7 years I've been using the site. Some of the other selections where downright bizarre and included one of those games early (2009?) Facebook users used to play where they tagged you in post, then you had to find a random image and a random Wikipedia post and make an album cover - clearly not a significant part of my life but something that Facebook's algorithm misunderstood as 'relevant' because of its virality.

Fake album cover (2009)

I'm sympathetic to those people who were sick of seeing the video appear - perhaps they'd watched a few of their friend's montages hoping to see themselves feature more prominently? Or perhaps they were irritated that their personal video was made up of irrelevant photos? Or perhaps they were sick of that twee tune that played over the top? Regardless, they sought to exert a sense of authority or mastery over their environment by berating other users for sharing their montages. Clearly, these people didn't have to click play on their friend's videos and many of them probably didn't, yet they still felt the need to complain about them.

This exertion of authority is another aspect of the narcissism that social media can encourage. Expressing dissatisfaction with what others are doing is a classic strategy for asserting that your way is the right way - that you are superior to others. So, by both sharing the personal montage and by berating others for doing so, we've demonstrated some of the most egotistical behaviours that humans are capable of.

The best response is to say nothing. Don't feed the data gathering beast. Perhaps we've had enough of social media and it's time to say goodbye?

iTunes bug when buying tracks from different versions of the same album

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 12:38:00 +0000

Have you ever bought singles from an album and then decided to buy the album outright, only for iTunes to not give you access to all the tunes that you paid for because you already own a different version of some of the tracks? That's what has happened here...

What a pain in the backside this is.

Dramatising natural history documentaries

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:05:00 +0000

'Natural history can be pretty dramatic' (Steve Hewlett, 8/1/2014)

I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Media Show, this morning in which an interesting discussion took place between the host Steve Hewlett and Wendy Darke, the head of the BBC's Natural History Unit. The discussion revolved around the extent to which the new BBC prime-time natural history series, Hidden Kingdoms, was built upon artifice.

The series starts on January 16th 2014 on BBC1 - check out the trailer below:

This is a show that has been two years in the making and focusses on the lives of very small creatures, who are very difficult to record in their natural environment. Consequently, in order for the production team to reveal the lives of these diminutive animals they have had to resort to using controlled situations and have filmed captive animals, sometimes in studios, shot against blue-screens so that the 'drama' of their lives can be revealed.

Hardly natural?

The BBC has come under fire from certain quarters of the news media in recent years, especially when it comes to deceiving the public in it's natural history output. Much was made in the press about the 'fake' polar bear birth sequence in the Frozen Planet (2011) series. In that series, a polar bear family was followed in the natural environment, but the scenes of the animal giving birth were actually of a different bear who was housed in a Dutch animal park, in a purpose built enclosure that allowed for unprecedented camera access. Even the snow was fake. However, the viewing public would not have been able to easily distinguish between the natural and artificial sequences, leading to questions of duplicity and declining viewer trust.

At the time the BBC revealed that such staging of footage was common-place amongst natural history output. In an interview on the UK TV show This Morning, Sir David Attenborough responded to the criticism and suggested these sequences were not designed to mislead the public - rather, they were used to enhance the audience's understanding of the animal's lives.

The question is, during the middle of this scene when you are trying to paint what it is like in the middle of winter at the pole, to say, 'Oh, by the way, this was filmed in a zoo.'
It ruins the atmosphere, and destroys the pleasure of the viewers and destroys the atmosphere you are trying to create. It's not a falsehood and we don't keep it secret either. But to say actually in the middle of that sequence, I mean how far do you take this?
Do you say this is a penguin, but actually it was a different penguin colony than this one and this one is a different one? Come on, we were making movies.

At the end of the first episode of Hidden Kingdoms there is a 10 minute sequence that explains the various types of filmmaking techniques that have been employed to create the documentary footage contained within the main show. This is something the BBC have been doing for quite some time in relation to their natural history output, going at least as far back as Planet Earth (2006). Indeed, it's arguable that these short featurettes have become a staple part of the BBC natural history output, and speak to the twin-pronged audience desire to know about the natural world as well as the challenges of capturing the exotic footage presented.

Upfront honesty?

In the Media Show interview, Darke responded to Hewlett's criticisms that the show does not reveal the levels of artifice for dramatic purporses to the audiences in advance by suggesting that production is very honest with the viewers via the 'making of' featurette, as well as via information contained within the show's website. Indeed, viewers are warned in advance that special filming techniques have been employed - providing they visit the BBC's media pack for the show.

However, the level of detail revealed in the media pack is underwhelming. Here's an extract from the website that details the extent to which the material presented in artificial:

What is it like to be a dung beetle caught in an earth-shaking wildebeest stampede? Or a mouse facing a tsunami-like flash flood, which to us would be nothing more than a gentle trickle? Combining their skills as wildlife filmmakers with blue-screen filming allowed the team to recreate real-life events as experienced by the animal stars, giving viewers a unique new perspective on these dramatic worlds within worlds.

When listening to the interview between Hewlett and Darke, it becomes clear that animal runs were built and captive creatures were forced into contexts that didn't occur naturally. Nevertheless, the BBC are clearly anxious to not fall foul of the same criticisms levelled at it circa Frozen Planet. This level of transparency is clearly an attempt to address earlier failings. However, this hasn't always worked, as Mark Lawson has pointed out:

I think that there is a problem with the methods used and that it has only been increased by the openness about what has been done. Watching the show is like living with a liar: you start to question everything.

Lawson goes on to discuss the privileged position that viewer of natural history programmes finds themselves in - namely, that they want and expect to be stunned with footage that seems almost unbelievable. Given the extent to which Hollywood-driven CGI has become a staple part of our filmic culture, it may not be surprising to see such techniques being employed in nature documentaries. Indeed, it may be exactly what is required in order to keep this type of flagship programming at the heart of the television schedules.

All documentary is constructed

What seemed to be absent from the debates around these shows and their varying levels of authenticity or artifice is an acknowledgement that all factual forms are constructed and can never give direct access to the real. While I understand that natural history programming fits within traditions of public service broadcasting and realist aesthetics, it doesn't negate the fact that the editing together of images from multiple cameras, overlaid with some kind of explanatory narration, fosters an environment in which audience interpretations of events are being carefully cultivated - often in a highly narrativised and in an anthropomorphic manner.

Whenever debates around documentary and artifice take place I can't help but think back to Bill Nichols's work on the varying modes of address within the genre (especially chapter 6) and their implications for audience understanding. Nichols identified 6 different modes of address or 'inflections'.

Whenever I see the BBC evoke the making of featurettes at the end of their programmes, I am reminded of Nichols's 'Reflexive Mode' which calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking. Typically, this mode increases audience awareness that what they are watching is a constructed re-presentation of reality rather than unfiltered access to the real.

The easiest way to explain this idea is by means of a comparison. I frequently use a cropped version of Rene Magritte's painting 'The Treachery of Images' in classes where I remove the text 'Ceci nest pas use pipe' and ask my students what they are looking at.

If the students haven't seen this example before, they usually say that what they can see is a pipe, before I tell them that they are wrong. They are looking at a painting of a pipe.

If they have seen the example before and say it's a painting of a pipe then I usually tell them they are wrong again. They are looking at a version of the painting that has been captured as a digital file before being recompiled and projected onto a screen so that it resembles a painting of a pipe. Never did Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' from 1936 seem more prescient.

It's not a huge leap from Magritte to Jean Baudrillard's examples of Disneyland as hyperreal America (in Simulation and Simulacra, 1981) and the claim that first Gulf War did not happen (in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1991) - despite the documentary evidence to the latter that an event called the Gulf War did take place in Kuwait in 1991. However, Baudrillard's point was about the way in which the images of that war were mediated to construct a version of events many times removed from the actuality of the incident (watching laser-guided Maverick missiles explode over featureless targets via cockpit videos).

The point that I am making is that the interview that opened this post seems to assume that there is a way to accurately represent the reality of the natural world that is somehow free from the problems of representation and narrative construction. Access to an objective reality becomes increasingly problematic and untenable once we acknowledge that all media forms are subject to certain types of artifice - whether deliberately acknowledged or not.

Still, the debate in The Media Show will be a helpful teaching aid for anyone wanting to quickly cut to the issues of documentary. We all love a little bit of 4K/HD 'nature porn' while we are sat in front of our big screen flat-panel televisions made of rare earth materials that may have been mined in conflict zones around the world, from unsustainable sources.

At least we get to watch the lovely, pretty pictures.

Ministry of Sound sues Spotify over user-curated playlists

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 09:50:00 +0000

Source: Atatiwa, CC

If you have an interest in the music industry and its business models in the networked era, there's a couple of articles worth reading over at theguardian.com today that concern music streaming service Spotify. Spotify has been on the receiving end of negative criticism in recent months for the amount of money that artists receive from their labels for playback, as well as flak regarding the longterm viability and profitability of music streaming services. Some of the criticism may be fair but there are a few voices who think Spotify might actually be beneficial to the industry. Nevertheless, let's take a look at the Ministry of Sound case.

The first of which is by Stuart Dredge who reports that the some time night club and record label, Ministry of Sound, is seeking damages against Spotify for allowing its users to create their own playlists which ape the ordering of tracks that appear on their releases, and which may also include the name 'Ministry of Sound' in the title. This last point is significant as Spotify users can now search the service for such a term and easily locate these user-compiled playlists. The label's argument appears to be that these playlists are an infringement on their intellectual property.

It's worth noting that Ministry of Sound does not licence its releases to Spotify as the streaming service's business model seeks to remunerate the copyright owners of musical recordings, whereas compilations compiled and curated by Ministry of Sound would not benefit the label in question as many of the featured tracks are owned by other labels (which Ministry of Sound has had to pay a sum in order to licence for their

Ministry of Sound launched proceedings in the UK High Court on Monday, and is seeking an injunction requiring Spotify to remove these playlists and to permanently block other playlists that copy its compilations. The company is also seeking damages and costs.

Chief executive Lohan Presencer claims that his company has been asking Spotify to remove the playlists – some of which include "Ministry of Sound" in their titles – since 2012

So let's be clear here:

Spotify has agreements in place with the relevant owners of tracks that have also been used by the Ministry of Sound in a series of compilation albums.
Ministry of Sound and Spotify have no licensing agreements
Users of Spotify have sourced licensed tracks and complied them in playlists using 'Ministry of Sound' as an identifiable search term
These user playlists may feature tracks in the same order as the Ministry of Sound releases
There's no guarantee that the tracks in these playlists are the exact same tracks (ie same track length, same remix, etc) that feature on the compilations.

The second article worth looking at is a blog post written by Lohan Presencer, written to accompany the announcement to sue Spotify. The article itself is riddled with errors or disingenuous claims:

iTunes is now the largest music retailer in the world with 575 million customers and annual sales of $23bn. It is the main source of income for every record company on earth. Not only that, Apple built its hardware business on an iTunes foundation – iPods, iPads, iPhones. Not a penny of the sales of which were shared with record companies.

Forgive me for being pedantic here but this claim needs qualifying. Apple did not build its hardware business on an iTunes foundation - at least not exclusively. iTunes did precede the iPod by about 8 months (released in the US in 2001), however in its original inception it was a tool for moving files from one device to another. The iTunes Store was not created for some time after that, coming to the US in April 2003 and to the UK in June 2004. Granted, sales in the iPod began to grow rapidly after 2004 with the 4th generation of devices capable of storing up to 40GB of music - enough to carry most people's music collections.

It was hardware iteration that was key to the success here. It seems bizarre that Presencer should claim otherwise whilst also going on to note that this hardware success was not shared with record companies. Should Denon or Technics share their hardware revenue with record companies because they facilitate the consumer in being able to play their CDs or vinyls? Similarly, the success of the iPhone and the iPad have very little to do with music and more to do with devices' multiple functionality (internet access, telecoms, applications, photography, etc).

Presencer goes on to critique Spotify for failing to make a profit despite being heralded as the 'ultimate counter attack to piracy'. Perhaps the company can be forgiven for struggling to make a profit 5 years after launch given the costs of launching a new business in 24 countries, with all the various regional licencing and legal costs associated with such a venture. Spotify claims to pay out 70% of all its revenue to rights holders. Given how notoriously difficult it has been for newcomers to enter the hermeneutically sealed world of the music industry, it's no surprise that profitability is an issue. Only time will tell as to whether or not the 24 million active customers can be converted to paying customers.

Presencer then goes on to critique Spotify for its PR strategy:

Spotify is addicted to PR, its oxygen of growth. Favourable comparisons to Apple and positive reports of industry data showing exponential growth of streaming revenue are its lifeline. Yet what the believers fail to tell you is that published streaming figures include advertising revenue from YouTube, the great hidden free music streaming service.

What is the purpose of this comparison to YouTube? Are they also to be criticised for under paying artists for streams? There's very little stopping users of YouTube from creating Ministry of Sound playlists on YouTube and inserting the brand 'Minsitry of Sound' into the title, for example:

Perhaps Presencer is unaware that this can and does already happen? I'm sure he can't be that naive. The difference with the YouTube model here is that many of the songs that appear in these playlists are ripped from radio shows or uploaded via users rather than having been officially licensed (as Spotify does). Is YouTube the enemy of piracy here?

The final point worth examining relates to how much Spotify contributes to the musical economy of the UK:

According to BPI annual figures, UK record company revenues in 2011 were £795m. Total paying UK Spotify customers at that point could be reasonably estimated to be no more than 250,000. At £10 a month that's total net income of £25m. About 55% of this is paid through to record companies, £13.75m - less than 2% of total industry income

Ignoring the envelope math here (is it 55% or 70% paid to labels) and the outdated figures (Spotify had only been in the UK for 2 years at this point so was a niche player), Presencer seems to have an issue with a young company generating 2% of the total UK music industry's revenue! This beggars belief. Would he be happier if this was revenue lost to piracy? Given that attitude and behaviour change tends to develop quite slowly, Spotify and services like it should be held in slightly higher regard for their attempts to provide a better (for the industry if not the artists) alternative to piracy against a background wherein it is very easy to access music without paying for it.

A solution?

Presencer's gripe seems to be more to do with the fact that compilation curators like Ministry of Sound do not benefit from streaming services because they don't fit the business model that seeks to reward the owners of the music. The simple solution is sue and hope for success so that a service like user generated playlists in Spotify has to removed, thus making the product inferior. Or at least, nuke the ability to search for use playlists. If this does happen, then it might damage the usefulness of Spotify and subsequently, its ability to generate revenue for an ailing industry. I hope this doesn't happen as creating and sharing playlists is part of what makes Spotify a service I'm willing to pay for.

A more complex solution would be to ensure that the Ministry of Sound has to be remunerated and they could do this by ensuring that their compilations featuring tracks that they own the rights to thus making it impossible for Spotify playlists to ever be exactly like the official release (not that this is guaranteed anyway - see #5 above). Ministry of Sound used to produce tracks - I know because I bought them in the 1990s when the brand was building on its 'super club' status. It's often said of the tech industry that companies become more conservative as they age, become less willing to take risks and are more likely to sue than to innovate. Companies in this industry need to be agile and innovative if they want to stay ahead. Maybe Ministry of Sound can go back to innovating.

Why did Microsoft borrow Sony's PS3 playbook for the XBox One?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:48:00 +0000

Having spent a few minutes pouring through my RSS feed reader and various social networks it seems like E3 is the place where Microsoft seem to have compounded the problems they started with their awful reveal event back in May.

Back then, not only did they drive the point home that the XBone was going to be a home entertainment system but they issued some rather bizzare messages about the system's (in) ability to play used games - something which forced them into addressing with a series of follow-up announcements. Meanwhile, Sony just sat back and did, well, very little. All it had to do was not repeat what Microsoft was doing.

The overall feeling many gamers were left with was one of confusion and bewilderment, but we all expected that E3 would be the place were the real battle for the next generation of games consoles would be fought. And it seems like Sony may have won the first round.

Microsoft's new console appears to be coming in as a home entertainment system that hooks up to your cable TV box, replete with some potentially limiting Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, a camera that wants to watch you and spy on you 24/7 (except in Germany where this is illegal). It must be connected to the internet once every 24 hours even if you want to play single-player games (to check with the DRM software - you're not a thief are you?), and will not let you trade in your physical copies of video games once you've decided you never want to play them again. It's not backwards compatible either.

All this for a price of $499/€499/£429 - it looks like Europe and the UK just got shafted on the price as $499 currently exchanges at £320. £109 for import and tax differences seems steep.

No doubt Microsoft has a variable pricing strategy planned, where they will be able to partner up with companies like Sky, Virgin or BT in order to sell the machine for less than that as long as a subscription is taken out. Or at least you'd hope they have something like this planned. Judging by the awful way in which they've handled their reveals to date, you can't be sure.

This just doesn't seem to be the Microsoft I expected. I figured that the strong performance of the Xbox in the US and the UK would mean that they were going to convert a lot more Sony gamers to their cause with their new machine. I for one was expecting to be converted. However, now I'm not so sure.

Given that the Windows phone, the Windows tablet market and the Windows 8 sales have all been very disappointing, you'd have thought they'd go out all guns blazing in order to secure the next generation of gamers to their cause. But instead, they look like they are going to fight an uphill battle.

Sony's new PS4 console is likely to launch around the same time, will pack as big a tech punch as its rival (if not bigger with that GDDR5 RAM), will retail for £349, isn't region locked, will allow games to be swapped or sold, and has lots of indie developers on board. It's also not backwards compatible either, but there are indications that PS3 games will be available via their Gaikai streaming service. Oh, and its 500 GB hard drive can be swapped out and upgraded anytime. The amazing PS+ service also carries over from PS3 to PS4.

It just seems like Microsoft have borrowed from the playbook that informed the original Sony PS3 launch: announce the machine late and at a price point way in excess of its competitor, whilst focussing on it as a media centre rather than a games machine.

This time around Microsoft are going to be competing with a rival that has a very similar hardware configuration. Last time around, the PS3 was notoriously more tricky to develop games on due to its custom Cell CPU and memory management. Microsoft also had a year head start on its rival. It has no such luxury this time around.

This time, Sony has attracted the smaller PC developers to their cause, emphasising the similarity of their (slightly) more powerful machine. It's also managed to convince bigger developers that anything a PC can do, the PS4 can do - and easily from a developers standpoint.

I was planning on switching to Microsoft's platform at the start of the year. Now, I'm not so sure.

A lament for physical media: Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (CD edition)

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:04:00 +0000

The last couple of weeks have been testing times. Really, they have. As a long time fan of Daft Punk (I saw them in '97 at the Mayfair in Newcastle) it's been tricky to avoid their carefully planned promotional strategy for the release of Random Access Memories. There's been the constant radio airplay of 'Get Lucky', there's been the teaser tracks, the ad spots, the full album stream via iTunes, etc. Let's just say the hype has been building for a while (check out Billboard's timeline here).

This has made it difficult to resist the allure of the various pirate offerings. There was the video that was compiled by fans using clips from the various Coachella adverts and Saturday Night Live spots. Then there were the various iTunes live stream audio captures of differing quality appearing all over the web. The official release of Get Lucky was prompted by an illegal leak captured from a Dutch radio station, forcing the hand of Columbia into releasing the single early.

Nevertheless, I purchased the single through iTunes and not long after I pre-ordered and paid for the iTunes LP (Mastered for iTunes) version for the sum of £8.99. I had succumbed to the hype, and on release day the album was pushed to my iPhone, my iMac and my Macbook so that I could enjoy the official release whereever I went.

However, I do have to admit to having downloaded the album in advance of this official release. I've tried all sort of versions: the supposed CD rip (Columbia / 88883716862 / CD), the WEB rip (Columbia / USQX913001 / WEB), the vinyl rip (Columbia / USQX913001 / Vinyl), and the special mastered version (Qobuz 24-bit / 88.2 kHz Édition Studio Masters / WEB). However, I much prefer the sound quality of the iTunes version. It's just a shame that if I wanted to buy the Japanese bonus track 'Horizon' I'd have to pay for an expensive imported CD (£22 registered airmail) or resort to piracy (Sony Music Japan / SICP 3817 / Japanese Edition + Bonus Track / CD).

It's an ethical nightmare

I'm a fan. I'm a fan who also loves the album - I will gladly hand over my money for Daft Punk product. However, I'm not keen on the excessive import/postage costs for 1 track alone. I want to legally purchase this music but it seems ridiculous that in the era of digital networks and near zero-distribution costs that such a disproportionate barrier exists.

And it gets worse...

It would seem that the availability of the UK CD release is less consumer-focussed than it could have been. Forgive me for sounding like a digital dinosaur (CDs are digital, right?) but I actually like to own physical media like CDs - even if I seldom play them - primarily because I've suffered several hard-drive failures over the years and lost large sections of my digital music collection. Secondly, I don't like the idea of being tied to Apple's ~~proprietary~~ compressed music format for the rest of time. Can I take this with me if I switch to a different device (Window Media Player? PS3?). At least with the CD, I can control the format and codecs I prefer in a few years time (without having to transcode the media and reduce the audio quality). Thirdly, it's a lot nicer to listen to CDs though my high fidelty audio setup than it is to listen to compressed music.

So if I want to buy Random Access Memories on CD I can use Google Shopping's search tool to find me a copy from Sainsbury's for £8.99. This is a price I'm happy to pay but where's the competition? Google Shopping doesn't even search most of the big providers. Tesco and Asda are both charging £10. Morrisons sell it for £10 but they don't have an online purchase option! What is this? The 1990s?

It seems like the supermarkets are the only physical music retailers left. This is okay if you are after something that's likely to chart but what about the leftfield music? HMV and Virgin are dead. Play.com has become a glorified market place where smaller providers offer products, often with a lack of detail or item description, and questionable feedback scores. Zavvi have stopped selling CDs altogether.

I guess I could always go to everyone's favourite tax avoider, Amazon (I will not link to them), but I find it morally repugnant to pay them £9.99 for a product when I know they'll go out their way to avoid paying corporation tax. CD-Wow were caught out by the Channel Islands tax loop-hole being closed down, so WowHD replaced them and they have the best price at £7.99.

So, I can buy the CD at a reasonable price but only because I know where to look (I'm not wanting to pay £19 Littlewoods!). But does everyone? And are people being offered a fair price for their supposedly obsolete media? As physical formats become less and less relevant to the consumer they'll inevitably become rarer as demand decreases, forcing the price up. This looks like its happening right now. I find this rather sad, but predictable. I guess we can always pay perpetual fees to access rather than own

EDIT #1

It seems I may need to clarify a few things about my initial whine:

My whinge here is partly about the death of the high street music retailer - I admit I didn't make that clear enough. I can go buy this album from a supermarket as it's a certainty to chart (the bookies recently slashed the odds on it being the biggest album of the year) but I've struggled to buy a less renowned artist, like Deerhunter (Monomania), from Asda or Tesco. I used to rely on specialist music stores to provide me with my physical media. Failing that, I'd go to the usual suspects (Play, Zavvi etc) who are also on the wane (Amazon excluded).

My initial lazy searches only turned up 3 recognisable UK stores selling the CD (Sainsbury's, Amazon and Littlewoods) with prices from £8.99 to £19.00. There was another company called Base.com, but I've no idea if they are reputable. Apparently they've been around for decade but this was the first time I've heard of them. ScreamingCD.com showed up but they are Canadian based and postage is an issue.

Amazon are hardly offering music at a competitive price on all their products. After some digging around I found alternate prices: 25% cheaper in the end. This does matter to me at least. I actually spent more than I expected as I found some other bargains. I ended up buying 4 CDs for £30 rather than 3 meaning I could support more musicians, admittedly at a lower royalty rate. Then again, the royalty rate on CDs is better that than that on digital releases. The Gowers Report (2006: p51) showed that artists get 8% from digital sales (less than the credit card company who handles the transaction!) while they get 9% from CD sales. This is marginal when dealing with one consumer (ie me) but the problem is scaleable. The shift to digital distribution is not always a best case scenario for creators.

Returning to Amazon, if you are the one-stop shopping destination for a substantial amount of internet consumers then monopolistic practises tend to occur. This is not my point by the way, it's one made in the BBC series The Virtual Revolution, in relation to sector market leaders becoming dominant (eg Facebook in social, eBay for auctions, Amazon for entertainment goods, etc) .

However, it's also about the death of the recognisable online retailer who used to provide me with many varied pricing options for my favoured consumer products. Put simply, I hate that it now takes more effort to find the things that I like when it used to so much easier.

It's easier to just buy the album via iTunes (even though Google Play and Amazon's MP3 store are offering it cheaper) - which I did. However, just because it's easier doesn't make it convenient or flexible. I still wanted the physical CD (which I have also purchased from HDWow) so that I can play the uncompressed sound through my Arcam/Mission/Marantz stereo.

A plea for help...

For the record, I can't get these 256 kbps .aac files to play in Windows Media Player without transcoding and making the lossy format even worse. If iTunes sold Apple Lossless (.alac) files then I'd be happy to batch encode them to .wav (well, actually, happy is not the best disruptive term for the process). If anyone has some helpful solutions for this issue then I'd be grateful for your advice. Likewise, I'd appreciate advice on how to get these .aac files to play on my Sony Playstation 3 without a reduction in quality. I suspect the answer is the CD ripped to .wav though...

Star Wars iPhone Edits

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:30:00 +0000

One of the things I've increasingly found myself doing in the past year or so has been the incessant editing of images on a very small screen, typically an iPhone 4 (or more recently, an iPhone 5). Photography-based apps are some of the most regularly downloaded bits of software from the iTunes store if the iTunes charts are anything to go by.

Indeed, there is a burgeoning mass of professional and amateur enthusiasts taking to the small screen with much gusto - just witness the success of people like Richard Gray (aka @rugfoot on Twitter) who teaches courses in iPhoneography at Kensington and Chelsea College. The iPhoneography website has (unrelated to Gray) has also been around since 2008, offering application reviews as well as a supportive network of creative individuals via their Flickr group.

Needless to say the rise of Instagram and other apps (eg Aviary, Instaeffects, Wood Camera, Vintique, etc) that offer quick and easy-to-apply filters, either for free or for very little cost, has produced an upswell in experimentation and creativity wherein even the most average of images can be transformed into something approaching professional quality.

That's not to say that every user of such apps are suddenly professional photographers - far from it - but the techniques that used to be the preserve of a few are now being aped by algorithms and employed by the many, often with mixed results. Suffice to say there has been an explosion in the amount of images being circulated across various networks, as people increasingly photoblog their food or create digital pinboards of things they've stumbled across on a daily basis.

The thing that really interests me is the ways in which individuals can experiment with various applications in order to achieve some interesting results, often with some helpful feedback from others who witness said experiments. The limitations of mobile phone cameras (limited focal control, digital zoom, etc) makes for some interesting workflows as users find ways to breather new life into old images, even if that is simple bit of colour correction with Snapseed or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, total image destruction with Decim8.

With that in mind, I've been playing around with a few different applications as part of an experimental Star Wars album so I thought I'd share some of those images here as they've been getting some fairly positive feedback from the people that have seen them. My intention with these images was twofold:

1) experiment with a number of different applications in order to see what they could do

2) in doing so could I make the overly familiar somewhat unfamiliar yet still recognisable on a very small screen (<4 inches)

All the images below were edited on an iPhone. The applications used in the creation of these remixed images include iPhoto, Photoshop Express (with paid upgrade), PXL, Etchings, Decim8, Snapseed, Wood Camera, Vintique, and Instagram

You can find me on Instagram at http://instagram.com/robjewitt

Any comments, questions or feedback is welcome

The morality of the press

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:48:00 +0000

This post is aimed at the Level 3 journalism students taking the Media Ethics modules (MAC373, MED312). It would seem that I haven't been given access to the module space in Sunspace yet, meaning that I can't add material, post content, respond to messages, etc... In the mean time I'll post material here until I'm given the keys to the kingdom.

The week we are looking at the differences between morals and ethics in relation to professional journalistic practice. Radio 4 has a regular programme which quite often covers these issues so it's worth checking out the The Moral Maze, presented by Michael Buerk/David Aaronovitch.

In particular I thought I do is draw your attention to an episode that was first broadcast on 19th of November 2011 entitled 'The Morality of the Press'. It can be streamed in full from here. Here is the description that accompanies the specific show:

The Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of our press opened this week. In the wake of so many scandals has time finally been called on the industry that for so long has been drinking in the last chance saloon? Defenders of the press say any moves to impose external policing and regulation will threaten freedom of speech and undermine the vital role a free press plays in a democratic society. But why should we treat our press differently from any other industry that's key part of society? Broadcasting, energy, water - they all have external regulators. Is it still tenable to argue that the press is somehow different, special and should be exempt, when at the same time it operates within a climate that thinks it's acceptable to hack in to the mobile phone of a murdered teenage girl? And what about the noble calling of journalism itself? Has the financial pressure on the industry created a culture where ethics and morality come a poor second to doing whatever it takes to get a story that will sell? If we want to reset the moral compass of journalists is time for hacks to consider swearing the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath? Or are we actually looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Do we get the press we deserve and are the people we should be questioning are those you buy, read and enjoy the stories that have prompted the Leveson inquiry? The Moral Maze - the morality of the press.

Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk with Clifford Longley, Kenan Malik, Anne McElvoy and Matthew Taylor.

Witnesses:

Steven Barnett - Professor of Communications, University of Westminster

Ian Collins - Radio broadcaster - Formerly with TalkSPORT

Simon Jenkins - Journalist and Author, Former Editor of The Times and London Evening Standard

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen - Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford and Assistant Professor of Communications, University of Roskilde in Denmark.

Er, hello

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:38:00 +0000

Wow - I haven't written a blog post here since May 2012. That's a long time. That might be something to do with the arrival of my first child at the end of April. Being a parent can be quite time-consuming. Hopefully, I'll start pushing some material out here over the newt few weeks...

BBC confuses Halo for the UN

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 29 May 2012 11:02:00 +0000

Some of the things I like to point out on this site are those instances where in quality journalistic organs occasionally slip up and misreport video game footage or content as if it were the stuff of the 'meat-space'. Earlier in the year ITV got in trouble for mistaking footage form the game ArmA 2 for IRA training videos and there are often scare stories about the increasingly photo-realistic graphics of contemporary games.

So it should come as no surprise that the BBC have found themselves on the receiving end of what can only be described as a 'face-palm fail' moment wherein they mistakenly used the logo from the United Nations Space Command instead of the the logo from the United Nations Security Council. One is a fictional body from the popular first person shooter gaming series Halo, while the other is one of the principal powers within the UN charged with the maintenance of international peace and security.

The incident tool place during a lunch time One O'Clock News broadcast last Thursday in which the BBC were reporting on the current conflict taking place in Syria. From the screen shot Sophie Raworth can be seen discussing an Amnesty International report alongside the logo of the fictional UNSC. It would appear that a Google image search for the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) brought back multiple images from the Halo game that were then used in the broadcast. Currently, the UNSC has very little ambition to police the Covenant and are more focussed on Earthly incidents.

A BBC spokesperson told Eurogamer 'mistakes do happen' but this image was not broadcast in later bulletins. A segment of the video has been uploaded to YouTube and is embedded below.

The Harvard Reference System and citing tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Earlier this year The Modern Language Association (MLA) decided to devise a standard format to assist students and researchers who liked to cite data found on Twitter. Given that Twitter is increasingly becoming a place in which news can break, frequently ahead of mainstream channels, then it makes perfect sense to attempt to accommodate this platform. The MLA system works well with how Twitter functions.

They advise researchers that citation should being the entry in the works cited list (aka the bibliography) with the author's real name followed by the Twitter user name in parentheses. When only the user name is known, default to that. What should follow this is the entire text from the tween in quotation marks. Spelling mistakes and capitalisation should remain exact (don't change anything!). Finally, the entry should include the date and time of the message and the medium of the publication (in this case, Tweet). Here's an example:

Jewitt, Rob (@rob_jewitt). "The problem with nerd politics gu.com/p/37hyb" 14 May 2012, 8:55pm. Tweet

If citing the tweet in the body of a paper the MLA recommends it is cited in its entirety.

Now this might seem fairly straightforwards but I do find it curious that the MLA ignores the unique URL provided by a tweet. After all, every status posted has it's own page. The above example could easily be supplemented by the link: http://twitter.com/#!/rob_jewitt/status/202124949522104322. I'd have thought that this would have been essential given that the exact timings on Twitter are subject to the timezone of the reader rather than the poster, meaning errors can occur.

The Harvard Reference system and web sources

At the time of writing there is no formal guidance for how to cite a tweet within the structure of the Harvard Reference (HR) system , but it should be possible to work within the current guidance dealing with websites and adapt the MLA system to come up with a solution. There are even automated tools like the CiteThisForMe page that attempt to auto format sources but it struggles with Twitter.

Students at Sunderland are encouraged to use the HR system as outlined by the resources over on the University Library Services site (direct link to "Cite them right" guide).

The common approach to citing an electronic source, like a website is to include the following info in this order:

Author
Year that the site was published/last updated (in parentheses)
Title of Internet site (in italics)
Available at: URL
(Accessed: date)

There may be instances where the author is not known but the page includes a title, so that should be used instead. There may even be instances where neither of these can be identified, meaning that the only information that can be provided is the page URL. As you can see, this is less than ideal. Many sites and blogs are happy to identify an author or contributor, so where these are provided then they should be used accordingly. There are also extra fields (highlighted) to deal with:

Author of message
Year that the site was published/last updated (in parentheses)
Title of message (in quotation marks)
Title of Internet site (in italics)
Day / month of posted message
Available at: URL
(Accessed: date)

So, following these rules, this authored Lifehacker article should look something like this:

Thorin Klosowski (2012) 'Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out The Window', Lifehacker, 26 April. Available at http://lifehacker.com/5905347/living-in-public-what-happens-when-you-throw-privacy-out-the-window (Accessed: 15 May 2012)

Citing a tweet in the Harvard Reference system

By drawing on the guidance for citing blogs, then it's possible to come up with some easy to follow rules for citing Twitter. It is a micro-blogging service after all. The following example will use the tweet I employed in the MLA example above coupled with the HR advice for citing blogs. I propose the following method:

Author of message (Twitter user name in parentheses)
Year that the status was published (in parentheses)
Full message (in quotation marks)
Title of Internet site (in italics)
Day / month / time of posted message
Available at: URL
(Accessed: date)

The aforementioned tweet should look something like this in the bibliography:

Rob Jewitt (@rob_jewitt) (2012), "The problem with nerd politics gu.com/p/37hyb", Twitter, 14 May 2012, 8:55pm. Available at http://twitter.com/#!/rob_jewitt/status/202124949522104322 (Accessed: 15 May 2012)

It might look a little cumbersome but it has the advantage over the MLA system in that it is more accurate and helpful for anyone else who might want to refer to the same message, or even check its veracity. This is by no means a definitive solution but it is an attempt to be consistent. Comments and feedback welcome

Virgin Media's blocking of the Pirate Bay: consequences

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:34:00 +0000

According to a report over at the BBC it seems like the hacker group Anonymous have taken down the Virgin Media website as a response to the company's blocking of the Pirate Bay. A tweet appearing to be attributed to @AnonCircle carried the hashtags #OpBayBack and #OpTPB, clearly referencing the infamous website.

VIRGIN MEDIA - Tango Down #OpTPB virginmedia.com #OpBayBack #Anonymous
— Anonymous Circle (@AnonCircle) May 8, 2012

Piracy research

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay website is currently hosting a link to a research project ran by the good people at the Cybernorms Research Group (based at Lund University). In this follow-up study they are seeking to understand online norms and values in relation to effective laws and polices so are asking for help. This link will take you to a short questionnaire (no personal data or IP address info is collected). It really will take next to no time and will help contest the industry-led lobby-led research. More information can be found over at cybernorms.net.

TheSlyrateBay

I was also contacted via email by the founder of TheSlyrateBay - a website currently helping online users bypass the Pirate Bay blocks. The founder suggests that the site allows you to log in to your personal Piratebay account without the need for any other external proxies or Virtual Private Networks (VPN). It's free and can be accessed form a browser. You use it at your own risk but it might help fill your Pirate Bay fix. At the very least, you can use it to get access to the non-infringing Pirate Bay blog.

EDIT: It seems like Orange are the second UK ISP to implement a block on the Pirate Bay judging by this post

EDIT #2: The Pirate Bay have taken to Facebook to criticise the DDoS attack on Virgin Media, critiquing the method as a form of censorship equivalent to web blocking.

Virgin Media blocks the Pirate Bay and how it doesn't even matter

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:36:00 +0000

As of yesterday Virgin Media customers were no longer able to reach the standard domain address for the Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.se/) after an earlier high court ruling demanded that the UK's biggest ISPs block access to the site on the grounds that it breaches copyright laws. This move has brought with it criticisms from several internet advocacy groups.

Speaking over at guardian.co.uk Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said:

Blocking The Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism ... Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes.

Part of the problem is that in an attempt to block access to copyrighted material, Virgin Media have also cut off access to the Pirate Bay blog - leading to a rather chilling effect on free speech.

It seems like the block has had an inverse effect as TorrentFreak carried a report in which the Pirate Bay stated they witnessed a surge in traffic to the site - after the block came into effect. Traffic levels saw a spike totalling an extra 12 million visitors as web users came to see what the fuss was about (a classic case of the Streisland Effect).

Access to the site can still be achieved if web users are committed enough to seek out alternate ways to reach The Pirate Bay. The UK arm of the Pirate Party have a proxy server setup to help people bypass the rather clumsy attempt at enforcing domain level censorship. How long this link stays available remains to be seen.

Over on the Pirate Bay's blog is an overview of the different ways in which users can still access the site:

As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use googles DNS servers... we could go on...

There are a range of different VPN services - some free, some expensive - that provide web users with alternate ways to route around censorship. The very real danger in the future lies with the potential misuse of domain level blocking. The Pirate Bay has been blocked as a consequence of successful lobbying by the entertainment industry (due to hosting links to files that may violate various copyright claims), but as the web becomes more and more a commodified experience, one wonders how long it will be before censorship of domains occurs at the expense of websites that carry material other powerful lobbyists disagree with

In the mean time, the blocking doesn't matter. The video below shows one way round the block. However, the future of the Internet doesn't look quite so open today.

Instagram and printing your photos

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:26:00 +0000

Given the recent success of the iOS and Android photo application, Instagram, there's been an explosion of interest in people using the service as the $1 billion Facebook acquisition received widespread media coverage. It seems like everyone is a fauxtographer now.

In the early days of Instagram (October 2010) the only way you could view your snaps was via the application itself but it quickly granted access to users' images via the API. Several different companies have been setup to take advantage of this access, offering a range of photo printing services or social networking services. I recall signing up to Followgram in order to check out my photos from a web browser. It's quite a basic 'display' service.

There are other services available. Statigram offers users quite a different proposition, including detailed statistics about your images (eg such as the most commented upon or liked photos) and it even offers links to a good range of printing services. You can have your photos emblazoned across iPhone cases, fridge magnets, posters, pillows and more...

Not everyone will want to print their Instagram images but they can be fun and playful, and even quite artful, so much so that there is a growing market for people looking to express their creativity beyond the digital context. However, the main problem I've encountered when looking for services to print Instagram photos are mainly to do with geography. All the services I've found (like Bumblejax or Hatchcraft) are US-based (eg Postalpix and Printstagram) meaning that costs to export to the UK make them unattractive.

The bamboo shadow box frames that Hatchcraft make would look great on my walls but at $22 per 4" frame and $34 per 7" frame with import duty and postage on top make these a somewhat expensive way of showing of your keepsakes.

So, if you know of any bespoke services dealing with printing or framing Instagram content based in Europe or the UK then I'm interested in hearing your views (leave a comment please!). There's an open question on Quora if you'd rather leave your responses there.

Sunday Times in Modern Warfare fail

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:07:00 +0000

You may recall a short while ago I posted about the massive fail at ITV whereby they managed to include footage from a video game (ArmA 2) whilst giving the impression it was an IRA video. Ofcom ruled that they were in breach of the Broadcast Code. Well, it only turns out that the Sunday Times have used an image of the fictional soldier, Soap MacTavish, from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series in a story about an ill-fated Nigerian-based rescue attempt that resulted in the death of a Briton and an Italian. I'd love to link to the story but News Corp have stuck the Times behind a paywall.

The Sunday Times even went as far as striking out the eyes of Soap, you know, just in case any of his fictional relatives recognised him and feared for his safety. I really can't tell why this picture is associated with the story. From the composition, it also looks like Soap is on a call with David Cameron.

The Media Blog picked this story up and it's since been reposted over at Tech Radar and C&VG. It looks like this may be a case of the mainstream media failing in their ability to distinguish fiction from reality again. It also seems a little tasteless to include an image from a video game when writing about a tragic incident.

Appreciation of a fanbase - David Moody is awesome

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:36:00 +0000

As a child growing up in the 1980s I was fascinated with horror movies, fitting really, given that in the UK at this time there was a well-established moral panic around 'video nasties'. That violent horror movies had the power to corrupt the innocent was always an idea I found ludicrous, and it perhaps informs some my teaching practices to this day. Regardless, I was a big fan of George Romero's zombie films (the Night, Dawn, Day trilogy), and this fondness has stayed with me. Especially when it comes to zombie-based video games...

Anyway, few years back I was discussing my interest in the living dead with a school-teacher friend of mine (hi Elliot!) whose personal knowledge of zombie media was far more refined than mine own. He recommended that I seek out the literary fiction of David Moody, a British writer who self-published an early novel of his back on the internet in 2001. The book in question was Autumn, which was recently republished. It's a book revolving around a mysterious illness which afflicts the majority of the human race, killing them only for some of the corpses to, you guessed it, come back to life. This is a zombie novel after all. What follows is a tale of survival, futility and hope as the last remaining survivors attempt to come to terms with the disaster in their own ways.

At the time I was first made aware of the series, I seldom gave it much thought, mainly because I was immersed at the time in the graphic novel, The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard. This is the 'continuing tale of survival horror' made famous by the recent television adaptation. If you enjoy the television series then you can do yourself a massive favour by seeking out the original source material - it goes where no television series can dare to go. Seriously.

More recently, a chance encounter with an ex-student of mine (hi Craig!) who also loves horror fiction put me onto the zombie novel by Max Brooks, World War Z. I was initially sceptical about the title, seeing it a cheap cash-in on the rise in popularity of the zombie, especially given the raft of HMV-friendly titles I'd browsed like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I was blown away by the quality of the story. It has since been made into a film to be released this year (trailer below):

Having, enjoyed this book I was in the mind to seek out David Moody's work, and I wasn't disappointed. The way Moody managed to capture the pointlessness that survivors of traumatic events feel was a pleasure to behold. Also, the attention to detail (eg the stillness of the post apocalyptic world; it's quietness) was refreshing and by the time I finished the first book I had already ordered the subsequent novel in the series, Autumn: The City. The ways in which the zombies herd together, chasing a lost and forgotten sound until distracted by something else was well-realised.

It's at this point that things started to go a little awry, and not because of the fault of Moody or his storytelling. Quite the contrary, the subsequent book was as good as the first, if not better. No, the problem was that after getting two-thirds of the way through the book, a printing error had meant that pages from earlier in the novel were replicated, thus curtailing the narrative. At this point I endeavoured to contact the publisher but, when struggling to find their contact details, I stumbled across David Moody's email address. I sent him a polite enquiry regarding the contact details of the publisher, not really expecting a response.

Within the hour David Moody himself returned my email explaining that there are a handful of copies of the book with this problem and that the publishers (Gollancz) were aware of this and were in the process of arranging a recall. His email was friendly, apologetic, measured and it took me completely by surprise. All I was expecting was to be given an email address of a customer services departement (and not straight away either!), but no, Moody actually took personal ownership of the issue and went out of his way to pursue the solution to the problem. A new book is on its way to me from the publisher.

You might imagine that this type of thing would really frustrate an author as it runs the risk of damaging their reputation and future sales. I've a new found respect the David Moody and I shall definitely be purchasing more of his work. When an author takes time to look after the fanbase the way he did, then that respect is deserved.

Thank you, David, you made my day.

War or gaming fun? Spotting the difference

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:01:00 +0000

A week ago I wrote a piece about ITV's blunder in which video game footage taken from YouTube found it's way into a documentary about Gaddafi. Ofcom were less than pleased with the lack of due process and compliance breaches on display. A few days ago, a BBC picture editor (Phil Coomes) wrote a playful piece in which he stressed the blurring of real and virtual worlds given the popularity and success of increasingly photorealistic video games depicting war or conflicts.

I only came across this article after a colleague of mine forwarded me the URL devoid of context. I think he knew it would wind me up and the gist of my response to the article can be found below.

Photo/realism

I get pretty confused about these kinds of posts from journalists, in which they attempt to link the digital representations of (usually) fictional war-based games with real world combat. I get that still images can look similar but there's a world of difference between experiencing war first hand and picking up a controller or a mouse and playing in a virtual world with strangers on the Internet (as in Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3). Granted, Coomes was responding to a point raised by the photographer John Cantile, who claimed that the level of realism was such that the "next sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not even have left their bedrooms". The rest of the article seems to give way to Cantile's experiences rather than being the work of Coomes.

What irks me about these kinds of claims is the easy at which the impacts of one experience (war) are neatly overlaid onto that of another (gaming) at the level of photorealism. You'd think that there's never been a thing called cinema in which actors depict realistic events a la vérite. When reading through the Ofcom report into the ITV blunder it's almost understandable how the game footage form ArmA 2 made it's way into a documentary - a failure of basic fact-checking before running with something grabbed from the internet, but it's another thing entirely to compare gaming to the real experience of warfare. This should be apparent to Cantile as he has photographed battalions in Sirte, Libya.

Fatigue

I'm sure Cantile felt "drained" after playing Battlefield 3 for many hours - I do too, but I also feel really drained after playing FIFA or Fat Princess online for large periods of time. However, I don't make the mistake of thinking that I am at the Bernabéu of that I've ever really played there, setting up goals for Lionel Messi and basking in the cheers or boos from fans and oppositional supporters alike.

The sound mix for Battlefield 3 is phenomenal - you can get incredibly disoriented with rockets and explosions erupting all around your character. This really can be a "hellish cacophony"as Cantile claims. It sounds even better with an expensive pair of headphones but that can break the verisimilitude - it's not often soldiers storm battlefields with big headphones, a games controller or a mouse and keyboard. I note he was a playing on PC - the only real injury the contemporary digital soldier will experience is Repetitive Strain Injury?

I know what happens when a player gets gets shot in Battlefield 3 as I've been killed several thousand times. You get a kill-cam of the player who shot you, overlaid with stats about your 'nemesis' (eg their weapon, their class, their personal kill/death ratio) before being dumped to a character load-out screen to do it all again. Very real. And let's not even go into how bad the texture 'pop-in' is on the PS3, further heightening the supposed reality effect! The texture mapping and frame-rate hardly contributes to the replication of reality (neither does having an on screen radar or ammo count). Just witness the realistic text effects below:

Anxiety

Cantile has spent some time attempting to match real world images to those taken in-game saying: "In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing". I'm not sure how worrying it is. As I've alluded to earlier, there are many other media forms that "look" real, but are not - they are representational or, in the case of games, simulational (see Gonzalo Frasca on this point). I think this is the underlying anxiety in the article - a point that is hinted at rather than explicitly addressed, and one which has connections with other moral panics about media forms and their supposed effects.

So the essence of the piece can be summarised thusly: still images taken from some war-based video games look like real combat environments. And rightly so given that vast swathes of research money has been vested in making these products look similar to the actions they depict in order to ramp up the dramatic experiences of gameplay. But it's somewhat disingenuous to claim that we should be worried about the similarities between static images of two completely different experiences

MAC281 Cyberculture 2012 - module taster

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:32:00 +0000

I've been putting together the module guide for this semester's module guide for MAC281 - Cybercultures. I'm currently tweaking the document and finalising a special guest for Week 6 but this is how it's looking at the moment:

Week 1: Introduction to the module & a short history of Cyberculture – An overview of the module content and assessment

Week 2: Copyright in the Digital Age – This session will establish some of the major arguments that inform the current copyright climate in the UK, and the West more generally. In particular it will look at the ways in which recent legislative changes have developed to ‘support’ content creators in the face of filesharing by exploring the Digital Economy Act and its impacts. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 3: The Music Industry and the Net Part 1: Producers, Profits, Pirates & Peers - This session will consider the crisis facing the music industry posed by recent changes in the organisation and distribution of music in the age of the Internet. The primary focus will be on the industry. It will consider claims made by the industry about sales and will consider business models for the music industry. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 4: The Music Industry and the Net Part 2: The Suits vs The Scene – This session will consider the opportunities presented to music consumers provided by the Internet. It will reassess some of the claims made by the music industry in context of actual audience members and analyse some of the reasons "pirates" give regarding “sharing” music via the Internet. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 5: Openness, Crowdsourcing & Participatory Culture

– The knowledge and resources of millions of people can now be harnessed through self-organising groups via blogs, wikis, chat rooms, forums, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting platforms, etc. This session will consider the impact of low-cost online collaborative production tools and the importance of open data and free culture to the participatory nature on the Web. (Rob Jewitt)

~~Week 6: Weblogs and the Rise of Citizen Journalism -~~ Today, thanks to weblogs and mobile phones that can send photographs, anyone can be a journalist. New media evangelists claim traditional structures are crumbling as digital technology breaks down barriers and heralds a new age of transparency and participatory democracy. Will citizen journalists change our view of the world? I'm expecting to have a guest speaker here to cover all things journalism and data. Will reprot back tomorrow

Week 7: Video Games, Narrative and ‘Play’ – The history of digital games stretches back over the best part of half a century yet academia has been slow to engage with this interactive form beyond offering moral objections. This session will consider the ways game scholars have attempted to situate and explain this ‘new’ medium by discussing narrative design and “play” mechanics. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 8: Game Music, Design and User Experience – This session will build upon contemporary discussion of game design and user experience by focussing on the frequently overlooked aural experience. It will consider the various ways in which music features within gaming experiences by touching upon the licencing of game soundtracks, incidental music through to a consideration of rhythm-based gaming experiences. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 9: The 'Actualities' of Virtual Realities - An exploration into the history, application and cultural and social impact and implications of virtual reality. The lecture will draw on key examples of VR from popular culture and industry as well as its use as an actual technology. (John-Paul Green)

Week 10: ‘Getting around’ in online environments - How do we come to know and explore our way around online places? This session will seek to define and explore more deeply our relationship with different online places and sites and ask how we come to habitually know and navigate around them. It will examine a variety of different places including virtual and gaming worlds as well as social networks, thinking about the ways that we know and interact with these different but very familiar environments. Using the work of Ingold and Shinkle, the session will also look to uncover the different roles of the body and sensoriality when we browse around, interact with and inhabit various online places. (Eve Forrest)

Week 11: Digital Photographic Cultures Online – Are we all photographers now? With photographic technology becoming cheaper and more accessible we can capture, store, print, upload and distribute our images like never before. This session will examine the explosion of amateur photography, looking at the different impacts and varying aesthetics of the photograph online. (Eve Forrest)

Week 12: ‘Net Neutrality’ and the Future of the Internet -

Network neutrality is a complex issue that has generated intense levels of political discussion in the United States in recent years, and attention has turned to regulation in the UK. This session will consider the whether network operators should be prevented from blocking or prioritising certain network traffic or traffic from particular sources – effectively creating a two-tiered Internet – and who stands to gain from this (Rob Jewitt)

Miro Video Converter dimension settings explained

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Anyone who has used the great Miro Video Converter (ver 2.6) tool for transcoding video into a format that can be viewed in any browser you may care to use might find the encoder settings a little opaque. There's no intuitive way of finding out exactly what dimensions the video you want to process will come out at other than by being familiar with the encoder settings.

The encoder settings are handily listed under the following categories:

Android Devices

Nexus One

Dream / G1

Magic / myTouch

Droid

Eris / Desire

Hero

Cliq / DEXT

Behold II

Apple Devices
iPhone
iPod Touch
iPod Nano
iPod Classic
iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4
iPad
Apple Universal

Other Devices and Formats
Playstation Portable (PSP)
Theora
WebM (vp8)
MP4
MP3 (Audio only)

For some people, these settings may be fairly self explanatory. However, it's still not exactly clear which of the settings will give the best quality output. What I intend to do in this post is explain what these settings equate to when using a real world example. I'm going to take a piece of video freely available and run it through each of these presets and then post the details of the file size and the dimensions. The video I have chosen is to use is entitled Liquid Skies by Annis Naeem:

The reason I have chosen this video is mainly due to its relatively short length (1 minute 36 seconds) - encoding video files can take a long time especially when the original file is long and necessarily large as a consequence.

Annis has enabled downloading of the video from his Vimeo page and it comes out as 29.1 MB Flash (.f4v) file. Using the Inspector tool within Quicktime we can see that the actual video dimensions of the file are 960 x 540 pixels, and it is encoded with the AVC Coding codec. We can also see other pieces of information such as the audio codec, frame rate and data rate. This file will be used as the starting point when trying all of the different presets.

Helpfully, when converting the files Miro appends the name of the preset to the new file name. However, there are times when this goes wrong - the Apple presets for the various iPod models all omit the specific device they are intended for so if you want to make multiple copies for different platforms it is advised that you add "nano" or "touch" to the file name to help distinguish between the conversions.

The Android Settings

Below is a list of the video conversion presets followed by the resulting file size of the newly converted video as well as the video dimensions

Android Devices

Nexus One - 17.5 MB - 800 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)

Dream / G1 - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Magic / myTouch - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Droid - 18.8 MB - 854 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)

Eris / Desire - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Hero - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Cliq / DEXT - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Behold II - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

All of the Android presets came out as .mp4 files using the H.264 video codec, but the audio codec remained unchanged along with the frame rate (29.97). There appears to minimal (if any) difference between the settings for Dream / G1, Magic / myTouch, Eris / Desire, Hero, Cliq / DEXT, and Behold II.

The Apple Settings

Again, below is a list of the video conversion presets for Apple devices followed by the resulting file size of the newly converted video as well as the video dimensions

Apple Devices
iPhone - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Touch - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Nano - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Classic - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4 - 15.1 MB - 640 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)
iPad - 15.1 MB - 1024 x 768 (1365 x 768 actual)
Apple Universal - 15.1 MB - 1280 x 720 (1280 x 720 actual)

As with the Android presets, all the Apple conversions came out as .mp4 files using the H.264 video codec, with the frame rate and audio codec remaining unchanged. The iPhone, iPod Touch, Nano and Classic all outputted the same video file. However the iPhone 4 and iPad outputs varied in video dimensions whilst the file size was slightly larger than the older Apple devices. It looks like the iPhone and iPad presets are optimised for those individual devices (the 'Retina Display'?) whilst the Apple Universal setting seems more geared towards an Apple TV device with its 720 output.

The Other Settings

As above, here's a list of the video conversion presets for the non-Apple/non-Android outputs. Not all the presets were able to convert the original file and the audio and video codecs were sometimes converted to fit the platforms they were expected to work on

Other Devices and Formats
Playstation Portable (PSP) - file could not be converted
Theora - 31.7 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: Theora - audio codec: Vorbis
WebM (vp8) - 4.4 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: V_VP8 - audio codec: Vorbis
MP4 - 17.3 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: AVC - audio codec: AAC
MP3 (Audio only) - 1.47 MB

Screengrab of WebM conversion

These presets produced a mixed bag of results. The Theora preset produced the biggest file out of all the presets available and the video footage looked sharp. The opposite can be said for the WebM conversion which produced a blocky and pixelated image, but it did compress the file down to 4.4 MB - the smallest size on test. It was truly awful when dealing with any onscreen motion. The Playstation Portable preset simply refused to work with any video I've thrown at it to date.

Conclusion

It certainly seems that Miro Video Converter contains a number of presets that do much the same thing as others. This is most likely due to the diversity of users with different platforms looking to make video specifically for their device (as in the case of the Android and Apple settings). Given that the generic Android and Apple presets put out video at 480 x 320 it's fair to say that the smaller file sizes reduce the amount of visible detail available, but then they are nearly half the size. This is an expected trade-off in quality.

Miro Video Convertor is a free tool with a tidy interface. If you are looking for a quick and simple drag-and-drop tool then it will more than likely meet your needs. Just don't expect much in the way of control over the conversions you run through it. For that, you'll want to use something like Handbrake

Ofcom slaps ITV's wrists over game footage

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:11:00 +0000

Back in September of 2011 ITV dropped a bit of a clanger when they unwittingly included some footage from the video game ArmA 2 in a documentary about Colonel Gaddafi's links with the IRA. "Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA" aired on ITV1 on Monday the 26th of September and purported to feature footage labelled as "IRA film 1988" (see video below).

This footage appeared within the opening minutes of the programme and matches similar footage posted earlier in 2011 which claimed the video was footage of the Provisional IRA shooting down a British helicopter near Silverbridge in 1988. Clearly this was a case of ITV's fact-checking processes falling well short of something approaching acceptability especially given that the last time I checked, real life doesn't feature texture pop-ins.

Nevertheless ITV admitted that the mistake was a result of human error but that hasn't stopped them from having their wrists slapped by the British broadcast media regulator, Ofcom. Broadcast Bulletin, Issue 198 (23rd Jan 2012) found ITV to be in breach of standards following 26 viewer complaints about the game footage and other footage purporting to feature a riot in the Ardoyne area of Belfast in July 2011. Ofcom investigated the documentary under Rule 2.2 the Broadcasting Code which states:

“Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience”.

ITV responded to the complaints by saying they had intended to portray two real events but that in each case the 'wrong footage' was used to illustrate them:

“mistakes were the result of human error and not an intention to mislead viewers. In both cases, steps were taken to verify the content of the footage used but unfortunately these did not reveal the errors”

In attempting to explain how ITV could have used the wrong footage (from the game) they said they were aiming to use material that had featured in an episode of The Cook Report entitled "Blood Money" that was broadcast on 12th June 1989. However, this footage was heavily edited and production staff sought to source "a fuller and better version" of The Cook Report material. Nearly two months later the programe director discovered the footage from the internet which “he mistakenly believed...to be a fuller version of the footage used in the Cook Report”. It was ITVs claim that:

“Although there were clear differences between the two pieces of footage, his memory over the ensuing period of time let him down and led him to believe it was the same footage”

The programme director included this footage in the mistaken belief that it was the full material taken from The Cook Report - without having viewed the internet footage themselves.

Compliance?

Now all of this would be bad enough if it wasn't for the fact that a member of the ITV Compliance team also had doubts about the authenticity of the material during the production process, even asking questions of the producer about the veracity of the sound effects and pictures. The assurances given by the production staff to the ITV Compliance team member were accepted in 'good faith' despite neither the producer nor the director checking the footage.

ITV has since made improvements to its compliance processes - a case of lesson learned in order nto to make similar mistakes again. These include keeping a list of archive sources used, extra guidance issued to news, factual and current affairs staff, as well as compliance training changes for production teams.

Nevertheless, given that factual content should not mislead the public and that Ofcom has a duty under the Communications Act 2003 to set standards, the regulator has criticised ITV for breaching the rules and for damaging the trust relationship between viewer and broadcaster saying:

"breaches of the Code that resulted in the audience being misled have always been considered by Ofcom to be amongst the most serious that can be committed by a broadcaster, because they go to the heart of the relationship of trust between a broadcaster and its audience."

This is a serious charge indeed. In fact, from the report Ofcom can scarcely believe that the programme makers could have been misled as there were "significant and easily identifiable differences" between the game footage and that material from the 1989 episode of The Cook Report pointing to "clear deficiencies"in the steps taken by both the production team and the compliance team to verify the content.

Oh dear. I guess ITV will have cancelled any plans to investigate the systematic slaying of dragons in Tamriel

CENSORED

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Today's the day that a number of high profile websites are demonstrating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills currently pending in Congress. The upshot of these bills passing into law is that they are tantamount to giving powerful content industry groups the power to cut-off from the internet or censor websites that are accused of hosting material that doesn't belong to them. Bear in mind that these bills have been sponsored and co-written by representatives of the entertainment industry (eg the MPAA) and it's plain to see whose interests are being served here.

Under the proposed legislation the US Attorney General would have the power to demand ISPS so block access to foreign websites suspected of dealing in pirated content, as well as making search engines delist such istes from the search indexes. Other powers include the blocking of payement services to accused sites too (and we all know what happened to Wikileaks when its funding services where blocked). If these standards were applied to several prominent US-based sites many of them would be in trouble (eg Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Google, etc).

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There have been some last minute amendments to the proposed bills but they haven't removed the threat to free speech entirely. That's why it's good to see several prominent sites doing their bit to raise public awareness of the threats involved.

Over at TorrentFreak you can find a compilation of websites that are participating in a self-imposed censorship/black-out campaign. I'm going to add links or images to those already covered by TorrentFreak as I come across them. Please feel free to contact me either in the comments, via Twitter or email with any more.

Those sites known to be taking part are in today's black-out are:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the student's friend, will be down for 24 hours (except for the pages about SOPA and PIPA)

Minecraft

Insanely addictive browser-based game Minecraft is down

Reddit

The community-powered news site, reddit, is down

Open Rights Group

The Open Rights Group are UK digital activists and they are making sure people know about these heinous bills

Wordpress

The creators of the blogging content management system of choice, Wordpress, are censored.

TorrentFreak

Even TorrentFreak themselves are making a stand. Lord knows, they've been inaccurately accused of being pirates enough times

Wired

Ever-popular tech site Wired are in self-imposed blackout mode

Craigslist

The classifieds service, Craigslist, is also making a stand

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The video game review site Rock, Paper, Shotgun is down

The Oatmeal

Satirical comedy site The Oatmeal is down

Humble Bundle

Online independent games retailer HumbleBundle have gone dark

Wikia

The alternate pop-culture wiki-based encyclopaedia, Wikia, is protesting

XBMC

Makers of the free media centre resource, XBMC, have gone dark

Zeropaid

Piracy-based news site Zeropaid has blacked out

Demonoid

Long-running torrent site Demonoid is blacked out

Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing site has gone offline

UKNova

UK-based TV catch-up torrent site UKNova had an interesting message for its users

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg kinda supports the anti SOPA business but Facebook isn't quite going dark

Absolute Punk

The punks over at Absolute Punk are against SOPA

Liberal Conspiracy

Those good folks on the Left at Liberal Conspiracy are blacking out their homepage

Destructoid

The gaming site for gamers, by gamers, Destructoid is dark

Know Your Meme

Not to be outdone by a spreading meme, Know Your Meme actually became part of what they normally document

This Isn't Happiness

The photography/art-based propaganda site This Isn't Happiness embraced the darkness

imgur

As the easy way to share images, imgur was keen to protest

XKCD

Popular online comic site, XKCD, ran a blacked-out sketch

The Verge

The technology-focussed site, The Verge, voiced their opposition

TechCrunch

The AOL-owned technology blog TechCrunch had a colour make-over

Fark

Home to all things satirical, Fark went for a white out

4chan

The home of weirdness (and haters of censorship!) saw some weird things happen, but hey, that's 4chan for you

Funny or Die

Funny or Die's comedy site got serious about the censorship

GoDaddy

Sometime supporters of the bills, GoDaddy, demonstrated their (customer's !?!) commitment to the opposition

More to follow. Maybe...

Merry Christmas Music Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:10:00 +0000

It's been a while since I last posted (work has been intense!), but I thought I'd get a festive post in before the new year. As the year ends there have been many things related to music and the copyright industry for people to get their teeth into: the MegaUpload video controversy; the safe harbours provision debate for Grooveshark; the ongoing arguments around SOPA and the threat to Domain Name Servers accused of hosting content protected by copyright...

On top of this though, there are some positive steps being taken by the music industry to give internet users what they want when they want it (competing with piracy?). I found myself becoming a fully paid up subscriber to Spotify Premium this year (£9.99 per month) and am now enjoying it on my Macbook, iPhone and Tivo box. I'm also waiting for Apple's iTunes Match (£21.99 annually) to filter the first 25,000 tracks in my library before seeing if I can add the other 15,000. Then there's Google Music, but I guess I'll wait and see what the UK provision is like before committing myself to another digital service.

That I've paid for these services may not be a surprise to anyone who read my series of posts in which I tracked my expenditure on music products and services for a year. However, I have found myself being a little conflicted about the value of these services - £10 per month is the same price you can pay for a seedbox and VPN package by which you can download, store and access all manner of torrented materials.

Guilty relief?

Nevertheless, I've come to think of these subscriptions as a form of mild guilt-relief for any form of consumption that might be viewed by others as not strictly legal. I'm not sure I get the full £9.99 per month use out of my Spotify subscription as there are many artists that I love that are missing from the service. Similarly in the filmic consumption space, my £14.99 per month subscription to CineWorld's Unlimited Card hasn't been great value for money when I go less than twice per month as they don't usually get the more obscure weekly releases. I also pay for Virgin Media's most expensive TV package (£24.50 per month) despite never watching any live TV.

I've found myself spending more money this month on second-hand vinyl albums including the spinning wheel version of Led Zeppelin's III album (£25!) than I have on digital services. I guess I should feel guilty in this consumption too, as none of that cash will find it's way back to the struggling artists - at least this is the rhetoric of the games industry about resales. However, I don't. I shall never feel guilty about purchasing tangible objects, even if they are old Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground or Crosby, Stills and Nash records (I feel older than I am!).

In the brave digital future physical music might be dead but at least, for now, I can hang it on my wall.

Merry Christmas music industry!

Blogging case study: a site map

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:36:00 +0000

Back in September Andrea Wren started a series in Guardian Money about how to build and monetise a successful blog. She drew on expert advice from 22 year old blogging genius, Glenn Allsopp, from Newcastle. He is the owner of ViperChill and a successful web-entrepreneur who earns £10,000 per month from his online activities.

Every fortnight, Wren has been updating readers with her progress as she tries to carve out a successful niche (check out her progress here). Allsopp has also been providing excellent advice on how to take the plunge into the murky waters of successful blogging over on his Blogging: Case Study site and plans to update readers over the next 6 months as to the progress.

Readers have also been encouraged to sign up for a news letter to the site to get more detailed help on 'how to' make their own sites - indeed Neil Perryman recommended that our students on MED102 and MAC195 to sign up and follow the progress given that we've been encouraging the students to setup their own sites.

One of the problems I've found will Allsopp's otherwise excellent site is it's lack of obvious navigation for those readers coming in a little late. There is some navigation on the site, but it only seems to be available from within one of the sections. This post is an attempt to rectify that issue as well as make it easy for me (and my students) to jump in and out

Niche
Point One: Deciding on your blog niche
Point One: We're not trying to attract everyone

Domain
Point Two: Deciding on a domain name
Point Two: Setting up hosting

Design
Point Three: Your blog design
Point Three: Theme and design resources

Plug-ins
Point Four: Getting your blog ready for visitors
Point Four: Final blog tweaks and recommended services

Strategy
Point Five: Your blogging strategy
Point Five: Standing out

Post Ideas
Point Six: Generating content ideas
Point Six: Examples of popular blog posts

More to follow...