Warfangled

I had the pleasure to attend the February Creative Commons Salon on the 26th. Sitting in For Your Imagination’s studio, some sixty folks sipped on free (as in beer) beer, watching speakers from Thingiverse, Blip.tv, and Indaba Music. Interesting things are happening in the realm of collaborative media, but there’s a signal to noise problem. Read on for comments about each, and some proposed solutions.

Thingiverse

Thingiverse is pretty amazing. You upload CAD; 3D objects; Schematics - basically, anything that enables someone else to make a copy of it. For example, this automated wire stripper: on that page is everything you need to build one of your own, except the necessary fabrication equipment (in this case, a laser cutting machine). Other people have uploaded circuit board schematics.

What’s even cooler, is that given the right upload format, Thingiverse will actually build a POV-ray file, render it, and attach it to your post. How cool is that?

What’s even cooler, is how they implement licensing. When you choose a licensing scheme (in the case of the automated wire stripper, it’s a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license), it puts all the licensing information on the sidebar. Not only that, but it’s built specifically for the forward-thinking concept of the Semantic Web. A deconstruction of their implementation of custom XML within their XHTML would be too much for this post, and will be covered in the future.

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is a free syndication agency for independant shows. Everything from how to make saloon doors to sitcoms about hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When a content creator uploads a video, they can choose what it’s syndicated out to, from YouTube and iTunes to blogs and RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, for the first-time visitor it’s kind of confusing. It looks like just another YouTube, with lists of featured episodes and popular episodes. Their player is nonstandard (pause and play in the top left as words?). Nothing that interesting pops out on the front page. For most people visiting for the first time, they might think: “Wow. Independant shows are pretty crappy.”

There is a huge signal to noise problem. There is no way to rate episodes (or even just entire shows). There is basic keyword search, but not much more than that. It’s still in beta, so there’s hope yet. If you go digging, though, you might find some stuff you like. Or you might not. It depends on how much work you want to put into finding it.

Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv talked a little about this. It sparked some pretty lively discussion about single tubes, series of tubes, and drinking from single straws. All in attempts to illustrate that when you have a lot of options, it’s impossible to sample all of them to find what you like. You have, in essence, a findability problem.

Indaba Music

Disclaimer: I am currently employed at Indaba Music.

Indaba Music is a collaboration service for musicians. They can upload full songs, partial tracks, and collaborate online to build full songs with musicians from around the world. Mainstream artists host remix contests - Yo-Yo Ma recently hosted a contest where musicians from around the world composed an accompaniment to a pre-recorded cello track.

Dan Zaccagnino spoke a little bit about his recent appearance on the Colbert Report.

They also talk a little bit about how convincing mainstream artists (or their copyright holders) to put tracks up for a contest can be difficult. They worry about lost revenue. However, remixes like this can be a boon to an artist: if a remix becomes popular, more people (who might never have listened to the original artist) will hear it and likely reach out to find more about the original artist. All of which is great exposure.

The Findability Problem

There is so much user created content out there. Much the same way that Digg and Reddit use crowdsourcing to find interesting news articles, these sites are using crowdsourcing to generate multimedia. Digg and Reddit use fairly interesting algorithms to filter all that content to find out what might be interesting to their viewers. Digg even has a recommendation system. Using collaborative filtering, it empowers users to not only find other users who like similar articles, but to also to have a customized news feed - ideally, to hand you news articles that you might find interesting - not just the main page stuff that “everyone” finds interesting (some people get irate when things they aren’t interested in hit the main page).

There is no such service for all of the creative commons licensed media out there. Creativecommons.org has a fairly advanced search utility, but all it really does is integrate with the search utilities for sites which host creative commons media. There are no options that empower you to find the figurative diamond in the rough of the long tail. Collaborative filtering can help, but one must be careful to not rely too much on public ratings for items (such as Amazon’s product rating system). Kurtisrandom has a post about these pitfalls, including linking to a study which showed that having a rating metric next to an item increases its likelihood of success. It certainly makes sense; consumers look to ratings to help determine what they might like. However, users who see an item rated highly are more likely to rate that item higher themselves, even if they would have not rated the item as highly in other circumstances. It’s probably innate in our desire as individuals to belong to groups.

We must tread lightly in attempting to make crowdsourced media findable. We can either create a new short tail out of mob rule, or develop smart algorithms to identify niches. Plain old keyword search will not help us here.

Tags: Blip.tv, Creative Common, Findability, Indaba Music, Semantic Web, Thingiverse

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:21 am and is filed under Findability, Internet Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.