On the subject of citizen journalists, if I could generalize, I'd say it's quite true that we work for free and have to support ourselves by other means. Yet we feel that some stories should be covered that both the mainstream press and the specialised press cover superficially, or not at all, or from a traditional angle which misses the mark. And the Internet offers very inexpensive worldwide distribution without the usual space constraints, and led by Google fairly reliable text indexing so people can locate articles.
Although I have had difficulty obtaining accreditation once or twice, most of the time press contacts are more concerned with track record and professionalism than the press card -- the Internet lets them find out very quickly how a news "blog" reports. In this regard, what does concern me is the sorry state of metadata in audio and video, both on the creation side and the indexing side. Almost all podcasts I listen to or download have the bare minimum of metadata, if at all. Video is not much better. Of course, when MPEG-1 was published in 1992, metadata was not a chief concern; the MP3 ID3 initiative has been a useful hack, but I will always prefer Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora since metadata can be flexibly added at or after creation with FOSS tools. Of course, Free containers by no means lead today's proprietary and patent-encumbered formats, which all propose some kind of metadata stocking scheme; it's just much harder to find and deploy tools to get to metadata reliably, especially in a workflow. But then, the effort expended to stock metadata such as IPTC -- the most interesting bits of which are often human-keyed at the source, such as names of people, captions, copyright, contact information -- goes to waste, since neither Google nor anybody else I'm aware of indexes it, even on the desktop. I think it's a fundamental problem for finding audiovisual content in any computer-based system. Even machine generated EXIF goes ignored. In this light, Adobe XMP seems to me an interesting approach, to federate media metadata with XML (CC likes it too). I am convinced the solutions to these two problems, at the source and by indexers, are fundamental to developing media online, that it will be far more worthwhile to indicate copyright than to rely on DRM encryption schemes. Sean. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
