New Media Rich Technologies & Two Way Web

Jon Udell points out that despite a long campaign to encourage publishers of Web audio and video to enable linking and quotation, media content seldom offers the necessary affordances -and points to his inability to link a video content from syscon-tv site. The fallback strategy was to download the video and snip out the brief segment needed. But because the FLV (Flash video) file was delivered using Macromedia’s proprietary RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) instead of HTTP - the other delivery option for FLV files could not be downloaded. Video screen capture seems to be the only repreive. Digital rights management opponents suggest that technologies such as Microsoft’s Protected Video Path will soon prevent this kind of copying. He argues that should the DRM movement is let to define the media rich technolgies, highly influenced by Hollywood if it has its way would force all to pay a terrible price. Digital audio and video tools, formerly wielded mainly by media pros, are now used increasingly for ordinary business (and personal) communication & jon rightly points out that we’ve hardly begun to understand the kinds of tools and techniques that will enable ordinary folks to compose and remix rich media in the same ways that - almost without thinking about it - we compose and remix text. Today’s digital media landscape is a welter of incompatible formats, containers, and players. Because the ruling metaphor is entertainment, not collaboration, the flow of data is one-way: from producers to consumers. The textual Web has, finally, embraced the two-way model that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned right from the start. That collaborative style is, more than anything else, what the Web 2.0 meme describes - afterall remixing data with high quality Web 2.0-friendly sources yields new possibilities and value. This is one of the bigger concepts that would help many organizations leverage Web 2.0 the most. The music industries attempt at DRM looked ridiculous and the sony fiasco and intel moves are quite scary.I agree with the viewpoint that so long as the tech industry aligns itself with Hollywood’s agenda of control, the two-way media Web will remain an elusive dream.