opensourcebroadcasting

Earlier this week, I watched the movie Tarnation by Jonathan Caouette. It skirted the line between being troubling and artistically amazing. The 8mm footage made all the colors oversaturated, like we were viewing a polaroid in motion. However, what really captivated my interest was the second chapter of the movie “Once Upon a Time” which showed a series of “slides” of text followed by photographs:

I love the way the text was used – like little breaks for narrative in silent films.

It was a real democratic way of telling a story. I’m always looking for democratic ways to quickly use technology to achieve an end and I think this technique really fits the bill. Think of it as Radio for YouTube!

I tried to find examples of this at NPR, and I didn’t see this exactly. I saw slideshows sure:

The World of Maurice Sendak
The Streets of New York
The Partisans of Ali
Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton

But nothing really jelled. If there was narrative, there was no music or ambiance. If there was music, no narrative.

And only one video that I saw used text in a similar way. It was at the beginning of the absolutely chilling All Alone in the World from A War Photographer’s View of Iraq .

Imagine a lighter subject, imagine music, a narrator, interviews, photos and text. That’s what I’m talking about.

Andy Bailey, in the Filmmaker review says that Tarnation was made with a cheap video camera, consumer editing software, troves of home movie footage and less than $300. He says that it’s ironic “that a film originally created for less than the price of a plane ticket now has to obtain thousands of dollars in music clearances in order to move forward for distribution.” Okay, so edit the film with creative commons licensed music from the start, and you’re on to a real fast and democratic way to generate radio for YouTube.

Really. NPR, if you’re listening. In the absence of a YouTube for Radio. Make Radio for YouTube.

I’ve set up my first two mashups using Yahoo pipes recently. Before I went ahead and made these humble experiments pubic, it had me thinking. Well, if I can combine our RSS feed with Flickr images, what’s to prevent others from doing things with our feed that we don’t intend?

After all, we specify – within our Podcast feed (not our plain rss just yet), using the <license> element, that this feed is made available under a creative commons license that specifically prohibits derivitive works.

Is a mashup a derivitive work? Seems like one to me.

I did a cursory search of the web and found an interesting article by Jonathan Bailey which suggests that rss feeds are, by definition, public domain protected, syndicated property and should be respected as such. (thanks for the correction).

He also describes three approaches for removing a feed from the yahoo pipes service.

I know this is not the time for locking up our content, but maybe it’s prudent that we change the license for our feeds to something that is more reflective of its actual purpose and use (although perhaps retain the NoDerivs part of the license as a sub-element of each item within the feed – as opposed to the feed iteself).