eirikso.com

Quick ideas on Twitter. After a while the ideas turn into a blog post. And further down the track your blog turns into a book.

And by the way, this blog post is one of the shortest I’ve ever written. But I think it’s an important observation of where publishing is heading.

A while after we did our successful experiment with BitTorrent distribution for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation I was interviewed by the German news web site www.tagesschau.de

The article is in German, but my original conversation with Mr. Wulf Rohwedder is in english. Because it reveals some of my thoughts about this project I decided to share it here:

- Peer to peer networks have a bit of an ambigious reputation, especially due to the use for pirated footage and othe rillegal content. Has there been any reservations or resistance against the project?

- Less resistance than the project initially feared. But we thought through the issues and planned the responses because we feared that other media would start screaming “the NRK use illegal pirate technology to distribute content”. So we made it very clear in the initial blog post announcing the project that BitTorrent is not by any means illegal. It is a very robust and powerful way to distribute content. So robust and powerful that it unfortunately has been the preferred distribution method for pirates.

After the announcement we can conclude that the problem of BitTorrent being the pirate’s preferred distribution method was highly overrated. No real questions about this have been raised. Seems like most journalists understand that the technology is by no means illegal.

- Will you expand the experiment to other productions?
- The experience and reactions after one week are extremely positive. It is likely that we’ll try to clear the rights for this kind of distribution of more content. But first we want to evaluate our current experiment in more detail.

- Do you fear any setbacks for the classical ways of distribution like broadcast and DVD sales?
- At this point our experience with multi platform distribution has been that success on one platform leads to success on other platforms. But BitTorrent distribution is one of our experiments trying to focus on future possibilities. In the long run traditional broadcast and DVD sales of content like this will decline anyway. It is important for us to start experimenting with new distribution methods. We don’t want to do like the music industry. Running around thinking that people will keep driving down to a record store when they can have the content delivered with the push of a button at home.

And if that wasn’t enough. BitTorrent distribution is environmentally friendly. Driving trucks full of DVDs around the country is not.

- By offering DRM-free versions of your products in a non proprietary standard you are pretty much giving up control over it – do you fear any misuse?
- If you want control of your content you need to lock it down in a vault and never show it to anyone. We gave up control of our content the day we started broadcasting. For years our most popular content have been available on BitTorrent and on sites like YouTube anyway. DRM doesn’t work. The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it. If people want it on YouTube then you should publish it on YouTube or in a system that give the same experience. If people want it on BitTorrent then you should provide that. If you do it right people will come to your official publish point and you’ll end up with more control.

In other words, the possibility of misuse has always been there. By publishing our content the way people want it we gain control of the quality and the presentation.

- How do you settle the question of third party rights?
- That is the most difficult part and the main reason for not publishing all our productions like this. Music rights, actors, artists, format owners etc. Fortunately the managers of this particular series was very forward thinking when they started working on it two years ago. They did a very detailed contract with Lars Monsen (the hiker, main character and photographer) and avoided third party sponsors. They had all the music composed and bought completely free.

To solve this in the future we need to be better at negotiating rights when starting new projects. And we need to keep working on renegotiation of our existing content to be able to publish more from our archives.

If you have any additional information about the project we would be interested to get them, too.
- We’re a license funded public broadcaster. We need to reach the broadest possible audience with our content. Because of that we can do experiments like these without having to worry about advertising revenues. And the reactions so far have been extremely positive. Currently there are 321 comments on the blog post announcing the project. All of them positive. Comments like “Now I’m paying my license fee with joy”, “Finally a TV channel that gets it!”, “Note to BBC: This is how it should be done” and so on.

So far we’re closing in on 90 000 downloads of the torrent files. The peer-to-peer ratio on the downloads have been close to 95%. Yes, meaning that using BitTorrent saves the license fee payers 95% of the distribution cost. And giving them download times of 3-5 minutes on a 30 minute TV show in full quality.

Link to the English article about the project.

The discussion on digg.com.

And the original Norwegian blog post announcing the project.

Regular readers have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated since the 11th of February. Usually I update eirikso.com a couple of times a week. I’ve had busy days lately. And have been working on some technical changes to this blog as well. And as you can see - I’m experimenting with a new theme. Hope you like it. Thanks, Kim.

And why are you so freakin’ busy?
- My day-job… Lots of exciting things happening over at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). The people that master the strange language of Norwegian can follow some of the stuff we’re working on over at NRKbeta.

But as you can see, I’ve finished some cleaning of this place and will be able to start posting more often again. Feel free to comment on the new theme, the fact that you don’t speak Norwegian and would like me to post more about the NRK in English and whatever…

I just finished a post (norwegian) about the fact that we registered the name of our Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation tech blog “NRKbeta” on a lot of social networks and places around the web. We did that the second we decided on that name for the blog. And I think that is becoming an important part of your marketing strategy.

I try to be pretty fast on registering “eirikso” on the different services popping up around the net. You never know who’s gonna strike big, and right now it is quite nice that addresses like youtube.com/eirikso, twitter.com/eirikso and flickr.com/photos/eirikso takes you to stuff that I am in control of. Eirikso is my brand on the internet. If you try the same with NRKbeta we’re there as well.

So let’s do a quick test. If you happen to make very nice sports cars you might want someone that visit youtube.com/porsche to find something else? And Microsoft on Flickr? Probably not extremely important, but as big web sites become huge services and places where we spend a lot of time this is getting important. The second race for domain names. At this point http://youtube.com/…whatever company… isn’t close to the importance of http://www…whatever company… but it is getting more important as these giants grow.

And, if you decide to go out there and register your company just to reserve the space, then please put something honest in there. Register at twitter and simply post one single update. “Company nn has registered this user. It’s currently not in use.” or something like that.

My former place of work, the american consulting company called Accenture seems to have done something like that: twitter.com/accenture. Or have they? I don’t know if this is Accenture or just some dude that has registered that user. And that last twit is just plain stupid. You’ll never get any feedback by simply registering a user on twitter and start screaming “anybody out there?”. And my guess is that some clever people at Accenture have registered this one as well. And they don’t have to use it. But at least put in one video and a quick message. Same as for twitter. “This is the official YouTube channel for Accenture. It’s currently not in use.”

And please. Don’t bring back that horrible “under construction”-gif from the late nineties! Register to reserve the space. If you’re going to use it, do it properly, if not be honest and tell people it’s not in use.

Do you have any nice examples of profiles that should have featured something else? Like Porsche on YouTube?

I know many of you are still waiting for some conclusions after my recent visit to DLD in Munich. But I’ve been busy making stuff available on BitTorrent:

As one of many ways to reach people with our content we have decided to do an experiment and make one of our most popular television series available through BitTorrent.This technology makes it possible for us to make our content available in a very high quality without having to invest in large server farms and expensive bandwidth.

The very popular series called “Nordkalotten 365″ has been aired on traditional TV in Norway. Over 900 000 of Norway’s 4,6 million watched the show in average, and the marketshare was close to 50%! “Nordkalotten 365″ is now made available for download. In this series the experienced hiker Lars Monsen has traveled alone through the north of Scandinavia for one year. The first episode is already published and the next episodes will be made available as they are encoded.

Read the rest of the story on NRKbeta.

We are suggesting that people use Miro to download the content because it contains both the torrent client and the playback codec. But you can use whatever bittorrent client you want.

Now help us by digging this story!

The story has been running on all major news sites in Norway, and recently we made the front page of BoingBoing.

And yes, a report from DLD is on its way.

I know you’re waiting for some articles from DLD in Munich, but I had to write them in Norwegian first. While you’re waiting you can have fun with this fantastic video.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

More details and more very cool Wii Remote projects over at Johnny Chung Lee’s page.

Norway during winter. Some images from yesterday. All of them snapped by Eirik Solheim. Creative commons licensed. Contact me for commercial use.

Icy old Volvo in Oslo, Norway What should I say? Cool car.
(Canon 400D with Canon EF 50mm 1.4 @ 1/250 sec at f / 3.5. ISO400. Adjusted to B&W in Adobe Lightroom.)

Wet Dog. At Bygdøy, Oslo, Norway
Satisfied with the fact that the dog’s eye is pretty sharp.
(Canon 400D with Canon 70-200 F4 L IS USM @200mm 1/60 sec at f / 4.0. ISO200 RAW. Adjusted to B&W in Adobe Lightroom.)

Looking at birds. Speaking in phone.
I think this one would have been better with focus on the birds. Or maybe not?
(Canon 400D with Canon 70-200 F4 L IS USM @200mm 1/125 sec at f / 4.0 ISO400 RAW)

Lamp. Snow. Night. Evergreen.
Yeah, right - night. Not. This is Norway at 5 PM in January.
(Canon 400D with Canon 50mm F1.4 USM @ 1/125 sec at f / 2.2 ISO1600 RAW)

Snow. Night.
Camera and lens. Had to survive quite a bit of snow when snapping this image. Still works fine.
(Canon 400D with Canon 50mm F1.4 USM @1/80 sec at f / 2.0 ISO800 RAW)

Thanks to Rodrigo I’ve been invited to DLD 08. A quick look at the program, and I immediately get high expectations: Jimmy Wales, Jason Calacanis, David Kirkpatrick, Matt Cohler, John Maeda, Caterina Fake, Martha Stewart, Niklas Zennström, Jeff Jarvis, Marissa Mayer, Bradley Horowitz, Naomi Campbell… Wow.

But if you want me to report on any particular speaker have a look at the program and give me a comment. I will for sure attend to the presentations by the people I’ve mentioned above, but there’s a lot of great speakers I don’t know immediately by name, so please help me. Do you see anyone in the program that I shouldn’t miss?

If you’re already on Twitter then feel free to add me.

So what is it? To put it short it’s a blog where all the posts consist of 140 characters or less. No images, but maybe a link. It’s very easy to update. You can do it from your instant messenger, from the web or via SMS from your mobile.

But why? I can easily fill eirikso.com with 140 character posts. And, it’s not too difficult to post to my blog via SMS or IM.

There’s more to twitter than the micro blog it leaves on your own twitter page. You can follow people and people can follow you. Still, all of this is possible through regular blogs. I can follow your RSS feed and you can follow mine. But that’s the point where the usability and simplicity kicks in. Which lead to my experience with twitter.

I have been following it since the start because I got aware of co-founder Evan Williams years ago when he mentioned a service I made on his blog. Evan Williams made the utterly successful blogger.com, the not so successful odeo.com and now the maybe-becoming-utterly-successful Twitter.com.

Twitter is a service that people tend to love or hate. I can’t say I have been hating it, but it has taken me more than a year to understand why and how I should use it. Slowly, I get the idea and now I have decided to start using Twitter more. At least for a while.

You can use twitter the way it’s suggested on the page. “What are you doing?”. Let me see… There. I have now updated twitter. It took me about five seconds. Now it says: “writing a blog post about twitter”. If you’re a fan of my blog it could be slightly interesting to know what I am working on. But most of the time you would find it utterly boring what I was doing. And I think the people that hate twitter get confused by that suggestion on the page. “What are you doing?”.

So what got me from “why the hell would I use twitter?” to “I have decided to start using Twitter more”?

First of all, Mr. Solstad. When he got back from a conference saying: “at conferences twitter is very useful”. And I can understand that. It works like some kind of group SMS. When all your friends are on twitter you can use it to keep track of where people are going. What restaurant to meet at. What speakers that suck and which sessions to attend. At conferences there’s a buzz going on twitter. A combination of public messages and direct messages.

So I decided to follow twitter when I went to Bucharest to speak at NetCamp. And yes, tech savvy people at conferences use twitter. It was interesting to follow in real time what reactions people had to the conference and so on.

I also had the privilege of talking quite a bit to Mr. Hugh MacLeod. An avid twitter user and a person that use the service in a very clever way. He has more than 2300 followers on twitter and could tell me that when he visits a city for the first time he simply twitters “I’m in city nn, anyone that knows a good restaurant?”. Usually lots of suggestions chimes in.

Okay, so that’s something that works when you have 2300 followers. Right now I have slightly more than 20. But I know how powerful a tool like that can be. My blog has enough readers around the world to give me answers to all kinds of strange questions. But how do you get 2300 followers on twitter?

That was one of the parts that took me a bit of time to figure out. But it is obvious. You do it exactly the same way you get thousands of people visiting your blog each week. By sharing interesting thoughts, quality links, amusing stuff etc. And by taking part of conversations.

I have been following Hugh MacLeod on twitter for a while and he does this thing brilliantly. A combination of interesting thoughts and some regular “What are you doing?”-messages. It seems like it works like a draft for his blog. And it’s interesting to follow how he slowly builds a new blog post often based on thoughts shared on twitter first.

So if you want to take part in my experiment, then follow me.

And of course, post your suggestions, people to follow and thoughts in the comments.

This one sparked a bit of interest over at the Norwegian blog I’m contributing to for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. So, I’ll share the story here as well.

I recently bought the lens you see in the image. Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM. Then Mr. Erlandsen pointed me to this.

Before you know it I made this one.

Equipped it with a snow crystal and mounted it on my camera.

Update:
I used some standard paper cutters to make the patterns.

Before you know it the images that have a traditional round bokeh…

…started looking like this.

Some more cutting and shapes and off we go…
Read more…