Content and publishing

Revision3 launches new music show

Today Revision3 rolled out a new show called XLR8R TV (pronounced like "accelerator"), which is being pitched as a local music and event show for indie folks. Think of it as something you'd see on MTV, but local and without extravagant parties for high schoolers.

XLR8R TV will air twice a month and feature music artists from New York and San Francisco. It's a formula show with reoccurring segments about musicians, their fans, and how they make their music. What interests me is a segment called "A Day in the Life" which follows around … Read more

Take online widgets offline with Amnesty Generator [Video]

This post has been updated from the original. Added: Hands-on video with Amnesty Generator.

For those early adopters out there with Windows Vista, you might be struggling to get some widgets from the Web onto your flashy, new sidebar. To help you out is Amnesty Generator, a small and free app that converts nearly every type of online widget into the 'gadget format' that's compatible with Vista's new desktop toolbar. Using the program requires no coding experience; it's as simple as pasting in the embedding code, and the program does the rest.

Amnesty generator works with Google homepage widgets, … Read more

BitTorrent's game downloads: A big hoax

Update: BitTorrent's Games section is misleading. First of all, game downloads don't necessarily use BitTorrent. What you may get via the BitTorrent P2P network is a small (298K) installer program, which in turn runs a proprietary downloader application that gets the game code from a central server.

Second, although games are listed in the B.E.N. catalog as free, they are nothing of the sort. You get a free preview period to try the game. If you want to play it past that period, you have to pay up. Gangland, for example, is free only for 60 … Read more

BitTorrent goes legit: Paid P2P movie-sharing coming

BitTorrent is launching a legal, paid media distribution system, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BEN). [See News.com story.]

Essentially an online store that will compete other stories like iTunes, the new BitTorrent Network will have more than 5,000 titles. TV shows will be $1.99 an episode, and users will be able to watch them as much as they want. Movies will cost $2.99 or $3.99 and will time out 30 days after download, or 24 hours after the user begins playing them.

In other words, there will be heavy digital rights management (DRM) on BitTorrent files. … Read more

Mobile portals: More options needed

I'm surprised that more Web sites aren't mobile friendly. By now, all content management systems and blogging platforms should be creating lightweight versions of their hosted sites automatically for users that come in via a mobile phones or WAP browsers. And even major sites that do have mobile versions (like most of the travel sites out there, bless them) don't automatically redirect users there when they should.

But one can rant, or one can find a workaround. I choose to do the latter and find ways to get my favorite sites onto my mobile phone in the … Read more

YouTube does sound with AudioSwap

It's a common problem: your point-and-shoot camera's microphone picked up nothing but wind while you were at the park shooting a video of people flying kites. The solution? Wipe over the track with music. But putting licensed music over the videos not only requires video editing software, but also the digital rights to publish. YouTube has rolled out a new service called AudioSwap which hopes to quell both of those problems.

To use AudioSwap, just pick a video you've uploaded and browse the provided audio list. You'll get a preview right away, and with the click … Read more

Really simple file sharing with YouBackItUp

YouBackItUp is a great way to share large files with friends. YouBackItUp has employed a really neat drag-and-drop interface that makes it dead simple for anyone (read nontech-savvy people) to use. Instead of hitting a browse button and fishing through your hard drive to find the file, you can just drag the original right onto the interface, and it takes care of the rest. When you're done uploading things, you're given a simple URL to send to friends or family where they can download the files.

What makes the service a real winner in my book is its … Read more

Prepare for the cyborg bloggers

At the Stirr event last night, I met Justin Kan, who was walking around the event with a camera strapped to his head. Kan is making himself into a cyborg for his new streaming service, Justin.TV, on which he will make available a real-time, Justin's-eye view of the world. In his backback is a laptop with an EV-DO card. A future setup, he says, will have four EV-DO cards that he'll link together in order to deliver live high-definition video over the Net.

But that's just the technology. Will people pay attention? I asked Kan, "… Read more

Adobe Labs offers myFeedz 'social newspaper'

Adobe Systems released a technology preview version of a "social newspaper" site called myFeedz, which sift through RSS feeds on the basis of user-defined tags. The site had been in public testing since August, but now is an official part of Adobe Labs and an comes with an official logo using Adobe's official typeface.

myFeedz begins with a standard RSS reader format but tailors the feeds according to content tags users can set. In addition, myFeedz suggests tags based on the feeds selected in users' OPML files--which for those of you who don't parse XML in … Read more