58 Time Capsules!

[Henrik Bennetsen]

At the Stanford Humanties Lab's Metaverse U Conference in February 2008 we recorded a bunch of time capsules were we asked people these same four questions:

• What excites you about current metaverse technology?

• What concerns you about current metaverse technology?

• What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?

• What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

With 58 videos uploaded our Metaverse U YouTube Group is really starting to get interesting. Personally I felt it was a bit of a scoop that I got to ask Randy Farmer the four questions. If you don't know why that felt like a big deal then check out this & the video itself.

Feel very free to join in the conversation by adding your own video to the open Metaverse U YouTube Group. You can go read Building a time capsule to find out how.

Henrik

--
Henrik Bennetsen
Research Director
Stanford Humanities Lab
Stanford University

Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall
Building 160, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2055, USA

benn...@gmail.com
Cell: +1 415.418.4042
Office: +1 650.724.5504
Fax: +1 650.725.0192

[Henry Lowood]

Hi Henrik (entre nous),

This is absolutely great ... but ... it bothers me a little that we are pushing this content to a commercial site, such that the institutional context kind of disappears.  It's fine to put it there, but I think we should put everything like this on an archival site, as well.  My choice would be the Virtual World Videos collection.  Also, at some point this should all go to the Stanford University Archives, when you are done with the physical formats.

We should also brand this sort of content more prominently as either SHL or Preserving Virtual Worlds or just Stanford.  I saw no reference to any of these.  Again, drinking our own Kool-Aid, there needs to be more metadata about the content -- who made it, what are the rights associated with it?

BTW I personally care less about driving people to a Stanford site than I do about the preservation aspect, but still I think it's important and I know others do.

Henry

Henry Lowood, Ph.D.
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
 Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; low...@stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood

[Bruce Damer]

Hi VW History team, I have collected a couple of dozen new potential invitees to this list. Should I send out a note to them and point them to a signup page (where is that?). Some of these folk were suggested by Celia, others from my own rolodex.

Who currently has list admin/signup rights?

bruce

DigitalSpace

343 Soquel Avenue, # 70

Santa Cruz CA 95062-2305 USA

http://www.digitalspace.com

[Henrik Bennetsen]

Sounds great with more people for our little group. At the bottom of emails sent to the group is the groups web address:

http://groups.google.com/group/virtual-worlds-history?hl=en

The group is open so anyone can go there to join or to check out the archives, so they can see what they are getting themselves into.

Henrik

[Bruce Damer]

How about using Google Video instead of YouTube? GV is a lot less commercial and also allows for higher resolution playback. I have been using GV to upload our historic avatar videos. For example, you can see Al Lundell's edit of the Earth to Avatars '96 conference that we put on GV at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l2E_4hde6o

bruce

[Kat Lemieux]

Uh, Bruce, am I missing something here? First you advocate using Google Video instead of YouTube, then you give us a link to YouTube?

Kat the Confused

[bruce damer]

Yikes ;( (embarrassed). We have about 70 videos to upload as yet, I guess this first one got tried out on YouTube (!).

I have 30 DVDs of virtual worlds related video over 7 years or so (events, talks, demos). I would love to find someone passionate about editing and carving out the gems from this big stack 'o pancakes!

Bruce

--
DigitalSpace
343 Soquel Ave, Suite 70
Santa Cruz CA 95062 USA

[Henrik Bennetsen]

Hi all,

Henry (who by accident sent a mail to me via the list): It is fine to have this discussion out in the open. We should absolutely practice what we preach about this. This is a good time to announce that our Internet Archive Virtual Worlds video archive is now live:

http://www.archive.org/details/virtual_worlds&reCache=1

(the first 15 videos are the Time Capsules under very liberal Creative Commons licenses)

I would love to provide the context on the videos you talk about and will work with you to do just that.

This is an open invitation to anyone with an interest to work with us on this archive. As someone who produces a fair bit of video and puts it online I think that the Internet Archive is a good choice. Their interface is very clunky but they let you upload in stellar quality and more importantly offers a better promise of permanency than commercial sites.

Bruce: I would love to see your videos in this archive. You mentioned in another email that you needed some help on these matters and we might be able to some resources towards this, so let talk about how we figure this out!

Henrik

[Kat Lemieux]

Bruce,

Sorry, didn't mean to embarrass you, just wondered if you'd crossed the references.

I'd love to help edit your vids, but right now I'm so overcommitted it's painful, and I doubt I could do them justice in a reasonable timeframe. As you know, video editing can take a lot of time, especially if you enjoy NLE as much as I do. It would be a great project, but probably more than I can take on.

Cheers,
Kat

[Henrik Bennetsen]

Excellent to hear that you will pitch in as well Kat!

It also occurs to me that we could get the footage on the archive and then use the power of CC open licenses to allow people to rework it.

We really need to meet (SL would be great for me as well) :)

Henrik

[Kat Lemieux]

A meeting sounds like a good idea. Want to use the ISM Workshop? We have a table & chairs in there as well as a couple of slideshow tools, including one that works with the new web page display available in the new release (1.19).  You may need to download the testing release client if it hasn't been folded into the main client version yet to use this, though. Prospero Frobozz (Rob Knop) developed this nifty tool.  It occurs to me that if we used a Google Doc to keep notes in the meeting the way we did during the workshop at Stanford, we could display that on the wall for everyone to see even if we can't interact with it from within SL. Those who have the bandwidth to keep a web browser open alongside the SL client could edit the page, and even those who can't edit could at least see what's there if they have the web-capable client version.

BTW, I only said I *wish* I could help, not actually offering to tackle the job of editing 30 DVDs worth of videos. Too many other things are going on right now to make such promises, unfortunately.

Cheers,
Kat

[Bruce Damer]

Thanks for all this great dialogue and support of possible future video editing! I am working on a project with the Timothy Leary archive and the team just uploaded about 100 video and audio segments to the Internet Archive. Brewster is very committed to the Leary project. It is an excellent suggestion that VW videos also go up on the IA and I look forward to sharing some of our content with the Stanford folks when I meet them in the next couple of weeks. I am sure Brewster would love to include historic VW records as well.

Oh and we use CC licenses for everything as well. The Digibarn worked with Lessig et al to beta test the CC ver 1.0 licences 6 years ago.

bruce

[Henry Lowood]

Hi Kat,

don't worry too much about the curatorship of the collection.  Henrik and I can handle that. 

And Bruce, what sorts of editing do the videos need?  The idea of the collection is to gather "documentary footage" if you will.  These will come in all kinds of versions, but I think unedited, raw footage is fine.  Or do you just mean encoding/transcoding?

Henry