SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Screenwriter/director John August has been engaging in some personal experimentation with emerging media [NY Times, login]. He has about 6,000 Twitter followers, most of whom presumably are fans of his work on movies including Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the underrated The Corpse Bride and The Nines.

August tested a story with some of those fans, made changes influenced by their comments, and then personally formatted the finished result for Kindle. “The Variant,” as the story is called, is now available for 99 cents through Amazon or as a 25-page PDF file on e-junkie.com (I couldn’t find it there, though, which may just reflect on me or the site’s search options). August said he has made “about enough to buy four Kindles” so far.

(Title lyric from the Beastie Boys.)

All sides of the controversy over Arbitron’s Portable People Meter are about to be heard in an official capacity. The deadline for the FCC’s formal Notice of Inquiry is less than two weeks away, followed by the decision whether the PPM system’s numbers are to be trusted.

So the news about noticeable problems with the system in Detroit and other areas is particularly interesting, as are Arbitron’s efforts to make corrections. Hispanic and black audiences are underrepresented, just as critics said they would be.

The PPM system involves inaudible codes embedded in the radio signal which are automatically tracked and reported by rechargeable little gizmos that are worn by representative listeners.

If you really want to read the government-ese, here are links to PDFs of the Notice of Inquiry and statements by Acting Chairman Michael J. Copps, Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein and Commissioner Robert M. McDowell.

(Title lyric from XTC – video intro by Peter Cook! – and Creative Commons photo by SayHolaToTravis/Travis Ekmark.)

Technology has the power to improve our lives in unexpected ways. RunPee.com is a wiki-style site that taps the power of the hive to determine the best bathroom break times while watching a movie.

The project is the brainchild of Flash Platform programmer Dan Florio, aka polyGeek. Florio half-jokes that he was inspired to create the site while watching the 187-minute-long King Kong.

Movie fans are invited to contribute their own opinions. Moderated postings give a description of a scene, how many minutes in it is, and how long a “break” is available. There’s even a description of what transpires during the suggested break time, which to avoid unwanted spoilers is only legible after a specific mouse click.

Mobile and iPhone app versions of RunPee.com are in the works in response to overwhelming demand, Florio said.

(Title lyric by Diane Warren via Aerosmith.)

Kevin Spacey and producer Rob Luketic have publicly added themselves to the roster of well-known people who will abandon Twitter if Reveille / Brillstein Entertainment’s proposed tv show goes ahead.

There is a growing chorus of protest from celebrities at Reveille Productions (home of the U.S. versions of The Office and Ugly Betty) and Brillstein Entertainment’s idea of using Twitter as the basis for an interactive reality show.

According to the press release, which was slipped to a few outlets under cover of the holiday, the show will put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

The proposed show would be executive produced by Amy Ephron (sister of Norah Ephron).

Among those tweeting their vociferous objections are Alyssa Milano, Sara Gilbert and Demi Moore. As Moore put it, in the Twitter-allotted 140 characters, “If that show happens we will all leave and there will be no show.”

Ashton Kutcher, who besides being an actor also knows about unscripted programming, later added: “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets stalked.”

The not-famous are objecting, too. Nearly 500 people signed up to “follow” user No_Tweet_Show within the first hour the account went live, which was shortly after #nottwittertv showed up in the top ten of Twitter’s trending topics chart.

There’s already a book coming out in October that is simply a collection of tweets. HarperCollins got ex-Gawker Nick Douglas to edit it, and he put up a website to which people were invited to send their favorite tweets.  Although it’s not officially affiliated, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone encouraged Twitter users to participate.

At least Douglas is asking permission first and giving credit to contributors, even if he did disingenuously claim in the site’s FAQ: “It’s not about wringing money out of you.”

(Title lyric from OK Go.)

From the “Man on the Street” episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, spoken by Internet billionaire Joel Mynor (Patton Oswalt):

The first hurdle in my business? That people will not accept the change that has already happened.

Episode writers are named here.

Apple thrives by creating and maintaining a brilliant ecosystem for its products. So it has been interesting to watch how the company deals with iPhone apps, a small chink in the perimeter of that walled garden.

For example, Apple rejected Trent Reznor’s nin: access (iTunes link), a characteristically innovative NIN iPhone app update, on grounds that the app contains objectionable material. Mockery ensued: Reznor is a prolific Tweeter, NIN has a devoted and vocal following, and iTunes simultaneously was happily selling the same music. Apple “reconsidered.”

More recently, Apple rejected and then “reconsidered” Eucalyptus, an e-book reader that offers all of the English-language, non-copyright books from the Project Gutenberg collection, since at least one of those books had sexual content.

Peter Hosey, a developer on Adium X and Growl, is maintaining the iPhone App Graveyard of apps that were released and then blocked by Apple, along with the reason for the action. It makes for some interesting reading.

Many other apps don’t even get that far, of course. Most of those are pretty obvious violations of the iPhone SDK Agreement. But then there’s Makayama’s 99 Cent Newspaper app which enabled users to read several dozen national and international newspapers. It’s available (iTunes link) now, but only after the developer removed British tabloid The Sun from its virtual newsstand. The Sun has a circulation of more than 3 million people, making it one of the ten most popular newspapers in the world, and always has a full-page photo of a topless woman on its Page 3.

Apple is taking steps to address these awkward situations. In addition to Bluetooth and other improvements, iPhone 3.0 will have parental controls.

(Title lyric is from the KLF.)

Timed to be part of Memorial Day observations, Google geospatial content developer Sean Askay launched a personal project called MapTheFallen.org, a Google Earth layer that honors deceased American and Coalition service personnel who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The basic layout is chronological, but the interactive tool lets users browse or locate a specific person by name, age, hometown, place of death, and by other criteria. It also offers photos and factual information about his or her service,  life, peacetime home, and links to memorial websites with comments from friends and families.  CNN’s John King was first to report the site’s going live.

(Title lyric by Harry Nilsson.)

There’s one computer in my house that I’m not allowed to touch, lest I tweak something that unleashes some kind of quirky Microsoft misbehavior. So I admit to a touch of schadenfreude at news that Kaspersky Labs found malware on a brand new, untouched, virgin, Windows XP netbook.

Kaspersky’s senior antivirus researcher Roel Schouwenberg discovered the malware had been acquired at the factory during the standard installation of software updates and drivers. Schouwenberg dug further and found a variant of the AutoRun worm along with a rootkit and a log-in credential harvester that had been spread via the USB stick M&A Technology used for this installation process on its Companion Touch netbooks (pictured – note the lack of optical drive).

(Title lyrics from Metallica.)

The first Open Video Conference, being held in NY on June 19-20, is bringing together producers, techies, distributors, lawyers and others involved in “the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.”

The conference is a production of Yale Internet Society Project, Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the open source Miro internet TV player) and Kaltura (developers of a full open source video platform), in partnership with Mozilla, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Among the many speakers and presenters are producer Ted Hope; Daily Show and Air America co-creator Lizz Winstead; Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack; John Lech Johansen (famed DVD DRM cracker and co-founder of the Doubletwist universal media platform); Eirik Solheim, project manager and strategic advisor at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (where they’ve launched a promising initiative to distribute TV programs using P2P); Jamie King, director of the Steal This Film documentary and co-founder of Vodo; Clay Shirky, author and professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program; and Yochai Benkler, Professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center and author.

(Title lyric from British Sea Power.)