Archive | August, 2004

We’ve got the opening and closing plenary videos on-line from last weekend’s National Summit on Community Wireless Networks.

Both plenaries were great. In particular, Harold Feld, associate director of the Media Access Project, gave a call to the audience to spend 5 minutes a day to protect and enlarge wireless networking spectrum, during the opening. In the closing plenary, Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, gave a rousing talk putting the fight for free wireless spectrum rights in historical perspective.

Right now the videos are in streaming Real Video, which is accessible from 56k modems up to broadband, but is best experienced on a 150kbps connection or better. Coming soon will be MPEG-4 downloadable videos and audio in mp3 and ogg vorbis.

I’m trying to balance the need for convenient streaming videos with making them maximally accessible and open, which is why we’re releasing audio and video in multiple formats. I’m considering putting video in the Ogg-related open-source video format Theora, which was just frozen in alpha. Any comments on this approach are welcome — drop me an e-mail.

The AP ran a story on this weekend’s Summit that got picked up by USA Today. What’s kind of nice about this sort of “event journalism” is that reporters and editors don’t typically feed the need to go dig up an opposing viewpoint in order to justify their supposed objectivity. Thus the AP article doesn’t have some PR flack from the cellular industry fear mongering about chaos in the spectrum or some other baseless reaction.

TV cameras from the local CBS affiliate came by today and I thought I saw a print reporter popping in and out, too, but I don’t know if anything will come of it.