Rampaging Robot

Several bloggers have been posting about BlipBack and BlipBomb, some new video widgets. Mashable, the social networking news site, had a nice writeup about these tools. Of course, they concentrated on the Web 2.0 goodies that this widget provides: user rankings, RSS feeds, and cell phone submissions. The feature that Mashable would like to see implemented in the future is a streaming video channel. Rich Young, of AE portal, sees many post production services arising out of such tools. In particular, he thinks that these could be used as "review and approval" tools.

When I learn about tools like this, I can't help but to be amazed at how streaming video has become a viable tool. Years ago, I was assigned to a grant project that our university was working on with many other institutions, the CU-SeeMe project. CU-SeeMe, was the first videoconferencing software that targeted desktop machines. Although, this software ran on desktops, they were very robust desktops for the time. Our institution had one of the reflectors, plus a camera that we used to stream video. At the time we had people all over the world, viewing our website to watch streaming video. I remember that the National Science Foundation almost always had someone popping in to watch, and not just because they were one of the funders of the grant. Real time videoconferencing was a rare and exciting event.

You might wonder what turned out to be the most popular pastime for our users who were based all over the world. The most popular request was watching our parking lot. Why? Turns out there is an international dislike of parking tickets. We would be working in our lab, when all of a sudden a voice from Australia, Japan, or Sweden, would shout out that tickets were being issued in the lot. Suddenly, two or three lab workers would rush out to move their cars before they were ticketed.

Although, CU-SeeMe went commercial, the biggest barrier to widespread adaptation was heavy broadband requirements and the need for extremely robust desktop computers. This project paved the way, as a proof of concept, that streaming video and video conferencing could a part of the mainstream computing experience. However, although people don't need only high end computers to watch and use video these days, access is still going to be an issue. There is no getting around the fact that good broadband is needed to utilize video. How widespread the access is to that type of connection, will determine how large the digital divide is between users.

http://mashable.com/2007/09/02/blipback/

http://aeportal.blogspot.com/2007/09/blipback-video-comment-widget.html