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Udell: Link-adressable streams Jon has been blogging this for awhile. I'm just catching up, but let me present it relative to IT Conversations. I'd like people to be able to blog audio clips from the site, and there are at least three ways to do this: (1) Jon's idea of being able to specify start/stop times in a URL, (2) the blogger captures and re-hosts a clip s/he defines, or (3) the clips are created and made available at the source.
I don't like #3 for two reasons. First, making clips is very time consuming. But more important, there's no reason to believe that the clips I create will be those that someone wants to blog. Not even close.
I don't like #2 because I don't want to encourage people to copy IT Conversations to their sites. Our Creative Commons licenses permits non-commercial copies, but not if they're altered. Furtermore, it's simply not ecological. The complete files are always and freely available through a massive content-delivery network thanks to Limelight Networks. There's no need for people to store copies on blog servers. A simple URL should suffice.
For these reasons, I particularly like option #1 in which a start/stop range can be specified by time for any linear medium in a URL. The challenge is that because of the proliferation of different formats, there's no universal specification. That makes it difficult to create blog-authoring and aggregation tools that can deal with multiple media and MIME types.
I'm going to keep scratching my head on this one. There's gotta be a way.
Posted Saturday, May 15, 2004 5:44:28 PM 
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