Criteria for judging a demo in a conference demo session

Mercan Topkara and I are the "Innovation and Demo Chairs" for ICME 2012 to be held 9-13 July 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. We were called upon to organize the decision making process by which the ICME organizers would arrive at the decision of which demo would take home the ICME 2012 best demo award.

The decision is a difficult one because demos in the area of multimedia tend to be radically different in nature. For this reason, I formulated a list of six dimensions to use when judging demos.

1. Clarity: Understandability of the demo paper and the presentation.
2. Realization: Well implemented, robust, good use of technology.
3. Innovation: Addresses a problem that has not yet been tackled (or has proven difficult to solve).
4. Impact: The number of people the technology potentially touches and the importance of its influence on their lives.
5. Representativity: Centrality to the topics covered by the conference (in this case ICME)
6. Magic: How closely the technology fills the description, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

Number 6 is basically a wild card that makes it possible to introduce in a controlled way that factor of je ne sais quoi, which seems to slip into the considerations made when judging demos in any case.

In practice, another factor that always seems to be important is how close the demo is to a working system that is or is about to be deployed in the real world. Also, when judging demos it seems that one is always trying to project forward: how important will this technology be five or ten years from now? Will the passage of time reveal that it is a disruptive technology? (Or, as Wikipedia prefers to call it disruptive innovation?)

For a list of the demos to be presented at ICME 2012, see the ICME 2012 Demo page.

I am dating the post 1 June, when I formulated the list of criteria. It's later now, but time seems to have simply gotten away from me, not surprising given the ICME 2012 Time Machine Session.

Search by misconception: Should search engines support information needs that are ill conceived?

The real Mozartkugeln? (Flickr: davidroethler)

Should our search engines make information findable based on misconceptions? Well, it's complicated. This post gives some examples to highlight the relationship of misconceptions to search.

Let's start with an example. When I refer to "Mozartkugeln" I mean the ones in the pictured here. They are gold and show Mozart in his red jacket. Their shape is round. I differentiate these from the ones with flat bottoms, which are for me "fake" Mozartkugeln.

My idea of Mozartkugeln can be considered a misconception. The original Mozartkugeln are apparently produced by a company called "Fürst" and are silver with a blue Mozart. Additionally, the producer of the flat-bottom ones apparently has the right to call their product "Real Reber Mozartkugeln". Digging on Wikipedia and on other websites supplied me with this information.

But what should an image search engine return in response to the query "Mozartkugeln"? Is it obliged to make an effort to resolve the question of which is the "real" Mozartkugel? Or is it fine if it just returns images that users have uploaded a tagged with "Mozartkugel"?

Effectively, simply returning images tagged with "Mozartkugel" allows users to search by misconception. The search engine returns images who have been tagged by people like me, who have a certain view on the matter (based on conversations with an Austrian roommate now a couple decades old and several subsequent trips to Austria, none including Salzburg), which is not necessarily universal. I am not immediately convinced that I can be satisfied with such a search engine as a source of information. Although, it seems reasonable to assume that if enough voices are combined, a consensus will emerge. I noticed that if you search for "champagne" on Google images, the top hits (at least the ones that depict identifiable bottles) clearly hail from the Champagne region in France and don't include the large range of other bubbly wines from other corners of the world that are widely enjoyed under the name "champagne".

In short, allowing search by misconception seems relatively innocuous. But we should be careful about assuming that the Mozartkugeln example is the end of the story. What is unique about this example, is that the search engine is relatively transparent in the way that it works. The images are returned by seeking exact matches in their user-assigned tagsets; without such a match, the image is not relevant. Users of the search engine have a chance of being at least vaguely aware of the reason for the match and they can propagate their understanding of the reliability of the taggers to create an understanding about the reliability of the results.

However, when the search engine becomes more sophisticated, the situation quickly gets quite murky. For example, if I had a visual concept detector that was trained to detect Mozartkugeln in images and assign to them the appropriate tags. The design of the detector would require collecting examples of Mozartkugeln, which means that whoever trains the detector holds the ultimate control over deciding what a Mozartkugel actually is.

The example of Mozartkugeln is interesting. In some cases, one could argue that common sense knowledge will tell you what an object is, for example, a helicopter or a pram. Everyone can identify these objects, right? But in the case of the Mozartkugeln, there is no right answer. It depends on your perspective. A long discussion will arrive at the conclusion "It's complicated". (And you may already find yourself with the same issue for the pram, if not actually the helicopter.)

It seems like a good idea to do away with the central authority that collects the examples used to train the detectors. After all, no one really likes they guy who walks around the party reminding people, "Yes, but it's not real champagne".

But do we really want to admit search by misconception? I had quite an unsettling experience with Google's query suggestion. On 17 May 2011, I was looking for a news story on one of the Facebook founders have renounced his US citizenship. No sooner had I typed in "facebook founder" did Google present me with the following list of suggested queries:

facebook founder mark

facebook founder saverin

facebook founder buys new republic

facebook founder college

facebook founder gay

facebook founder bios

facebook founder dead

facebook founder movie

Did I really need to know about the existence of the circulating rumors? Do I go on to passively "believe" a query or do I dig deeper that find out if it is true? Do we really want our search engines to allow us to so easily flow down the same information paths worn by searchers before us who mis-received a rumor?

In the case of "facebook founder dead" I did dig deeper. That query led to a Fox News article on the death of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of Diaspora*, an alternative to Facebook. I was left wondering at how query suggestions have taken on an information dissemination (news broadcast, if you will) role of their own.

From the fun of searching for pictures of bonbons (...and wondering if round vs. flatbottom Mozartkugel relates to a real misconception or rather an alternate interpretation) we hit on a matter of true importance (Diaspora* upends the Facebook model because it is based on the idea that every member of the network should “own” his personal information). Suddenly, it gets extremely serious. In light of this seriousness, it looks like if we really do not want search engines to admit search by misconception at all.

This whole line of though was started while I was at a symposium entitled "Cultural Heritage Gets Social" of the SEALINCMedia project (Socially-enriched access to linked cultural media). Alice Warley (Public Catalogue Foundation, UK) gave a talk entitled "Your Paintings Tagger: Crowd-sourcing, art history and the UK's national oil painting collection" about a website where visitors collaborate to tag painters. 

Apparently, general public users tend to tag older paintings "formal wear" when what the people pictured in the paintings are wearing is not formal wear at all, but rather daily clothing.
The reason for this misconception is that today's formal wear evolved from what was worn on a daily basis in certain social circles in past eras. Wikipedia is rather silent on the history of formal wear. The "misconceptions" of the taggers are actually a source of information about something that is not widely known, but actually an real historical connection.

So we're back to the Mozartkugeln, considering whether Mozart is dressed for a concert, or is in his everyday work clothing that he uses for composing. It seems like misconceptions help us to uncover new and interesting information.

However, if we incorporate misconceptions, maybe we should call them 'exploration engines'. A 'search' engine should find answers or else gently reveal to us that our initial information need was ill conceived.

English usage convention for scientific publications: "Related work" vs. "Related works"

Yesterday, we got back reviews for a journal article where a reviewer suggests that we change the title of our Section 2 from "Related Work" to "Related Works". In the review, the comment was included in a list headed "Typos (I think)" so the reviewer is not sure exactly what is going on. The reviewer's self doubt is well founded:

In the context of a review of previous research on a topic in a scientific publication, "related work" is the correct expression and not "related works".

There are several places on the internet that provide clarity on this point. Typing a query "related work" vs. "related works" into your favorite search engine will give you nice set of pages asking you to please use "related work" and not "related works" when writing a scientific publication. Examples are:

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-bugs.html
http://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html

I'm not trying to add another link to that list with this blog post. Rather, I want to add a couple of comments about why the distinction is important.

"Work" can be used as either a count noun or a mass noun. Mass nouns refer to undifferentiated substances, which can not be conceptualized as individual entities and, for this reason, it does not make sense to use such nouns in the plural. "Fuel" is a mass noun. Count nouns refer to entities that are discrete and differentiable and are, for this reason, countable---such such nouns can be used in the plural. "Airplane" is a count noun.

So, I suppose, as an author of a scientific paper, you are free to choose whether you consider research work to be an undifferentiated substance or set of discrete entities and choose "related work" or "related works" accordingly. Why then, is it so disturbing to read "related works"?

I thought about this point a bit and I realized that it is disturbing because the difference has some pretty profound implications for how we conceptualize scientific research. Is our scientific output making a contribution to a mass of knowledge, joining the efforts of scientists that went before us and available to those who go after? Is it meant to be tapped by others, reproduced and extended? For me the answers are "yes" and "yes'. The results of scientific effort flow together to become an undifferentiated resource pool whose value lies in how it advances the collective knowledge of the species and how it can be put to productive use. Under this conceptualization of scientific work, it is only possible to use the mass noun, which does not ever occur in the plural.

The expression "Related works" evokes a conceptualization of scientific work as a set of discrete entities, individual units of output created by the efforts of individuals with the idea that they will remain untouched in their individuality. Under such a view, each paper published would be a work of art, embodying the creative force of an individual researcher or an individual team and intended to be admired, rather than built upon, reproduced, validated or improved. Indeed, when the art world makes the plural of "work" they say "works" as in "works of art". These are clearly individual entities, finished works, ready to hang on the wall of the gallery.

We do sometimes feel this way about our work as researchers: our biggest and best conferences have the exciting, invigorating atmosphere of an art show opening, where you get to meet the great creative spirits and enjoy wonder and admiration at what they have produced. However, after the conference, we go home and take these amazing new papers apart and work with them in a way they makes clear that we see them as substance to be extended and not as finished works meant for framing and hanging on the wall.

So, please, yes, it's "related work". You probably already know that deep in your own scientist soul. You really wouldn't ever write "related researches" would you? "Research" is of course also a mass noun, also denoting our scientific effort and underlining its part of a larger flow.

At a more general level, I do sincerely believe that we should all adopt World English: drop some of the finer points about word choice and grammar conventions and just write papers in clear simple sentences that can be easily understood by anyone with a working grasp of the language. However, for a "work" vs. "works" distinction remains, in my opinion, an important one: it gives us a chance to reflect on how we conceptualized our contributions to our scientific field. Maintaining the distinction allows us to continue to express a subtlety important to our underlying scientific culture and mission.

The MediaEval Workshop: What it's meant to be and why you want to be there.

The MediaEval workshop is the event held each year in the fall at the culmination of the yearly benchmarking cycle. At the time of the MediaEval workshop many things have already happened in the benchmarking year: The task organizers have worked hard to define tasks and issue data sets. Participants have worked hard to develop algorithms that tackle the tasks, and they have run these algorithms on the data sets. The "runs" have been evaluated and each participating team has written their working notes paper. Now it's time for the workshop!

This blog post provides a view (from my perspective as one of the MediaEval co-ordinators) on the history of the workshop and on what the workshop is meant to be. In particular, it highlights the similarities and differences with other types of workshops.

The main goal of the MediaEval workshop is to bring everyone who carried MediaEval tasks together in one physical location to present and discuss their results, exchange experiences and develop ideas for how to improve their algorithms. The first year that we met at a medieval convent, Santa Croce in Fossabanda, it was mostly due to delight in the wordplay between medieval and MediaEval. However, we soon came to appreciate how getting everyone together working, eating and basically living in the same space creates an extremely productive focus on our our common tasks and goals. (Although unlike the nuns of the Middle Ages we don't go dashing off to prayer when we hear the convent bell.)

In 2010, we held the MediaEval workshop just before ACM Multimedia 2010, which was held at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Firenze, Italy. Santa Croce in Fossabanda is located in Pisa, about an hour's train ride from Firenze. We chose the dates and place to cut down on travel time and cost for people who wanted to attend both ACM Multimedia 2010 and the MediaEval 2010 workshop.

The next year, Interspeech 2011 came to the Palazzo dei Congressi in Firenze about the same time of year. MediaEval submitted a proposal and was granted the status of an "Official Satellite Event of Interspeech 2011". Now, instead of just taken advantage of the convenience for travel, we began emphasize hook-up to the topic of the conference: being associated with Interspeech reinforced the use of speech within MediaEval and helped us to better realize the goals expressed in the MediaEval slogan The "multi" in multimedia.

This year, the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2012) will be held in Firenze. This conference provides us with the opportunity to reinforce the use of visual content within MediaEval, another of the multimedia "multi's". The MediaEval 2012 Workshop will be held right before this conference starts, again in Santa Croce in Fossabanda in Pisa. A very close contending idea for the MediaEval 2012 workshop was to hold it near 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2012) in Porto. However, the results of the MediaEval 2012 survey showed that the majority preferred to co-ordinate the date and place with ECCV 2012 and stay for a third year in Pisa.

In sum, the idea of being close to a large conference related to MediaEval topics has grown from being a convenience to being an aspect that strengthens and enriches both the benchmark and the workshop.

What exactly happens at the MediaEval workshop? The workshop consists of a series of sessions on the individual tasks. The task organizers present the task as a whole and each team presents its individual results, after which the floor is opened for discussion. More discussion and exchange occurs during meals and breaks in ad hoc groups. We try to build in a lot of space for discussion into the workshop schedule and especially try to create opportunities for students to discuss with more experienced researchers who help them to guide their efforts along the most effective path.

The proceedings are an important aspect of the workshop. The MediaEval workshop proceedings is a "Working Notes Proceedings" and consists of short (two page) papers written by the participating teams to report their results. These papers describe the algorithms that are used and present the results. They then also seek to understand the algorithm, and participants are requested to report:

• which cases are easy/difficult and why
• which approaches work best and why
• which approaches do not work well

The working notes submissions are reviewed by the task organizers. The task organizers may either accept the submission as is, or may come back to the participant team with a request for revisions of the paper. The preferred mechanism is to have the papers revised rather than to reject them --- sometimes this revision cycle means that the working notes proceedings is not ready until just before the workshop. For this reason, the working notes proceedings is distributed at the workshop on a memory stick.

After the workshop, the working notes is made available online. The 2011 the "Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2011 Workshop" was published here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-807/ and in the future we would like to continue to use http://ceur-ws.org/. By publishing in this way, the copyright for the individual papers is with the papers' authors.

MediaEval working notes papers are intended to be first versions of work that is later extended by the authors and submitted to mainstream venues, such as conferences and journals. The fact that the MediaEval workshop proceedings consists of short working notes and that the copyright does stays with the authors keep the proceedings consistent with the goal of reporting an initial research result, which will then be refined and extended using input from the discussion at the MediaEval workshop.

Another important goal of the workshop is to discuss the tasks themselves. Did they help to move the state-of-the-art forward? Should we improve or replace them next year? Are their new questions that need to be answered that require new tasks. Any one attending the workshop is welcome to stand up in the final session and "pitch" an idea for a new task. Tasks which receive good community support in this session have a good chance of receiving the response levels they need on the yearly MediaEval survey to run as tasks in the next year.

Finally, the workshop also aims to connect ourselves and our research to the larger community. We welcome participants from industry who have tasks that they might want to pitch to the community. We also welcome representatives from other benchmarks: MediaEval grows stronger by staying in close contact with groups running benchmarking activities in areas beyond the MediaEval core domain of human and social multimedia. MediaEval 2011 was presented at CLEF 2011, NTCIR 2011 and FIRE 2011 and in 2012 we hope to convince some of our sister benchmarks to give a reciprocal presentation on their own experiences.

As part of staying connected to the larger community, the MediaEval 2011 workshop included a poster and demo session where projects that help to organize MediaEval tasks could present their results and where industry people could make a presentation of new and interesting problems that they would like to make known to the MediaEval community as possible benchmarking tasks.

The workshop closes with a gathering of task organizers and others who have invested time and effort into the community or want to get more closely involved in the future. During this session, we reflect back on what happened so far in the benchmarking year and also discuss the MediaEval related activities that we organize beyond the core benchmarking activities. These include joint papers among all the participants of a task and also special sessions at conferences. Looking forward we also plan to get involved in organizing more workshops (of the traditional variety) at conferences and also think about the possibilities of special issues. Finally, we reflect on our MediaEval goal, To offer the community innovative new tasks related to the human and social aspects of multimedia and our slogan The "multi" in multimedia (it not necessary to be able to say the slogan with a straight face.) On the basis of these reflections, we consider where we would like to go with the benchmark in the coming year.

So why do you want to be at the MediaEval workshop? Well, if you are a task participant, it gives you an opportunity to exchange with other people working on topics similar to yours and helps you to understand and improve the algorithms that you are using to approach your task. MediaEval needs a central group of dedicated researchers to organize the tasks that make the benchmark run. Attending the workshop is a good first step to getting more deeply involved in MediaEval, for example, by proposing a task for the year.

On the MediaEval 2012 survey, we had a question concerning what the community thinks about how MediaEval should grow. I personally, want to keep the workshop as small and intimate as possible. In 2011, we had nearly 60 people and that appeared to me to be a good maximum size for the workshop. However, when I examined the survey results, I realize that I am in the minority here, and that most of the people in the community would like growth. As a result, I am changing my opinion and we will not attempt to artificially restrict growth, as long as it is sustainable.

The issues and ideas around growth is just one area in which the concept of the MediaEval workshop is evolving. One of MediaEval's strengths is that it develops from year to year, guided by the input of the community --- and in particular those people who invest the most hours of their time to make it work. I look forward witnessing and being involved in this development in the 2012 season and, we hope, to seasons beyond.

For further impressions of the MediaEval workshop, check out the MediaEval 2011 workshop video:

Querying the Collective: Why search engines should (responsibly!) support analytics

My thoughts today turned towards the social responsibility of search engines. As search improves, it seems that the question is not moving towards being resolved, but rather is becoming more important. Simply put, as the helpfulness that search engines have in our lives increases, so does their power over us. In this post, I'd like to attempt to unpack that thought a bit and build a case for the importance of social responsibility of search engines.

Let's consider the question of the identity of the entity with which knowledge resides. In other words, let's have a look at, "who knows what" in some basic search scenarios. User information needs, I claim, differ along the who-knows-what dimension:

• Known-item search: "I know what I want and my information need will be fulfilled when I can get my hands on this item." (Knowledge effectively already with me.)
  
• Ad hoc search: "I don't know exactly what I want. But I know that there are other people who know. My information need will be fulfilled when I can get my hands on information sources created by people who do know." (Knowledge with other people, soon to be with me.)

As long as we stick to these two variants, the world is relatively well behaved. Social responsibility arguably remains with the searcher and with the individuals making the information sources available.

However, with the next step in this typology, things definitely become different.

• Analytics search: "I don't know exactly what I want. In fact, I know that there is no individual person who knows. My information need will be fulfilled if I can get my hands on information that is created using analytics over a larger number of information sources." (Knowledge with no one, not yet.)

We do analytics search all the time, even without realizing it. For me, it's often for small things while writing research papers, for example, for finding the more common usage "crowd-sourcing" vs. "crowdsourcing" or to see if "internet" has finally overtaken "Internet". I actually just this moment carried out a search for "analytics", which is being red-underlined as a spelling mistake as I write. In response to my query, Google tells me "About 117,000,000 results (0.24 seconds)". I decide that there are a lot of other people using this word -- many in the same way that I am using it now, so I ignore the spellchecker and move on.

The point is that this 117,000,000 is information that was derived on the spot by analyzing and aggregating a huge number of data sources. As a result, the responsibility for this information has shifted and now lies elsewhere. It is not so clear that it lies only with me, the person asking the question, or with the information sources that are being aggregated. Rather, the responsible for creating this information lies with the algorithm that made the calculation. If we think that a non-human entity such as an algorithm cannot be responsible, then the conclusion must be that the responsibility lies with the people who created and control the algorithm that made the calculation, i.e., the minds and masters behind the search engine.

Of course, many times that responsibility is not a particularly heavy weight and the answers to analytics search queries can often be wildly off and still not be harmful. Give or take a million, I still will see that there are a lot of people using the word "analytics" and that answers my question.

However, I would argue that there are enough cases in which the results of analytics search queries have a large enough impact that they should force us to think carefully about the social responsibility that is borne directly by our search algorithms, their creators and the providers of our search services.

Recently, I spent some time in a house by a lake in the forest. The local news reported an incident in which a hunter reported a man in the forest, carrying a gun, but not wearing the blaze-orange of a hunter. The man had fired at him, and the hunter returned fire. Basically, I made my decision about when to go out of the house after hearing that news report by using a search engine to monitor real-time media (Twitter and local news). My queries were analytics queries because they relied on the entire collection of available information being scanned. My conclusion about the situation relied on a relatively subtle difference between no one mentioning it and it being mentioned by a handful of people (the forest being rather sparsely populated). I continued periodic query sessions, and the story died out relatively quickly. I walked out of the house with confidence that the incident was a fluke and not a rampage and that no one was going to take a pot shot at me.

One could argue that I was irresponsible for potentially putting my safety in the hands of a search engine. But one could also argue that I was irresponsible for being there in the hunting season. There are also those that would claim that the place is a bit weird anyhow, and should be completely avoided. The problem is, that place is where I'm from. I'm probably not about to stop going back and also I'm probably not about to stop looking for information by carrying out analytics search with a search engine.

It seems inevitable: People use analytics search to form opinions and make assessments that influence their behavior and lead them to make important decisions.

We have little choice but to admit that we would like search engines to offer us as users the possibility to satisfy our information needs using analytic search. It gives us a lens to view the world around us. It takes us a step in the direction pointed to recently by Doug Oard, who was quoted on Twitter as wanting an information retrieval system that is an exoskeleton for the mind. Personally, (and to the bemusement of my colleagues) I tend to talk about search, especially in the context of social networks, as providing us with a prosthesis. In the end, all the metaphors boil down to analytics search being just plain important to us and to what we want to do in our lives.

We are left with the conclusion: Search engines should support analytics search, but they should take careful regard of social responsibility.

Why am I thinking of analytics search today? Probably because I've come up against another problem where it is useful. This problem involves no guns, so it's not particularly life threatening -- at the most it threatens the productivity of our lab.

At the beginning of the year, there was a high-level decision to restrict access to our building on the weekends. The cited reasons were that ICT technology no longer requires 24-hour building access and that weekend closure would save energy and security costs. The net result has been that on the weekends our lab is completely empty, when there used to be at least one or two PhD students working there, when I'd go in.

I became curious about exactly how much electricity is being saved and realized that we can actually make a rough estimate using social media to calculate the number of weekends in which the building is actually powered down. For example, today (a Saturday) it wasn't. Today, I took a picture (above) in the cafeteria which reveals the fact that it wasn't. There were also other people in this group in the picture that were themselves taking pictures. If a search engine will allow me to find other pictures (e.g., on Flickr) of weekend events in the building, it will be possible to make an estimate the total number of days of electrical consumption actually saved by keeping the PhD students out of the lab.

None of the individual picture takers know this information, but if the information can be aggregated with the support of a search, then we can know -- calling the information into being, as it were, using a couple of queries linked to dates and locations. I'll leave it to another day to examine the question of if I actually have a right to know how much energy is being saved by the building closure policy. Here, I draw a different conclusion: if I am going to rely on a search engine to formulate an impression of what happens in the building on the weekends, then I would like that search engine to have assumed the responsibility of giving the best answer it possibly can.

BBC Don't Make Me Evil: We need fragment level access to online spoken audio content

Today, I uploaded something to YouTube I strictly speaking probably should not have. It was a section from a BBC podcast Outriders containing an interview with Heather Marsh about connecting and protecting people by creating social networks from the bottom up rather than from the top down, so that the power and control remains with the individual and not with with an overarching central authority.

In particular, she discusses working with Tribler the open source peer-to-peer client at TU Delft. At 4 minutes and 28 seconds into the interview she states, "It's what we always wanted, it's what the Internet always was supposed to be and we're at the point now where there is no excuse not to have it."

C'mon BBC, there's no way that I am not going to take that sound byte and spread it through my social network. I just don't have that kind of will power. But are you allowing me to do this?

No. The podcast is one monolithic .mp3 file. The times at which the individual interviews (there are three on three different subjects) begin are not given. There is simply no easy fragment level access possible.

And here's where my self control breaks down. I excerpt the interview from the mp3 and upload the thing to YouTube. Twinged by guilt, I generate myself a neat deep link. (As I mentioned in my previous post that touched on deep links as used by YouTube, a deep link is a link that let you jump in to a particular point in an audio file.)

Voila, here is my link for the "there's no excuse not to have Tribler" sound byte:

(except my conscious got the better of me and I deleted it)

Most people I know are so much more likely to click on a deep link then to struggle with the podcast download at:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/pods/pods_20120221-0400a.mp3

Of course with the download it's still Tweetable:

TU Delft P2P client Tribler as heard on BBC Radio 5 "It's what we always wanted" Listen in at 4'28''
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/pods/pods_20120221-0400a.mp3

Twitter's link shortening would get that down to 140 characters. But then I have to trust my followers are willing to devote about 10 times more attention to digesting my Tweet, then to other Tweets containing links to streams not downloads.

Not only can I not easily link to my sound byte, I also have no way of finding this reference to Tribler unless I already know this is there, occurring in the middle of an interview. There is no indication of the names of the interviewees and give only very limited information on the topic.

And to aid findability, of course, I turn on the YouTube automatic captioning and see what kind of text transcript the speech recognition will generate.

It's just a click on the little cc icon on the bottom and the transcripts are displayed. You can use the player bar to move quickly through the video and the changing transcript sort of gives you an idea of what the different parts of the interview about. You won't be blown away by the quality of the transcripts, "Tribler" for example is not correctly recognized. Nonetheless you can use them to figure out where to stop, and how to navigate to listen to particular questions.

In short, this workaround instantiates the principle of the intelligent multimedia player. Ask me about the Internet as it always was supposed to be and I would say that there should be no audio content, no interesting sound bytes, buried away without the possibility to find them and to share them easily. We need the fragment level access, the deep links, the player that tells us what is where when we're listening.

Can we get you to do this for us BBC? You might notice that my YouTube solution here is quite ugly and and strictly speaking probably not at all what you have in mind for me to be doing with this content.

But let me assume that the mp3 is online in order to be listened to and shared. Let's continue our search to find new ways to make this possible.

I am not my website: Warning! Something's not right here.

The server hosting the MediaEval website was compromised 16 February and infected with malware in the form of lines added into the .html code of several of the pages.

Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics caught the problem and MediaEval community members saw the warning in their browsers and started writing me immediately.

I fixed it quite quickly. However, at the moment, Chrome (above), Firefox and Safari and probably also other browsers are presenting this error screen. The malware is gone, but people are still being for-all-practical-purposes prevented from visiting the MediaEval site.

The warning links to a safe browsing diagnostics page that states, "Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded without user consent." But that's pretty deep to have to dig to understand that the danger has been taken care of. The implication is that it's going to take us 90 days of a clean record to get back in the good graces of Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics.

At the bottom, the diagnostics page tells me that as the website owner I can request a review of the site using Google Webmaster Tools. It's nice to find a helping hand extended in a tough situation.

However,what happened next echoed the text of the warning: Something's really not right here. I have been quite concerned about Google's new privacy policy and my interaction with the Webmaster Tools further deepened that concern today.

Google Webmaster Tools wanted me to verify that I was the owner of the website, and, of course, it does this using my Google login. Now, that site is linked at the hip to this blog.

I suppose that was obvious anyway, for anyone reading the content. And people ask me why I care about some association that is deep in a Google server somewhere. It's a slippery slope, yeah sure. Let me articulate why I am not comfortable with this latest slide downwards.

I put a lot of thought into the fact that MediaEval is a community-driven initiative for which I act as the "glue person". Glue person means doing the infrastructure (which amounts to keeping a bunch of plates all spinning at the same time like they do in the circus) and co-ordinating the process by which we make tough decisions (in cases in which such are necessary). My MediaEval activities need to be understood clearly by everyone who cares to scrutinize them as being separate from what is written in this blog---which is my own personal view and does not claim to be anything like a community wide consensus.

The separation of my personal and my public role in MediaEval was previously naturally represented by the fact that on the Internet the default existence for websites are separate entities. These entities were perhaps associated with a webmaster, but that were not linked with a single author/owner person who has a personal history and a private life (as represented by my Google account). Now, I suppose I could set up a separate account to be MediaEval---but these means signing in and out if I want to go from one to the other and that is simply not practical given the amount of work I need to do.

The way that co-operative initiatives like MediaEval grow is that they can be set free from a single person or personality and can take on a life of their own. It's idealistic, I realize, but we do strive for a sort of grassroots democratic process in the benchmark. In order to come anywhere close to this ideal, we need technology whose default mode of operation allows leading members of the community to draw themselves away from the spotlight to stand at the sidelines and give the community room to speak for itself.

Today, I made a quick decision under the pressure of protecting the channel of communication with the MediaEval community. I tied my personal self yet more closely to the site of the benchmarking initiative, when another part of my brain is telling me that for growth and sustainability of the community the trend must go in the other direction.

When I am tired and desperately need a solution, I am in no place to insist on the principle that I am not my website.

I tell myself, that maybe the close technical connection will now remind me to be even more careful in making the conceptual distinction between the two hats I wear: research and community coordinator.

In the meantime, I sit back and take my mind off the issue by enjoying some YouTube---recently a category "Middle Ages" has appeared on my recommendation page. Hey, Google, it's not that kind of mediaeval that I care about! Watches those videos is a welcome form of distraction: especially because it underlines that point that putting all that data in one place isn't really necessarily going to get anyone closer to where they want to be. Let's just hope that the consequences remain innocuous and merely amusing.