Video big bang era

Alex Lightman Said:

I have good news and bad news about our current era, which could be called the video big bang era.

The good news is that there is more information available now than ever before, via easily accessible videos. Hurray!

The bad news is that it would take you 1,700 years to watch just the videos on YouTube right now, and there's no way to watch everything. Plus there are fewer filters than ever to misinformation or disinformation, from government, corporations, and supposed experts.

Alex Lightman Thanks to Eddiey Sur, who works at Fox, for the figure of 1,700 years. This post inspired by Brad Acker, who wants to see things faster.

PS: I call this the "Infocalypse" (to borrow a word from Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash".)

JL:  http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/06/30/crap-detection-101/ 

Quote: “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” - Ernest Hemingway, 1954

NL: Video, (even though this fact has been obscured by commercial television, See: Motive, Profit), is easily, and by far, the most significant communication tool ever devised by man. 

Much more so than Gutenberg's Printing Press.

Imagine the effort and time it would have taken 100 years ago to relay the bulk of the data in the Library of Congress to Asia from DC, but now today not only can I do that with 8 keystrokes on a keyboard by typing in loc.gov but I can also give and receive language lessons in real time over Skype to anyone in Beijing.

Or learn on any other subject under the sun.

Bigcheese, in addition to Sony and Microsoft, both Apple Quicktime and Google's YouTube have got the 'audio correct' tech to where they have made great leaps and strides in minimizing and abating that 'chipmunk pitch effect' but they haven't as of yet rolled it out across the board.

In this clip if you click on 'Normal' on the bottom bar you have a range of options available where you can slow it down to as slow as ¼ speed, (not recommended if you want to watch this for almost 2.5 hours, and the audio is cut, though the audio is available at half speed), or accelerate it to 2x speed and not get driven up a tree by the chipmunks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKgOh_VSQe0

With certain videos in Apple Quicktime X I've seen this tech work at 8x speed.

I really, really want TED to implement this technology, the sooner the better. I'm curious as to why it's not there already in the first place, since a significant percentage of the visitors to TED are Type A Personality types that put a premium on their time.

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John L. Sokol Mind if I blog that. I love it.

Alex Lightman Sure, John. Looking forward to what you do with it. You've been working on this for years. In general, TiVo created an expectation to apply the TiVo functionality to all video.