Multimedia and Digital Commentary Online Site maintained by Michael Bush Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 Featuring thought on digital and multimedia technologies, book recommendations, and interesting and useful links. Last update: 6 February 2007
Important Note! I am updating this site after a very long absence and rediscovering the transient nature of the Web. Basically some of the links do not work. Please be patient! Places to Go A friend of mine in the multimedia industry once told me he was setting a trend by being the first to announce that he was NOT reading Wired.  We don't always like their style, but they do know what is going on. The Los Angeles Times provides excellent coverage of what is happening with the impact of digital technology on life in general and on the media in particular. Check out the Internet.com site for a lot of up-to-date information on Internet technologies. Simba and Cowles have put together SimbaNet, a Web site that looks very interesting for "media professionals." On the Web Language Learning via the Web shows how the World Wide Web is experiencing exponential growth through its primary use as a means of accessing information. Unfortunately many educators were a bit late in considering its potential for education. World Wide Web Technology: What's Hot and What's Not. In 1996 we were feeling bad about almost missing the "Internet Revolution" but then we realized that Bill Gates had almost missed it as well.	MPEG-7 Most people have heard of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4.  Where those standards specify how video should be encoded and compressed, MPEG-7 specifies an XML schema for describing video content. Our interest at Brigham Young University (BYU) stemmed from our work on standard approaches for video asset descriptions (VAD) .Our work with Japanese National Television and Motorola was incorporated into Part 9 of the standard, essentially a subset of the incredibly huge full MPEG-7 standard, known as the Core Description Profile. Random Rips Check out these mini-essays on topics of interest. You can even talk back, sound-off with your own ideas! Drill and kill? Digitally Speaking Several years we became quite interested in the brouhaha surrounding the DOJ vs. Microsoft battle and published our first piece on "Gates Hate" over ten years ago! "Fear and Loathing in Cyberspace" is a three-part series of articles with a subsequent update that  examined the role of Microsoft Corporation and other "eagles of the Information Age" and how they have influenced the evolution of the microcomputer industry. Is Bill Gates the villain in this story -- or could he be a hero? Are there any heroes to be found? Read previous essays on digital technologies in the Historical Perspectives section.	Conference Presentations Check out PowerPoint presentations from recent conferences. ACTFL Nashville  2006 ACTFL Baltimore 2005 Click Here for our poster on Customized Video Playback (CVP) from the Digital Humanities Conference at the Sorbonne in Paris in July 2006. Click Here for a presentation given in October 2006 as part of the Lansdowne Visting Lecturer Program at the University of Victoria. British Columbia. This is a HUGE file (77 MB)! Current Reading Check out our recommendations for books that will keep you "in the know!"  You can even purchase them from Amazon.com by clicking on the Buy it! links. The World is Flat Buy it! Thomas Friedman captures the essence of many very important issues in our “increasingly flat” world. Miscellaneous Local Links From 1996 through 1998 we covered for the Multimedia Monitor the Milia Conference held each year in Cannes, France.	George Glider is an author that Bill Gates reads. No foolin'! George Gilder Said: Early in the next decade, the central processing units of 16 Cray YMP supercomputers, once costing collectively some $320 million, will be manufacturable for under $100 on a single microchip. Such a silicon sliver will contain approximately one billion transistors, compared to some 20 million transistors in currently leading-edge devices. Meanwhile, the four-kilohertz telephone lines to America's homes and offices will explode into some 25 thousand billions of possible hertz of fiber optics. Twenty-five thousand gigahertz is the intrinsic capacity of every fiber thread: enough communications power to hold all the phone calls in America on the peak moment of Mother's Day. (Quoted by President Bill Clinton in his 1998 State of the Union Message and taken from George Gilder's Life after Television, p. 16-17.) Gilder Gold Gilder published his "Telecosm Series" of articles in his new book, Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World. Buy it! Other Reading Check out our previous recommendations This is our "must read" list. It will be hard to anticipate what will be happening with digital technology if you have not read a significant part of the works listed here!

Note: The background of our graphic is Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of his conception of the world's first automated computational device. For a nice treatment of this concept see:  A Brief History of Mechanical Calculators. There was even an interesting controversy that surrounded the creation of a working model based on da Vinci's design.

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