Tribal.mx

A global citizen is not the one that travels the globe rushing from one destination to the next at the furious pace its business demand, but the one that roams the roads of a city or the world open to the opportunities that serendipity will bring, architecting with each moment a fulfilling life devoted to creating value for the communities he touches, combining his skills with the resources available. Such a nice maxim for any traveller, you must be thinking.

But as much as we fantasize about travelling the world and becoming that global explorer, we are mostly driven by rituals. We go to school or work following the same route every day, we meet with more or less the same people and exchange in average the same rehearsed words. We like the little thrills that the modern hyper-connected world gives us, but we end up “friending” all the same 150 people we’ve known our entire lives. We like the detachment of “following” a few intellectuals or celebrities as there is no effort on our end but panic if a random stranger talk to us on the street. In the long run, we find ourselves surrounded by too many comfortable mellow relationships that are too kind to shake us a little bit and push us higher.

As isolated as may feel in a world of 7 billion people, there is one hero that is surging ahead, thriving on openness and mastering all the skills learned through three or four generations of social networks: our avatar. That smiling, fearless, handsome self-portrait not afraid of making up a few stories to find a place in the collective streams of strangers (the more the better), using the 8-bit equivalent of a grave-voice to teach everyone else life-lessons and revealing beauty in the mundane (yes, that same scene we saw at every commute for years). This alter-ego has found its place in our real-world, projecting our deepest and most sacred thoughts onto a canvas that looks more like a matrix-esque thumbnail composition that exudes personality. Our personality.

And now that our digital avatars feel at easy out there, broadcasting 24/7 on our behalf, are all of sudden running into each other without the caution characteristic of their masters. We call it serendipity in our world, to them it may be algorithmic association or visual coherence, but whatever their secret, it is working. They are now assembled in entire genres and sub-cultures that we barely knew existed, not unlike artisans of a forgotten medieval craft.

And now, for their final movement, they are about to teach us a lesson: how to go back to our tribal ways, connecting with those whose avatars have brought down the walls of anonymity in the name of creating meaningful connections that will rescue our communities from the apathy of routine.

X-Summit conference, October 2011

Just to make sure every attendee would drop their assumptions at the door and would engage in defining the future of interactive media, the opening keynote was by Scott Snibble, who is responsible for the recently launched interactive music iOS app Biophilia. Some say is the first interactive album and the beginning of a new distribution model for the music business. I was simply blown-away by the fact that such an adventurous project had found its way into a mainstream audience and had done so while creating amazingly sophisticated interactive experiences. Clearly the audience is ready to evolve and participate in much more rich ways.

Soon I realized that I was probably the only technologist in a conference full of creatives and producers. Ironic, as most of these people are trying to master the foundation that is required to make their productions more interactive and social to safeguard their future in the entertainment industry. To the many people I had the opportunity to meet, my pitch was a variation of the this:

Imagine a media show that is produced in such a way that multiple threads of narrative exist and a well-planned production makes it possible for all those stories to fork and converge at the will of every single viewer. Viewing the show on an evolved video platform would allow the audience to influence the outcome and experience specific bits chosen based on a wide range of parameters such as location, demographics, past interaction and personal preferences such as parental control. Now, know that such a video platform already exists: it is called the web and it already has everything that you need to make this a reality.

The excitement was palpable and I look forward to being part of architecting such a future. If some of the elements in this pitch sound familiar it is because I’ve been advocating such a future for the last 5 years (read lonelytv)

In fact, some of the projects we’re working on right now are already taking advantage of modern web standards to accomplish seamless video manipulation responding to user interaction.

One key take away from the conference is that 2011 has been a year of great experimentation by big studios growing confident in their understanding of how to deliver interactive projects that cross platforms. Some of them are doing so by creating entirely new genres of entertainment like Machinima. 2012 is only going to see this space grow bolder in its attempt to redefine entertainment.

Tribal Mix is creating a tool that will allow newsrooms around the world to keep up with the growing volume of video content and find those worth integrating into news stories.

In order to keep up with the endless stream of video content (35 hrs of video uploaded every minute!) we need a tool that will mimic the ways in which users consume video today: multiple sources and channels, endless streams of content, collaborative viewing, short snippets.

The Use Case: imagine you’re running the Al Jazeera news desk responsible for reporting Egypt’s revolution. You have a couple of crews on the ground placed at strategic locations such as Tahir Square, but in reality nobody really knows what is about to happen or how long it will take. Spontaneously, civilians on the ground start to take little video vignettes with their mobile cameras and upload. Back at the news desk, you launch the Tribal Mix dashboard, configure a collection of tags that seem to be popular in the context of this story and let it run. The dashboard becomes available as part of your main web story about the event as a “latest videos” link. When users everywhere launch the dashboard, they automatically participate in the curation process by scanning the feed, clicking on those videos that appear more interesting. In fact, only a couple of hours into this process, a thumbnail that contains a sequence with a burning car starts to “grow”, as a result of its visual impact. Now you have a story to report… with video.

Breaking news today requires monitoring an overwhelming number of “social media” channels, yet journalists can’t afford to spend their time doing so. Traditional tools such as Google and other custom search engines have the disadvantage that you will only uncover good content once it has become really popular, which means that someone else already ran the snippet.

On the other hand, the public has demonstrated to be very effective in spotting good content amid an ocean of submissions. The crowd sourced approach makes sense very early in the media gathering and filtering process as an initial step to dramatically reduce the volume of content that professional news people have to interact with. Let the audience be your collaborator.

Some professional video tools are available at enterprise prices, but they are limited in that they can only be used by paid user seats. By combining a set of existing open technologies and frameworks, not only I can deliver the solution presented, but can do so in a way that the resulting software product has little development cost and very low operational costs, usually scaling whenever there is intense use of the infrastructure.

TECHNICAL DESIGN

Earlier in the process I had provided a quick snapshot of what the tool could look like and even provided a concise set of design directives that would make sure the tool remains true to the idea of openness and transparency and is built on the fundamental premise that the audience is integrated into the news gathering process. But to implement this project a lot more is needed:

Click to see the diagram

The Stream: videos exist everywhere and the ability to use videos where they are is important to consolidate sources (YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter) into a single stream of all possible candidates.

The Engine: using a series of video techniques such as time-lapsing, a series of vignettes would be rendered for each video submitted. This is a CPU intensive task that can scale very nicely using a cluster of servers (Amazon EC2 for example). On the other hand, many of the tools to accomplish this technically already exists and have very open software licenses such as FFMPEG. At this point, I’m assuming that all videos will be pre-processed and the version used in the Dashboard is an animation rendered by the browser.

The Dashboard: is the main user interface that allows a viewer to inspect all the pre-processed snippets and implicitly mark those that seem to have better content quality. It is meant to be used by a large number of viewers and for that group to influence each other’s viewing targets by visually giving higher priority to those snippets that get more “air time” from the audience. The only currency that viewers can use to favour specific content is their own viewing time, so the system is hard to game. Built on HTML5 + CSS3 + JQuery (compatibility) + Masonry (layout) + Popcorn (video integration and measurement), this solution is at the forefront of web standards and should work beautifully across all modern browsers.

Play with the prototype yourself: notice how video boxes “grow” as you let the videos run longer. Imagine that effect multiplied by a group of hundreds of viewers using the tool simultaneously.

Technical Challenges: during the prototype development I was able to identify the following technical issues that will need special attention to create a mature tool:

• Video content found on the web is not necessarily tagged properly to reflect proper licensing. The engine will without question render a “modified” version of the original content so a proper copy-left license is required. Finding the right approach to integrate this information into the stream will likely require further thinking. I’m particularly interested in Creative Commons machine-readable licenses as a possible solution, but this may limit the amount of content available to the stream in the first place.
• Vignettes rendered are currently built as Animated GIFs. This format, though, has several technical limitation such as a colour palette restricted to 256 colours and the fact that there is absolutely no compression on the final animation, creating a very large file to be downloaded by the browser. Further to that, rendering these requires a fairly good CPU which disqualifies mobile browsers. I believe technology on video is evolving fast enough that using an actual video codec would be possible.

Acknowledgements:
- To Phillip, Pippin, Alex and the rest of the #MozNewsLab crew for organizing an incredible lab.
- To Amy, James, Raynor, Saleem and a great group of peers for the help and stimulating feedback.

Thanks Alain Bachellier @ Flickr

In his “the people formerly known as the audience“, Jay Rosen pursues the idea of how modern technologies have shifted the balance between audience and the traditional producers of news. A modern newsroom has to be built around the notion that the public WILL get involved in the process of gathering the news. Such was the insight offered by Mohamed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera when talking about their most popular stories. So, the most important collaborator in a newsroom today is THE AUDIENCE.

So, to build around the audience as an active participant, I’ve put together a few design directives for my video dashboard project, using the advice from Oliver himself (“The user interface doesn’t connect eye with screen, it links head and hand”):

• The video dashboard should be able to process videos elsewhere, simply by subscribing to a RSS feed. Ideally the feeds will be machine-tagged so intellectual property rights are obeyed when finding the videos. After all, the videos will be subject to a massive transformation in order to be usable within the dashboard.
• The curation process should be with the audience. Open access to the contents of a given stream would allow those interested in specific topics to get raw access to the library and influence which videos get more attention throughout the process.
• To police content, we need a community-driven approach, one that requires little effort for the community to enforce and requires a lot of energy for trolls to game. Every user gets to flag inappropriate content with a single action, but only the community as a group gets to push content up in relevance, by actually watching the content.
• We need to provide clear indication of which content is fresher within the stream, as it is more likely to be important. This aligns with the “breaking news” culture in newsrooms everywhere.
• The feedback method for the audience to participate in the curation of content should be trivial, can be followed by anyone with access to the stream and has an immediate impact on what others will see afterwards. Implicit feedback in the form of javascript events resulting from certain actions from users will be captured and used to render the dashboard for future users.
• To keep the interface simple, only basic gestures will be used: swipe to move around the dashboard, single click/tap to watch content.

Release a dashboard to the audience and see it transform under their control, revealing the snippets of content that will shape the next story.

A very insightful creative mind once said that people don’t remember much about your site’s design. Fonts, colours, layout are all very important, yes, but the one things people don’t forget is their first emotional reaction. That’s all you have to design for. That first glimpse that without any objectivity defines the entire future of your relationship. Along the same lines Clotaire Rapaille (The Culture Code book) preaches the science of creating very deep connections between products and consumers, sometimes inquiring into our collective childhood to unlock cultural elements that have defined the behavior for an entire generation.

Fast forward to the age of interactive sites and you’ll have @jjg, the very own “father of AJAX” and author of “The Elements of User Experience” explaining how all you can control is the emotion. Most people are already wired to react to certain codes (cultural codes, that is). So, when building a new tool or application, it makes sense to build a foundation that is deeply engrained into our collective story.

How? From strategy to visual design any good product needs to be evaluated from two perspectives: what do users need and what does the product is trying to accomplish? In the following video I explain the first:

Provide a new medium, fluid and boundless, that allows the hive mind to quickly scan through a vast library of digital videos to uncover the most important snippets in order to keep up with the growing volume of video content.

None of us is young enough to have grown up surrounded by media. And so we look for artificial organization schemes to serialize our consumption. They are called TV “series” for a reason. But observation of how younger generations consume media has led me to believe that a new medium where multiple storylines are being played out simultaneously is not only possible but it will eventually improve our ability to digest through the increasing volume of information using patterns of consumption that we haven’t even discovered.

Of course, creating such a medium to interact with video seems like an impossible task today. But with a little help from standards, open source projects and the power of a very energetic Mozilla community I’m convinced we have all the elements to make it happen:
HTML5 with its capabilities to display video directly provides the perfect lightweight canvas for this project.

CSS3 can provide all the fluid layout without sacrificing performance.

JQuery and other javascript libraries like Modernizr will enable this dashboard to run across a variety of platforms without having to worry about all the different implementation details.

Because the challenge is to unlock video we’ll have to leverage libraries like popcorn.js to make sure the video content is actionable and the dashboard truly serves as a discovery tool.

Finally AJAX will enable realtime measurement of any action on the dashboard in such a way that the actions of users will influence how videos are presented to subsequent visitors.

Try the live demo.