FeedBlast is an experiment in directed generative video. It takes the form of a web-based application that creates an audiovisual mashup of web content using items from a collection of RSS feeds, also known as an OPML file. The goal of the mashup is to present a densely-packed summary of a users unread feed items in the smallest amount of time possible. The resulting Quicktime movie can be downloaded, viewed, and shared. Watching a FeedBlast is not about comprehension, but about gaining a general understanding of the information landscape that informs and directs later review of the feed information.

The FeedBlast Process

1. The user goes to the FeedBlast site and provides an OPML file.
2. The user sets several preferences about how the video should be generated, including how long each clip should be.
3. The application parses the OPML file and all the feeds within and gathers all of the items that were added since the last time a FeedBlast was generated.
4. The text of each item is analyzed with Topicalizer – a service that provides a variety of useful information on a given text including keywords and a short abstract.
5. The abstract is converted to speech using the AT&T text-to-speech software. A voice font is chosen from a list of 12 based on which voices were used before.
6. Any media items that appear in the items are gathered. This includes images,videos, and audio. Videos are converted to a usable format with the aid of the Vixy.net transcoding utility.
7. If there is no media in the body of the item, the application will follow any links within the text and try to gather media linked on the sub-pages.
8. If no media is found in the first level of links, the application will use the Yahoo Image, Audio, and Video search APIs to find appropriate media, using words and phrases deemed to be important according to the Topicalizer analysis as query terms.
9. The pieces are mixed together using the QuickTime API and the editing techniques shown below.
10. The video is made available for download.

The Cocktail Party Effect
Advances in filtering and delivery of syndicated web content have significantly increased not only the quantity of information a person can access, but the relevance of the information, and this trend will only continue. Technologies that aid in digesting information have not kept pace with the related delivery methods, leaving many people completely overwhelmed. The goal of FeedBlast is to remedy this problem using a phenomena colloquially called The Cocktail Party Effect, which is the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a particular audio source among a cacophony of background noise. By barraging the user with audio-visual information rather than just a long page of static text and images, I hope to utilize the Cocktail Party Effect to allow a user to focus their attention only on what is most interesting to them, and therefore allow greater information intake.

An Example

The following video was produced using the top 20 new items in my RSS reader on March 26, 2007, at 5:26 PM. FeedBlast will create something very similar.

Production Budget

** I am requesting $3,000 from Rhizome to help with the intern salary. I have applied for a NYSCA grant to cover the remaining portion.

Rough Production Timeline

FeedBlast will build upon the work of Jason Freeman’s open-source iTunes Signature Maker. This will significantly shorten the development process. The project is divided into three parts: the user interface, the media hoarder, and the mixer. Development will start on July 1 and continue until November 1. I will be receiving design and editing assistance from Jerry Juarez – a Senior Production fellow at Eyebeam.

About Jeff

Jeff makes things out of the Internet. His projects include both art pieces and software development, but most fall somewhere in between. Most of his work involves generative systems that use pre-existing content. He’s not an artist or developer as much as a hacker. He received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech and in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam Atelier as a production fellow.

http://www.jeffcrouse.info/cv.html

Work Samples

1. Interactive Frank is a program that uses resources from the web to construct a narrative based on an initial sentence entered by the user. It was written in Java.
2. Switchboard is library for Processing that provides a conceptual level interface to a variety of web and network services.
3. Earthify takes a page of Craigslist posts and maps them onto Google Earth.
4. Real-Time Art is my masters thesis at Georgia Tech. It explores common strategies and qualities of art that uses live data sources.

I also have a shit-ton of projects in the pipes, as usual.

Current Projects

Hit! or Sh!t
Work is ostensibly underway on the new and improved Hit! or Sh!t, but the going is slow. I spent several days before I went to Atlanta retooling the site to use the same class structure that is used in the AMFPHP server. I realize this probably means next to nothing to most people, but it’s all part of my effort to imitate the MCV structure in Ruby on Rails in my PHP projects. This makes it much easier for outside developers (such as Jamie Wilkinson and Devin Hunt, the Hit! or Sh!t super team) to come in and make stuff happen on the site.

I also started using phpDocumentor, the Javadoc equivalent for PHP, and I am happy with the results. It has forced me to be more diligent about commenting my code, which is always good when there is more than one person working on a project.

MTV is being a bit shady about future plans for Hit! or Sh!t, but that doesn’t change our goals or schedule too much. They’ve told us flat out that they can’t allocate any more resources to the project at the moment, which is fine with me because our contract stated that we could only be held to the 2 month deadline if we received the resources that we needed. Now we have a bit more leeway, which is desperately needed.

Fartsy.org (previously: the artist statement generator)
Progress has been slow but steady on the Artist Statement Generator. I’ve made a slightly more user-friendly interface, and next week I will work to make the grammar a little better and the construction a little less formulaic. And now that I have moved to Dreamhost for my private server, I have the PHP5 environment that I need to make it live, so a working version should be available soon.

Pocket Dirt (an offshoot of Dirt Party)
During my short visit to Atlanta, Dave and I completed the Ars Electronica proposal for Pocket Dirt, which is the mobile version of the Dirt Party, which I blogged about a few weeks ago. But rather than reading me ramble on about it, why not kick back and watch a 10 minute video?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEwcq4BX2X4]

As a disclaimer, I’d like to say that I am far from a video editing expert. We threw this video together in one day, and we were laboring under the impression that the video had to be 10 minutes long, so I apologize for the bullshitting at the end.

Anyway, moving on.

Stop Work Day is the monthly meeting at Eyebeam where all of the fellows and residents talk about what they are doing. It’s exactly like show and tell, except that we are all in our 20s and 30s. So at the last Stop Work Day, I gave a little spiel about the Dirt Party and how awesome it could be. At that point, it was still a “what-if” project. Just an idea I had been toying with for a while. But immediately after my presentation, Evan Roth of the GRL approached me about a class that he is going to teach at Parsons called Internet Famous. The class revolves around a yet-to-be-built application that calculates your Internet Fame index based on several sites around the web. They are very protective of the idea, so I’m not going to say any more about it, but suffice to say, it has a lot in common with Dirt Party, and we are going to try to combine our efforts to make both projects even awesomer than they would be separately. Stay tuned for more awesomeness from this direction.

FeedBlast (previously OPMLove)
I am about to post my Rhizome proposal for FeedBlast, the project that I’ve been dreaming about for a while now, so stay tuned for that. Posted here is a little collection of logos that I put together as inspiration for the logo that the talented Jerry Juarez is going to make for the intro sequence.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr8TYxd9qbU]

Also while in Atlanta, I was able to meet with Jason Freeman, a professor at the Music Department at Georgia Tech and creator of the iTunes Signature Maker. He gave me a crash course on the Quicktime API for Java. This will be an essential part of the FeedBlast application.

Earthify
I’ve set my sights on menupages.com for the next Earthify script. However, with my discovery of ScrAPI and the gloriously easy scraping that it allows, I am now considering moving to Ruby with the entire project. As a result (and because of the Internet Famous project mentioned above), I have been studying Ruby in my free time. It’s a very interesting language with lots of new syntactical peculiarities, but I think I am getting the hang of it.

Future Projects

Second Life/Overheard In New York Machinima mashup
My good friend Nate might have fond the missing piece of the Overheard in New York-inspired podcast. He has been involved with a few machinima projects at Georgia Tech, headed up by the delightfully german professor Michael Nitsche. I was lamenting to him that the thing that makes the OHINY bits funny is the fact that they are so out of context. If you knew what had come before and after the overheard remarks, it would probably just be another banal remark. And for some reason, this seemed like a dead-end to me in terms of making it into a podcast.

So I was sitting there complaining to Nate, and he started telling me about some machinima stuff he was doing, and the answer came to me. The absurdity of many of the settings and characters in Second Life is the perfect compliment to the absurdity of OHINY posts.

This morning I was also reading the wonderful site whatshouldisay.com – the so-called “metafilter of giving advice”. People post their problems and then other people who have had the same problem write in with advice as to what the person should do. So I was just reading along when I come across this post

A few days ago, my girlfriend came home early from work. I wasn’t expecting her, so when she came in to the apartment…

It gets much worse from there, so you’ll have to click to read the rest.

So I decide it would be funny if my girlfriend told a few of her friends that I was the one who had made that post, and that she was completely crushed and confused. Unfortunately for me, my girlfriend has some gullible friends, and before I knew it, three of her friends were disparately trying to console her and I was the biggest asshole in the world.

Anyway, that is beside the point. The point is that I think that these posts would also make great machinima re-enactments in SecondLife. I can imagine cutting to one avatar, re-enacting whatever horrible thing he is writing in to ask for advice about, and then to several other avatars who either scold or offer advice to him. I think it will be great fun.

Google Docs synchronizer
I need a tool that synchronizes all of your Google Documents and spreadsheets to a folder on your local machine. Maybe I will make one.

Hit! or Sh!t for Feeds
In my ongoing effort to streamline my information intake, I decided that I would like to abstract Hit! or Sh!t so it can be implemented in many contexts. The first thing I want to do is implement it for feeds. The idea is that there is a script that you run your RSS feeds through, and it does 2 things.

1. It adds two buttons at the bottom where you can vote on the feed item.
2. Based on how you have rated feed items, it re-sorts your feed items and puts the feed items that will interest you most at the top, and filters out ones that you definitely won’t like.

It’s like a social recommendation system for RSS feeds.

HopStop distance map

In a recent episode of This American Life, a Chicago man was talking about his recent move to New York. New Yorkers, he said, only like to talk about 2 things: subway routes and cell phone reception. And god forbid I betray the stereotype.

So, my proposal is to create a map of New York where users input their location and their transportation preferences. Based on those parameters, the map warps itself so that the distances reflect travel time accorgding to HopStop.com, my new favorite site. HopStop is kind of like GoogleMaps or MapQuest, except that it tells you how to get around New York using your feet, the subway, and busses. If it weren’t for HopStop, I probably never would have taken a bus in New York.

Last week, Yahoo announced a new service called Pipes, which is “a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.” In the circles in which I operate, some said that this would be the biggest news of the year, despite the fact that most people who said this hadn’t actually used it yet. The pundits are giving lots of reasons why this is such an important milestone, and I have my own ideas, many of which were alluded to in my thesis. A few days ago, I even saw an article called Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As a Database – a phrase that I have used more than once in presentations.

By releasing this tool, Yahoo has effectively gone on record saying “if you want your content to be seen, you must make it available to people in a way that lets them use it however they want”. And Yahoo is one of the few companies that could make such a statement and be taken seriously. If some unknown web startup had released a similar mashup service (and apparently there have been a few), the bar would have been set much, much higher. Only if the product was perfect in every aspect would it have had the same kind of impact as Pipes. As it is right now, Pipes is lacking in a lot of ways, but the message that it sends is still clear.

Even my brand new Earthify script will be made trivial by the fact that Pipes will eventually support KML. However, after a few minutes playing with Pipes, I see several important modules that Yahoo would have to add to make the tool viable as a general mashup tool.

1. HTML input module (which I think I read was on the way, but I can’t find the link). This would have to include an HTML Tidy cleaner.
2. Regular Expression and XPath Modules
3. iCal output
4. media enclosures for mashing up podcasts

These modules would probably be in some kind of Advanced section, but they would greatly increase the power of Pipes.

It’s always sort of bittersweet when you champion an idea for a time, and then suddenly it breaks through and makes it mainstream. On one hand, that’s what you wanted, right? On the other hand, when you are fighting for a cause, it gives you direction. Now I have to completely reevaluate what I am doing with Switchboard, and see where it fits.

The Presentation

On Friday I gave a short presentation at Eyebeam describing the work that I have been doing over the past few months. I made a glorious keynote slideshow, packed with glorious transitions. Here’s an export of the presentation. Some of it won’t make sense because you don’t have the narration, but whatevz.

FeedBlast (previously OPMLove) Update

Former classmate and 1.61803399 fan Josh Cothran pointed me to the exact article that I wanted to read, but didn’t knew existed. The Cocktail Party Effect is “the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations and background noise”. The paper looks at why we have this ability, and how we can utilize it in practical applications.

So the current official description of FeedBlast is:

Overheard In New York

In my ongoing quest to create a podcast, I have decided that I will try to write some scripts based on entries from one of my favorite websites, Overheard In New York. The original idea was to take the small chunks of dialog that are found on the site and turn them into longer skits. But after trying out this format with a few of the more entertaining entries, I realized that most of the humor of the site comes from *not* knowing the context of the statements. So I have gone back to the drawing board to evaluate whether this is such a good source for inspiration.

Dirt

Things are moving forward with the Dirt Party on at least 3 fronts. Dave and I will be preparing a proposal for Ars Electronica based on the original Dirt Party idea, but modified to use Bluetooth phones. During my presentation on Friday, after I talked about the party, Paul Amaitai (a great sound artist – check him out) recommended that I install it at a benefit that is being held at Eyebeam at some point in the near future. And finally, I have delusions that I am going to have time to put together a proposal for The Bigger Picture that uses some of the same ideas.