Radiohead: First Ever BitCast

I'm not going to add to the already excellent praise and discussion around the House of Cards videolisation.

Oh no wait, I am.

But only a little bit. Nothing substantial. Promise.

It just occurs to me that since RadioHEAD released the video as data, and actively encouraged people to develop other visualisations of that data, that House of Cards may be the first ever bitcast piece of content.

Bitcasting, which I've mentioned before, was Nicholas Negroponte's idea:

In Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT professor of media proposes an idea he called Bitcasting. He foresees a time when the form in which content is consumed will be decided at the point of consumption.

An example, by way of illustration. The weather is bitcast - all the core data is contained in the transmission. Then, at the point of reception, I decide if I want to consume it as printed report, as  an audio stream, as video, as interactive simulation, and my computer dynamically generates the manifestation.

To which I'd only append: my computer, and a Google visualisation API, and express my wonder at how disturbingly prescient that book was.

Comments

[Will]

So, had to get a copy of BD after this post. Negroponte is a bit good, isnt he?! It's not just the general insights that are so spot-on but the freaky precision of some of his specific thoughts. I reckon YouTube, Nike+, Google Reader, at least, are all in there in zygotic form.

I've mined some stuff for digibites:
http://will-lion.blogspot.com/2008/09/negropontes-predictions.html

[Faris]

Hello brother!

It's insane isn't it? It's literally all right there. Facebook / social networking also in one bit.

Love the bites. good work. I've been bigging them up.

have you read Snowcrash?

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/inventing-the-f.html

[Will]

Yep. Have now! Great stuff.

He has a mighty fine goatee too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Neal_Stephenson_2008.jpg