Somehow, a 22-year-old University of Alaska student named Richard Millay got his hands on a videotape that's eluded the media since John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate — original footage of her 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant.

Of course, this is all very frivolous and has nothing to do with the current campaign. But like Barack Obama's high school basketball footage, it's a little glimpse into the early life of a highly-visible national figure.

In the first part added to YouTube, he posted the portion from the swimsuit competition, prefaced by a brief introduction mentioning the demand for the "88 minutes of Alaska Gold."

Update: The original video was removed, but I managed to save a copy of the relevant footage without Richard's original intro. YouTube's removing every copy of this video, so I'm streaming the clip below from my own server. It won't be removed.

As the future vice-presidential candidate parades on stage, an off-screen announcer reads her early biography: "Contestant #8, Sarah Heath. Sarah says that she wants to prepare for a career in television broadcasting by majoring in Telecommunications and Political Science. It's no wonder that she has also been recognized by Who's Who, since she has displayed her leadership in all areas, from academics to student politics to athletics, having led her basketball team to the championship at the state tournament. Ladies and gentleman, contestant #8, Sarah Heath."

I've emailed Richard asking for a brief interview, and will update here if he gets in touch. (Thanks to Jeff Milner for the original tip this morning.)

I wanted to take a moment to announce that I've joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter's a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)

I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They're a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.

Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.

To help them on their way, they're currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I've been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we're looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.

If you're interested, drop me an email or IM and I'll introduce you!

After recording last week's interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it's always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.

Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.

The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.

This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.

Here's how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn't take you more than five minutes of setup per job.

Step 1: Prepare your audio.

First, I split my 35-minute audio file into seven five-minute MP3s. Why? Mechanical Turk workers are all working in parallel, so the more discrete tasks, the faster the job gets done. This also diminishes the risk of one bad worker ruining your whole job. (Though you're always allowed to reject bad submissions, and you'll never have to pay for those.)

I used the open-source Audacity to split the files, but you could just as easily use any audio utility or editing software. Optionally, you might want to make each clip overlap by a few seconds, so you'll be able to easily recognize where each segment of the transcript starts and stops.

Name the files sequentially. In my case, they were interview_1.mp3 through interview_7.mp3. When you're done, upload the files somewhere they can be downloaded publicly. You'll need the full URLs later.

Step 2: Design your HIT template.

Mechanical Turk jobs are called HITs — short for the dystopic-sounding "Human Intelligence Tasks." After you've signed up as a new Requester on Mechanical Turk, you can design a new template from the homepage using one of several samples. Choose the Default Template.

On the Properties screen, we'll write a short description of the task, define how many people we want to work on it, and how much we're willing to pay them.

For a five-minute MP3, I think allotting two hours per assignment is ample time, and I expired the entire HIT in 12 hours because I was in a hurry. As for pay rate, you'll need to determine the "Reward per Assignment" based on the difficulty of the task and what you think is fair. I chose $2.00 per five-minute MP3, or about $0.40/minute. Depending on the difficulty, you might want to try going higher or lower.

I only wanted one worker to attempt each clip, so I changed the "number of assignments per HIT" to 1. (If you want redundant transcripts for each clip, change this to 2 or 3... But be aware your costs will double or triple!)

After entering all this information, here's what my finished Properties screen looked like:

On the Design Layout screen, you design the template that gets displayed to each worker, using basic variables that will be substituted later. For this template, we make up only one variable named "$url." You can call it anything you like.

The basics you'll need are a title, some simple rules, the link to the audio file with a substitution variable, and a text form for the worker to type the transcription into. If you'd like to use my template HTML, here it is. (Make sure you change the path to your own audio files!)

Two things to notice in my example. First, the "${url}" variables will be substituted with values in the "url" column of the spreadsheet we'll create in the next step. Second, any form element you create will end up in your final output from Mechanical Turk, so don't worry about the naming. I called mine simply "transcription." Here's what the relevant part looks like in the final template:

For the worker's convenience, I also added an embedded Flash player for the MP3, but this is entirely optional. When you're done designing your template, it should look something like this:

On the next screen, make sure it looks the way you like, and click "Preview and Finish" to save the HIT template.

Step 4: Upload the data for your HITs.

Once we're done designing our template, we can select it to create a new HIT batch. We'll be creating a simple comma-separated file (.CSV) filled with the data that will be substituted into our template.

On the Publish tab, select the template you just created by clicking the "Select" button:

Now, Amazon generates a sample CSV for you to put the URLs to your MP3s in. Click the link to "Download a sample input file" and open the downloaded CSV in a text editor. If you've done everything right, it should look like this:

Replace the "Hit1_url_data" lines with the full URLs to your own MP3 files. For me, this looked something like:

And so on. Save the CSV file, and upload it to Amazon. When you're done, your uploaded file should appear, with the number of input lines.

Step 5: Publish your HITs.

Select your uploaded input file, and preview the finished batch of HITs. You'll be able to page through each HIT, seeing exactly what workers will see. Use this opportunity to test that your audio files can be downloaded and heard properly. If it all looks good, click "Next" to confirm and publish your batch. This is what the final screen looks like:

If you don't have any money in your Amazon Payments account, you'll be prompted to fund it with a credit card. After you've paid, click "Publish HITs" and you're done!

Your HITs will publish out to the Mechanical Turk workers, who will find and work on your task. Depending on the length and number of your MP3s, expect some work back within an hour.

As they're working, you can browse and approve the results. The final output is an exported CSV, a spreadsheet of all the finished work that can be opened in Excel for your review.

Conclusion

You'd be insane not to use this for your own transcription projects. Absolutely nothing else comes close in price and speed.

One thought: I suspect it'd get even faster if you split clips into more pieces. I'd bet that splitting into one-minute segments would reduce the time by at least half. I'll bet you'd be able to command lower rates with smaller MP3s too, since the time commitment would be lower, driving more competition for the tasks. If anyone experiments along these lines, please let me know!

First, the bad news. Two days ago, I received a polite email from David Winton, the director of Code Rush, asking me to take the out-of-print documentary off of Waxy.org. As promised, I immediately complied.

Now, the good news — In my reply, I asked David if he'd mind being interviewed, and he agreed! He's an accomplished director and producer, the creator of the Big Thinkers series for TechTV, and the cofounder of Winton/duPont Films, located in San Francisco's Presidio.

We had a wonderful conversation about the film, which revealed for the first time that he's planning on not only re-releasing Code Rush digitally, but considering releasing the original outtakes (100 hours of footage) to the public domain on Archive.org.

I wish all my takedown notices were like this! Read on for the full interview, with selected clips from Code Rush, used by permission.

Ethan Diamond, co-founder of the pioneering webmail service that became Yahoo! Mail, today lifted the veil on his new startup and gave me an exclusive first look.

Bandcamp is a free hosted publishing platform for musicians, taking the technical challenge out of setting up a site — transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics, payment processing, and so on.

Band websites are often pretty bad, hacked together by a friend of the band with Flash and Dreamweaver, or worse, by the record label. There are exceptions, but mostly, it's a sea of Flash intros, popup windows, mystery navigation, and 30-second sound clips.

Bandcamp is trying to change that, giving every album and track its own page with clean URLs and semantic markup, with the accompanying SEO benefits. Even before launch, they're topping Google results for many searches for song titles of participating bands.

As an infoviz geek, I'm particular fond of their analytics and audio visualizations. Detailed stats let bands track recent activity on their songs and albums, including where people are coming from, trend tracking, and which songs were skipped, played partially, or played in full. A number of real-time audio visualizations in Flash are available on each song's page, which can be shared and embedded on other websites.

Like Oddpost, the team's small and nimble — only four people, all splitting engineering and design duties. Co-founder/CTO Shawn Grunberger (also formerly with Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail) and two engineers working from Seattle and Vermont round out the distributed team.

Ethan was kind enough to sit down with me on launch day to talk about their inspiration and process developing Bandcamp.

Election coverage, natural disasters, and Wall Street meltdown got you down? Let's go back to a simpler time — 1984! It's morning in America again, and the dawn of a new information age.

Fortunately, one unlikely celebrity couple is here to guide us through the brave new world of spread sheets, data banks, and modems. In Computability, an instructional VHS tape from 1984, comedian Steve Allen and actress Jayne Meadows "take us on a light-hearted but detailed tour of the ways a home computer can change your life by simply using the correct software packages to suit your needs."

The video was originally inspired by the couple's Grammy-nominated "Everything You Wanted to Know About Home Computers," a vinyl LP released by Casablanca/Polygram Records in 1983. The LP's completely unavailable, but thanks to Sammy Reed's wonderfully strange podcast, I was able to recreate the full album. (Stream it below or download the 11 MB MP3.)

With an Apple II, a Kaypro 2, cheeseball computer animation and a grab-bag of corny jokes, this is classic computing from the VHS era. Keep an eye out for references to Wargames, hackers, Boy George, Ronald Reagan, and more.

I've highlighted the different sections and my own highlights in the video's comments, but feel free to add your own on Viddler.

Special thanks go to Dave Cassel from 10 Zen Monkeys for finding and loaning the VHS tape to me. Thanks to Colin Devroe at Viddler for the support for their brilliant service.

Girl Talk's Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music. Gregg Gillis created a beautiful, illegal mess of copyright clearance hell, which you should download immediately. (It's free, but I kicked in $20 for Gregg's legal fund and a copy of the CD.)

Last month, Rex Sorgatz asked about collecting metadata on the album for data crunching. After spelunking through Billboard's chart history, that sounded like my idea of a good time.

So I compiled all the data into spreadsheets, used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to collect some additional information, and pulled out a few charts. As always, I've provided CSV downloads for all the data along with the original output from Mechanical Turk, for those interested in experimenting with the platform.

Results

Here's the final spreadsheet with all the collected data. You can download the CSV or browse it using Google Spreadsheets. For more information about how the data was collected with Wikipedia and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, I wrote about my methodology in the next section.

There are 14 tracks on Feed the Animals, with a total of 264 sampled songs. "What It's All About" and "Like This" have 26 sampled songs each, tying for the most, while "Don't Stop" has the fewest at 11 songs. Overall, the album averages 19.8 songs sampled per track.

The timeline below shows where each sample was triggered across the entire album, as a percentage of the song's duration. (For example, a marker at the 50% mark on the 9th line means that a sample started halfway through track #9, "Hands In the Air.") You can get a sense of the flow of the album, how Gregg spaces samples apart and occasionally switches moods entirely by introducing three samples in quick succession.

Using the sample release dates collected from Mechanical Turk, the chart below shows the median sample age for each track. (The bars above and below each point represent the earliest and latest years for each track.) I was surprised to see a trend — the album uses relatively recent songs for the first three tracks, before taking us back to the late '80s and early '90s for the middle of the album, with the exception of "No Pause." Then, every song from track 9 to the end of the album gets progressively more modern. For the whole album, 1995 was the median year.

The chart below shows the sample release years in more detail, telling another story. Here, we can see how heavily Gregg uses samples from the last three years, and strongly avoids samples for the previous three-year period from 2001 to 2004. (Too old to be cool, but not old enough to be retro?)

I'm sure there's more that can be explored here, so feel free to send on your own analysis.

Methodology

Getting the sample list was easy. I took a snapshot of the album's Wikipedia entry and extracted all the samples using Excel's Text to Columns feature.

Now, I had a spreadsheet of all 264 songs sampled across 14 tracks, with each sample's original artist and song name. But to get the sample's release year, I'd need to go elsewhere. The Last.fm and Yahoo! Music APIs all support album release dates, but during testing, I found that the dates were unreliable. (Compilation albums and reissues led to incorrect dates, and some artist/song searches led to incorrect results.)

Instead, I decided to use human labor to fill in the gaps using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I created a new request using the new web-based tools for generating HITs (or "Human Intelligence Tasks") from a simple spreadsheet.

I paid $0.02 for each request, with each song verified by two different workers. Each worker was asked to search for the song on Billboard.com, All Music Guide, Wikipedia, or Google, and fill in the original release year. Here's an example of one of the requests.

Within an hour, all but 4 answers were submitted. The median time to finish a request was an impressive 26 seconds. (Amazingly, over 110 answers were completed in under 10 seconds without any errors.)

For 193 songs, about 73%, the two workers agreed on the year, so were approved immediately. For the rest, 27% of the songs, the workers came up with different answers, so I checked them manually. (In hindsight, I should have required three workers per song to resolve different answers.)

Surprisingly, I couldn't find a correlation between the amount of time spent on each task and the error rate. Workers who made mistakes took just as long as the accurate workers.

The spreadsheet below is the source data from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. (View it on Google Docs or download it in Excel format.) The "raw" sheet is the default output from Amazon, while the rest of the sheets are my own edits, breaking out the final set of accepted answers, the responses that were immediately approved, and the ones that were contested.

Overall, it cost me $13.20 for all 528 answers and took a little over two hours, an hourly rate of about $1.64. Simple to use, affordable, and I'll almost certainly use it again — for something a little more interesting next time.

If anyone out there wants to take a pass at getting the sample endings, sample genres, or any other additional metadata with Mechanical Turk or otherwise, send it along and I'll add it to the spreadsheet. Thanks!

Update: If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to wrangle an invite to Yahoo!'s Open Hack Day in Sunnyvale tomorrow. Hint, hint.

Back in 2004, I wrote about how high-quality videos from the Olympics in Athens were being digitized and posted online, in defiance of the networks and the IOC's rules.

At the time, NBC's online coverage was restrictive by today's standards — mostly highlight clips and no live video, delayed until after the events aired on TV, and required a valid credit card to verify residency in the United States.

But that was four years ago! YouTube hadn't launched yet, HD-quality streaming video on Vimeo was three years away, and BitTorrent or HDTV were only popular with early adopters.

This year, it's much improved, albeit with some caveats. NBC's official video is great quality, if you and your computer can stomach Silverlight (unavailable on non-Intel Macs). Their coverage is fantastic, though still tape-delayed. And, because of IOC regulations forbidding international distribution, NBC won't allow you to download, embed, or transcode any videos for your iPod or phone.

Is this availability enough to satiate the pirates, and what does the quality look like compared to 2004? I went poking through Usenet and some public and private BitTorrent trackers to see.

Usenet

Back in 2004, the place to go for illegal Olympic videos wasn't BitTorrent, popular trackers like Suprnova, or mainstream P2P clients. The best coverage, surprisingly, was found in the old-school Usenet binaries. It was a mish-mash of events, skewed heavily towards events with bikini-clad women, Brazilians, or bikini-clad Brazilian women, but other popular events and the opening ceremonies also showed up.

Today, the event coverage in Usenet is just as sporadic, but the quality is dramatically better. Compare the three videos below. The first is a sample from the gymnastics high bar finals from the 2004 games, followed by the same footage of Michael Phelps' win from Saturday's 400m IM final, as seen on NBCOlympics.com and a 720p HDTV rip found in Usenet.

Size Comparison (See Actual Size)

Sample Videos (right-click to download):

• Men's Gymnastics High Bar Finals - Usenet, 2004 (25MB MPEG1)
• Men's Swimming 400m IM Final - NBCOlympics.com, 2008 (5MB MPEG-4)
• Men's Swimming 400m IM Final - Usenet, 2008 (15MB MPEG-4)

Here's the full list of Olympics videos currently up on Usenet, as of this evening:

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony (720p)
Football - Group A - Ivory Coast vs. Argentina Extended Highlights
Football - Group B - Netherlands vs. Nigeria Extended Highlights
Football - Round 1 Highlights
Gymnastics - Men's Qualifying - USA
Shooting - Women's 10m Air Pistol Final
Swimming - Men's 100m Backstroke Semifinals
Swimming - Men's 100m Breaststroke Final
Swimming - Men's 200m Freestyle Semifinals
Swimming - Men's 400m Individual Medley (720p)
Swimming - Men's 4x100m Freestyle Final
Swimming - Women's 100m Backstroke Semifinals
Swimming - Women's 100m Breaststroke Semifinals
Swimming - Women's 100m Butterfly Final
Swimming - Women's 400m Freestyle Final
Volleyball - Women's Preliminaries - China vs. Switzerland

Most of these are in alt.binaries.tv, but some are also posted to alt.binaries.multimedia.sports. I'll update this list at the end of next week.

BitTorrent

But the trend for this year is clear — Usenet passed the torch to BitTorrent.

A quick search on Mininova or BTJunkie returns a huge list of every video found on Usenet, plus dozens more and growing hourly. Beyond public trackers, I've seen extensive activity on several private communities. On one of them, its members compiled a list of every event and were slowly adding their own recordings to create a massive archive of Olympics video.

And this is only Day 4! It'll be interesting to see how much of the Olympics was captured, digitized, and uploaded by the end of the games.

Also interesting: If this chart from Mark Ghuneim is accurate, the thirst for pirated Olympics coverage is greatest in China.

How often is Friendfeed hitting Flickr, and how many Friendfeed users are on Flickr?

We now have a glimpse into Monday's traffic, thanks to a snapshot provided by Kellan and Rabble's in their talk, Beyond Rest: Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub, presented earlier today at OSCON in Portland:

On July 21, 2008, Friendfeed hit Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users, of which 6,721 visited Flickr in that 24-hour period, and could have potentially uploaded a photo.

Three million requests for 6,000 updates. Clearly, polling isn't ideal. Don't miss the rest of the slides.

(Also, at its peak, Flickr is currently receiving 60 uploaded photos a second, "roughly 10 times the number of people born on Earth per second.")

Alan Taylor, The Big Picture
Photo by Buster McLeod

With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe's The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It's designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)

The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.

I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it's like being a programmer in a journalist's world.

The Big Picture's become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it "the best new blog of the year." What inspired it?

Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC's photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn't reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.