Here’s Alex’s winning video (with a shout-out to Miro):

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”

“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

…

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

My email is jessep [at] pculture.org.

PCF has an office in Worcester, MA, but most of our staff works from home around the world and we expect the same will be true of our interns– you don’t have to live in Worcester. We will expect you to work 30 hours a week for at least 9 weeks and to file a weekly progress report. Following your internship, we will happily serve as job references and provide written recommendations.

Members of the summer team will focus on some of the following:

• Engaging the blogosphere and general press
• Improving user support and help systems
• Fundraising
• Web development and design
• Open video outreach and education
• Sustainability and business development

TO APPLY: If you are driven, self-motivated, and want to sharpen your marketing and outreach skills, please email jobs (at) pculture.org. Include a resume and a brief note about why you would like to work for us.

p.s. If your school gives credit for internships, we’re happy to work with you to make this count for credit.

The new Miro Non-Profit Co-Branding Service

We launched the Miro customization and co-branding program earlier this year in order to give video producers a tool for simple, integrated distribution of many podcasts. We’ve had interest from lots of non-profits looking for simple ways to distribute video content online and we’ve always wanted to offer the co-branding service to them for free. These have included both public broadcasters and organizations that do independent media and activism.

Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to serve all of these non-profits because we haven’t had enough people to work with them. Rather than throwing up our hands, we’ve built a simplified, externally facing version of our co-branding tool especially for non-profit organizations. Now, any non-profit can get a co-branded version of Miro for free that will automatically update to include the latest Miro features.

If you are a non-profit and would like to have a custom version of Miro for your organization - “Miro - MyGroup Edition” - you can make it now. It will come pre-subscribed to your channels and with your own startuppage. It’s a great way to turn visitors to your website into subscribers.

Miro Non-Profit Co-Brander

This is one of the things I love about working for Miro: we’re able to do projects like this that are focused directly on serving our mission and helping non-commercial broadcasters reach an audience. It’s exactly why we’re here.

As usual, for-profit companies should contact us about co-branding opportunities. Email jessep@pculture.org for more info. Revision3, TED Conference, Deutsche Welle, and other companies and organizations are already offering custom versions of Miro with great results.

Update: Worcester, MA public access station WCCA has already used the custom Miro generator to make a “Public Access TV” version of Miro with feeds from stations around the country. Download the player or just those station feeds here.

What’s new:

* When you download videos from YouTube (whether by search or in a YouTube feed), we get an MP4 rather than a FLV, if it’s available. The video quality of the MP4s is much higher.

* Updated translations in lots of languages.

* We’ve updated the linux version to Mozilla 1.9.

* We’ve updated VLC on Windows to 0.8.6f (security fix).

* Bug fixes

CNET has announced that Miro is a Webware 100 winner! Thanks to all of you for your votes.

Here’s Miro’s official victory page and the Webware announcement which lists Miro in Editor Rafe Needleman’s personal Top 10.

They write:

Poised to become the ultimate desktop video app, Miro is across between a media player and a Bittorrent client. It handles every major video format including MPEG, QuickTime, AVI, H.264, DivX, Windows Media, Flash Video, 3GP, and others. It downloads torrent files and has a wealth of settings geared for user customization. You can e-mail videos, autodelete, autodownload, set favorites, organize your video collection, and more.

Miro arranges content feeds into “channels,” showing that there’s no need to reinvent television terminology when it’s useful. And unlike other software-based Web video viewers, Miro’s double duty as a Bittorrent client makes it a worthy addition to your desktop.

a. You can’t load to getmiro.com in a browser (sounds like a trick question).

b. When you start miro, the Miro Guide never loads, but you can download videos from feeds.

If you do see either of these bugs, please write to jed - at - pculture.org and let us know so we can track them down. As usual, any other bugs should go here Miro bug report. Lots of bugs will be resolved today, in fact, with the release of Miro 1.2.3 in a couple hours.

Cory writes: “Theoretically, I’m locked into a Virgin plan for another six months, but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve just announced that they’re violating the agreement by announcing that the services I can reach will be systematically slowed down unless they pay Virgin extra. That means that we’re now null and void. I’ll be calling to cancel today. Who’s with me?”

Got Virgin for internet? Cancel it and tell them why.

At our Worcester office, we have a Charter cable internet connection. We’ve been noticing that they appear to be restricting BitTorrent traffic and we’re canceling our service this month. Miro, of course, supports evasionary encryption to get around such blocking, but a technology arms race is no substitute for real public protections.

Cory’s full post.

Update: Folks have been asking what Cory is going to switch to. He tells me:”I’ve got two lines at home, BT and Virgin, so when I manage to kill Virgin, I’ll keep BT for the rest of the year, then have a look around… I’m not fond of BT (they’re participants in Phorm), but I’m locked into them, too.”

At the PCF office, we have both Charter and Verizon. We’ll be using our Verizon account for now, as they seem to be more neutrality positive so far.