Ashton Mills08 November 2006, 6:08 AM
No this isn't about the elections in the US, and how we can send men to the moon but can't make a voting machine without a bias. You could, however, probably watch the politicians kissing babies through the eyes of pop culture with Democracy: a culture driven video based RSS aggregator.
No this isn't about the elections in the US, and how we can send men to the moon but can't make a
voting machine without a bias. You could, however, probably watch the shenanigans through the eyes of popular culture with Democracy though, a culture driven video based RSS aggregator. Or, as the Democracy project likes to call it, 'Internet TV'.
Democracy can pull in, according the to project page, some 700 hundred channels and if, like cable, you still can't find something worth watching at least here you can add your own -- in fact, Democracy encourages it.
As a "culture driven medium", all the content is supplied by people like you and me. Well, some of them actually have talent for the silicon screen, especially when it comes to the Wayne's World type homebrew shows (and yes there are some great ones to choose from), but for the most part Democracy's channel content is an eclectic mix of music, culture, and whatever people throw up on the Net in video feeds, video blogs, and plain old video files. My first foray into Democracy brought me:
- Hak.5, the 'hacking' channel
- French Maid TV
- Adult Swim (it's actually music)
- Borat excerpts (can't go wrong there)
- HBO docco on Diebold voting machines (funnily enough)
- The Media Rights channel
- Ask the techies!
- Mainstream music videos
- Did I mention French Maid TV?
And that was just the first few minutes, there's a lot to explore.
Many videos are sourced from other sites such as youtube or Videobomb, which actually works with democracy to allow you to rate content. And, as if it couldn't get more hip, media is distributed via bittorrent. So the more people who are watching, the more people who get to watch.
Downloaded videos automatically 'expire' to stop your drive space being eaten up, unless you choose to hang onto your favourites.
Although comparisons to youtube are inevitable (and again, some videos feed from there), Democracy also hosts higher resolution movies and, as an aggregator does, manages the volume of information and makes it easy to find, explore, save, and promote videos that interest you.
I wasn't expecting that much when I got into Democracy, but it's certainly got my *cough* vote of confidence, at least as a concept. It's also cross platform with binaries for Windows, Mac, and of course Linux including packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo so there's no excuse not to try it.
So If you're looking for a bit of culture, don't go out for it, download it.
 Democracy Windows |
 Democracy Linux |