RSS is not a feature

I was wondering if Yahoo's new Mediacenter clone supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures. And I realized: that's not a feature. That's central. A developer or product manager may think: "oh, we can build that in later". But without RSS support, you have another closed media delivery system. Who cares about that? I am still waiting for the day that Tivo, Windows Media Center and so on truly support RSS. Really throw their weight behind it.

Flamenco Download

The granddaddy of all faceted browse systems, Flamenco, is now available as a free Flamenco Download

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | BBC unveils radical revamp of website

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | BBC unveils radical revamp of website: "The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com."

Mmm. OmMalik (link) doesn't like it. I'm worried too. The BBC team has clearly shown they're very good at doing bottom up webby projects, but announcing something like this, like a big plan, is just setting it up to fail.

Yahoo! Go - TV - What Is It?

Hey, Yahoo is going for the TV space as well. Yahoo! Go - TV - What Is It?

I say why not? Microsoft is doing it, Apple is doing their darndest best, and all the old school tv players are doing it.

Whatever happens in the coming years, somehow internet tv will find its way to your television set. And if it's somewhat open (and they'd be stupid not to be), that means videoblogs will too. I can't wait.

Google's GData, MySQL, and the Future of on-line Databases (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Jeremy from Yahoo is listening again to Adam Bosworth's (from Google) talk on the future of Mysql. The vision is that the new webOS will have certain data types (see
Google OS taking shape), and use RSS with a few extensions as its query language. And Google and others are building it like crazy. These are interesting times.

I wonder what Odeo are up to? They roll out little features now and then. But they're surprisingly quiet for a startup. I guess they're getting that pay service (whatever it is) ready to go...

All this chittah-chattah

All this chittah-chattah: "When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other."

Ratings are overrated

In information architecture, ratings are overrated. Not only do ratings often create competition around the wrong attributes, also, ratings often end up being meaningless in particular implementations. What does a 4.5 star rating mean? Usually, the answer is: nothing.

Ratings are overrated. Except when they're not.

Can you spell two point o?

When you spend more time on design than on grammar: "You can specify your interest in some topics, pick from what other people's interests, and even customize it by providing a reading list."

The poorbuthappy guide to being gainfully unemployed |

We're starting an informal conversation about being gainfuklly unemployed (ie. working for yourself) here: The poorbuthappy guide to being gainfully unemployed. Check it out, leave a comment!

Is there a way to use an iPod video to record audio interviews and such? Both Belkin's microphone adaptor and the griffin italk don't seem to work with the video ipod, as far as I can tell.

Rolling Stone : The Rise of the Video Blog

Rolling Stone : The Rise of the Video Blog: "Rocketboom may be the vanguard in the march of the vlogs, but it's hardly alone. Video-blog monitor Mefeedia.com currently lists more than 6,900 vlogs. And while the vast majority are essentially home videos glorifying children, hobbies and pets, vlogs are beginning to infiltrate the mainstream media, part of the increasingly seismic shift in the way we get our news and entertainment."

Big Media still struggles to understand what I like to call authentic media. It's not just about homevideos or funny dogs.

Famous Hollywood People are starting to videoblog now.

Famous Hollywood People are starting to videoblog now. Here's Jack Black's videoblog.

Those crazy Famous Hollywood People!

Flickr: Photos tagged with harlemrosegarden

Flickr: Photos tagged with harlemrosegarden. We had a bunch of volunteers in the community garden. I put some pictures online. It was great to work in the garden again, even though it was raining. And it's my birthday today. Now I gotta run to hear Aiwa Ong talk.

uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures: Practicing Usability in Hong Kong

uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures: Practicing Usability in Hong Kong: "Here at the uiGarden, we have been having discussions on whether there are cultural differences between practicing usability in the West and the Far East. In an exploration of the theme, we interviewed Apogee’s own Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong. They give their own uptakes of the discussion and offer us their insights from their own experiences of working in Hong Kong."

It shows in the systems we build...

I was just at an anthropology conference where they were talking about the importance of the race/gender/... of the interviewer vs. the interviewee. A black lady said: "When I was interviewing in Africa, people told me they opened up to me because of my color and grey hairs". The discussion was interesting, it made me think of the importance of a diverse team. In web development, usually everyone is white male, and I think it shows in the systems we build.

apophenia: medical marijuana

apophenia: medical marijuana: "Today, the FDA issued a statement saying that there is no scientific proof that medical marijuana helps patients better than other prescription drugs. This infuriates me. In 1994, i broke my neck. I was given valium (and a lot of other things) and became extremely addicted to it. I was in a constant fog. To make matters worse, it made my body unable to register pain so when i tossed and turned at night, i made everything worse. I kept losing vision and hearing, even while drugged out of my mind. Weening off of valium was hell and i was super resentful towards the medical establishment for getting me addicted to it. Without valium, the pain was brutal, but i refused to go back on that evil drug."

Rosenfeld Media - Card Sorting

Rosenfeld Media - Card Sorting. Donna Maurer, about THE expert on cardsorting, and definitely someone with a lot of practical experience, is writing a book about cardsorting. I can't wait. I really like the approach LouRosenfeld is taking with his new book company. Practical UX books. Just imagine!

The Google OS is taking shape

Through it's API, Google is starting to define its OS for outside developers. The main characteristic of the OS seems to be its web simplicity. Everything has of course a URL. Google defines "kinds", which are major content types, like "event" or "message". A message can be an email, a blog entry, a comment or anything like that.

So Google's services (calendar, mail, ...) use a common language and common content types ("kinds"). This promises to be powerful stuff, and as we've seen with the opening of Amazon's S3: we're just getting started.

Common Elements:"Kinds": "The collection of elements that together describe a contact is called the Contact "kind." Some of the elements in the Contact kind are ordinary Atom or RSS elements; others are defined by Google in a namespace called the "Google data namespace." By convention, the Google data namespace is usually referred to in XML code using the gd: alias; for example, the element that contains a telephone or fax number is . The schema URL for the Google data namespace is http://schemas.google.com/g/2005.

Google defines other kinds as well: Event (a collection of standardized elements that together represent a calendar event) and Message (a collection of elements representing an email message, discussion group posting, blog entry, or other message)."

Ryanne made a promo video for vloggercon2006: Peter Van Dijck is going (Quicktime Movie).

Seriously though, if you want to get in touch with the grassroots of online video, go to Vloggercon. And sign up now, coz I have a feeling they'll be sold out very soon.

Visio Tip: getting stuff in Powerpoint

If you have a Visio doc with lots of pages, and need to get them in PPT, what I do is to Save As Webpage. Then click the Publish button and you can increase the resolution of the pictures (I choose .png and the highest resolution), and save it. Then I just pick out all the images from the folder Visio generates, and paste those into PPT.

The reason I have to go through these steps is that if you do Save As .gif or .png or something, Visio only saves the current page, not all pages. So it's faster to use the Save As Webpage trick.

If you want to see how bottom-up media is being spread, check out the new Freevlog. Michael and Ryanne are doing a (ahem) "kick-ass" job of spreading the word.

Joi Ito's Web: Japan's

Joi Ito's Web: Japan's "Free Press": "I heard an interesting theory that I'd love for any Japan experts to confirm or debunk. Apparently, during the drafting of the Japanese constitution, the phrase "freedom of the press" was proposed by the US team. This was a big problem for Japan which had never really allowed any free speech. Instead of translating it as "freedom of the press" in terms of free speech they changed the meaning to freedom of "printing press" sort of press."

Who'd a thunk it? Google getting into design and usability

Google has always been good at minimalism, but as they expand into more complex apps (UI-wise), there seems to be a move towards getting "designers" involved. Google calendar got help from Douglas Bowman, Google got Jeffrey Veen to join them with their purchase of measuremap from Adaptive Path.

The challenge will be to: a) create a somewhat consistent feel in all their new ajax apps (which is somewhat happening), and b) instill a culture among engineers that values "design" enough for their products to be usable.

They seem to be well on their way. The word on the street about Google is that they're actually getting very advanced at doing usability testing and measuring results. I have the feeling they'll be like Amazon: no apparent focus on design and such, but a very deep, measuring, "engineer"-like way of doing usability and design. So far, some of their apps have been horrendous to use (RSS reader), others I quite like (the new calendar).

videoblogging's power to humanize.

SB Forum on Digital Transitions Vlog: this is a great example of the power of videoblogging to humanize conversations. (via Jay)

But is it just me, or did Michael Jackson take over Mena Trott's body? And should that worry you if you have a Typepad blog? Mm. The plot thickens.

We Are The Media : What’s going on with Veoh?

We Are The Media : What’s going on with Veoh?: The Veoh saga continues. Veoh is "stealing" (the quotes because it depends who you ask) videos from videobloggers, putting them on their site without attribution, trasncoded and hosted by them.

The poorbuthappy guide to being unemployed: together with my friend Paola, I am starting a blog/discussion site about working for yourself. I love working for myself, and I love to talk about it.

Go check it out.

loadedpun: Veoh (a VC-funded video company) is pulling in videos, re-encoding them and hosting them on their blog with no link back. This kind of "re-hosting" (I just made that up!) should be done through an opt-in mechanism, Veoh doesn't use opt-in. It is probably quite illegal, and the videoblogging community is up in arms. We'll see how it goes. In a world of fuzzy content rights, this should prove to be an interesting case.

YouTube Raises $8 Million from Sequoia Capital

YouTube is in trouble. Apart from the obvious problems with copyrighted material, their businessplan (which I know nothing about) seems flawed: It
plans to start doing contextual advertising by the middle of the year.

That is a problem. If contextual ads is the best idea they can come up with (come on guys!), their brand will suffer heavily. And I don't think their brand is that strong right now, although they are very, very popular. The problem lies also in their cost structure: YouTube must be quite expensive to run. So just placing ads on there? Contextual ads?

The thinking behind contextual ads is that the user is interested in them because they are "relevant" to them. Think about this in the context of YouTube (not a Google search). I'm not gonna give away what I think they should be doing, but it's definitely not contextual advertising.

Amazon plogs

Amazon's new "plog" feature (who the hell came up with that name?) is fascinating. It is basically a feedreader, personalized for you, with blog items by the authors of books you've bought. The authors write blogentries specifically for Amazon. And you can leave comments.

In other words, it's a direct connection between you and the authors of the books you buy. It's quite brilliant. If they can get the implementation right (and get rid of that silly name).

It'd make even more sense if Amazon were to aggregate the actual blogs of writers who have a blog already (many do), instead of making the authors write specifically for Amazon. Now, you get messages like this: "Speaking of which, I tend to blog pretty actively over there, so I probably won't spam your Amazon pages with too much material." That's not good.

I'm trying out the newest Drupal, it is MUCH more usable and has most of the configurable options you'd want. Really, MUCH more user friendly. Congrats team!

Powazek: Just a Thought: Death to User-Generated Content

Powazek: Just a Thought: Death to User-Generated Content: Derek Powazek: "So let's not give in to the buzzphrase du jour. Let's use the real words. Those people posting to Amazon pages? They're writing reviews. Those folks on Flickr? They're making photographs. And if we must have an umbrella term to describe the whole shebang, I have a suggestion. Try this on for size: Authentic Media."

I like.

Joho the Blog: [f2c] Christopher Sacca, Google

Joho the Blog: [f2c] Christopher Sacca, Google: "Chris Sacca is head of Google's Special Initiatives. There are about 5 million terabytes of info in the world and google has collected about 170T so far."

Gyre.org : New York Times: Iraqi documents are put on Web, and search is on

Gyre.org : New York Times: Iraqi documents are put on Web, and search is on: "The U.S. has put thousands of untranslated documents, captured from the former Iraqi government, online in an experiment to see if volunteer researchers can find evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al-Qaeda that the official intelligence agencies could not."

Videoblogging Week 2006

Videoblogging Week 2006 is a great way to get started with videoblogging. Just do it.

EricRice.com :: Let me break it down for you. Podshow = Old Media.

EricRice.com :: Let me break it down for you. Podshow = Old Media.: "So, yeah, let me be clear:
- Podshow is not a business I trust.
- I am concerned for friends and other very talented folks who are part of the organization. "

USATODAY.com - Google's hidden payroll

USATODAY.com - Google's hidden payroll: "Because Adsense earnings can vary widely depending on a site's traffic or subject matter, many Web publishers in the developed world don't bother participating. Whereas a $25 monthly payout may not be worth the trouble to a blogger in Manhattan, it can mean the world to a blogger in Manila."

Moving On and Trading Places (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Moving On and Trading Places (by JeremyZawodny): "I recently left Yahoo to go to work for Google."

I realized something else this morning. Microsoft has a videosite that uses Quicktime. Google starts syndicating video using Yahoo's MediaRSS site. There is some movement in the standards space: the big players are slightly starting to support each others' standards.

Technorati Search: iasummit: I just realized something. Technorati has a strategic problem: with more and more personalized features (your favourites, ...) they're very close to morphing into Bloglines. But they don't want to *be* Bloglines.

Bloug: From consulting to products and services

Bloug: From consulting to products and services: a LOT of information architects have been starting to build products lately. Lou made a list. It's in the air!

I'm back from the IA Summit. I wish I had time to write about it, but I have other fish to fry. It was a really good one. My talk went really well, I kept it down to earth and the jokes really worked, even though I lost my notes and thus was kinda nervous. But I had practices it 4 times before going to the summit, so I had the material pretty much down.

I also reconnected with a whole lot of people. I didn't party much - the conference information and social overload isn't for me - all the noise and buziness makes my head hurt.

So all in all, perhaps the best IA Summit so far. It just keeps getting better. I also really like the efforts the organizers make to make it a social experience for everyone, newbies included, and to tear down the "old boys club" feeling that this and many other conferences suffer from. Fantastic work.

I also realized that I see most of my (few) role models at the IA Summit. Role models, people you can look up to and learn from, are really important in life. I met LouRosenfeld the first time at an IA Summit, I saw Steward Brand speak at an IA Summit (an ongoing inspiration!), and this time I was honored to meet David Weinberger (another inspiration). I was also very pleased to have an opportunity to listen to Dana Boyd and Rashmi Sinha talking about social aspects of the web. By the way, Rashmi's upcoming Mindcanvas product rocks very, very much.

And that's enough for now.

apophenia: MySpace, HR 4437 and youth activism: "For good reason, many Americans are outraged by HR 4437, a House bill that will stiffen the penalties around illegal immigration. Over the weekend, protests began with over 500,000 people taking to the streets on Saturday. Online, teens wrote bulletin board posts on MySpace, encouraging their peers to speak out against the bill. On Monday, instigated through MySpace postings, thousands of teens across the country walked out of school and marched in protest. In Los Angeles alone, 36,000 students walked out and took to the streets. Throughout the country, thousands of teens walked out in protest."

A Zulu In Silicon Valley: Mefeedia - Video feeds for iTunes and your Browser

A Zulu In Silicon Valley: Mefeedia - Video feeds for iTunes and your Browser: "I like mefeedia. Why? Because unlike Yahoo! Podcasts (which I like), I can accumulate all my video feeds into a single feed which I can stream into my iTunes player."

Upcoming videoblogging books:

Video Blogging by JayDedman, Joshua Kinsburg and Joshua Paul $24.99
0-470-03788-1 Publication date July 2006 [I don't understand, was
the book cancelled and then re-instated?]

Secrets of Video Blogging Diana Weynand, RyanneHodson, MichaelVerdi,
Shirley Craig $24.99 ISBN 0-321-42917-6 Publication date April 2006

Hands-on Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting Damien Stolarz and
Lionel Felix $34.95 ISBN 0-240-80831-2

Videoblogging for Dummies by S.C. Bryant $24.99 ISBN 0-471-97177-4
Publication date June of 2006.

loadedpun rocks

loadedpun is quickly becoming THE place to follow what's going on in online video land.

"Ask A Ninja: Question 15 "Deciding Like A Ninja"

Not bad, funny and well edited. But a bit gimmicky. I prefer personal vlogs altogether.

Watch movie (Quicktime, 2.3 min, 14.3 MB)

Original post, from Ask A Ninja - You Got Questions, Ninja Got Answers.:

Ryan asks the Ninja if his friend Paul makes bad decisions. Click below to Download this movie: (Use 'Save As' Control Click for Macs and Right Click For Windows) iPod Quicktime WMV MP3 If you like it, tell a friend! You got questions, Ninja got answers. Previous Episodes of Ask A Ninja Remember to send your questions to askaninja@gmail.com. This is a podcast and can be automagically downloaded to you computer through iTunes. Please upgrade to the newest version of Quicktime.

(Via Mefeedia)

The Mefeedia core team (Devlon, Michael, me) uses a mailing list, mostly to discuss strategy and stuff. We tried using the 37sigs chatroom app but the email just seems to work better.. the problem with the chatroom is that you have to open it, it's kinda hard to follow. Gmail works better.

Anyways, since we fixed the speed of Mefeedia, we're all happy and fuzzy again. The new homepage really helps too.

Yesterday I added a list of *new* feeds to the homepage, so that when someone adds their feed, anyone see that's on their homepage and can easily subscribe to it. It really fits in nicely with te philosophy of sending Mefeedia love not just to popular feed (it's not about popularity!) but to newbies. Newbies need subscribers a lot more than popular feeds, so that's who we want to highlight.

Anyways.

Sun Grid hit by network attack | CNET News.com

Sun Grid hit by network attack | CNET News.com. So the day they launch Sun's grid computing service gets hit by an denial of service attack.

Other peoples memories is a concept I love: found art. They're putting videos online that they found (often in 8mm form).

This video has an unknown family's memories of Barcelona: Watch movie (Quicktime, 0.9 min, 4.5 MB) Original post

(Via Mefeedia)