Videoblog archive tutorial for blogger
Freevlog tutorial: how to put an Instant Visual Video Archive on your Blogger Blog. Ryanne from Freevlog made a tutorial movie - it's fantastic. A good example of good video tutorials.
Open media
"1. When Google first unveiled video.google.com, you had to use their patched version of VLC to play videos there, and if you used Google's patched version of VLC, it would only play items hosted on http://video.google.com. (They have since changed over to a Flash player using FLV, which is not like this).
2. If you want to watch news video on MSNBC.com, you have to be using Internet Explorer or you will get an error message saying that IE is required. It's not good enough to have Windows Media Player as either a standalone or plugin, and it's not good enough to use an alternate media player like VLC which is capable of rendering Windows Media. It's possible that there are technical issues associated with this (probably the site relies on features specific to IE) but not that these technical issues were insurmountable.
3. If you want to browse the iTunes music store over the web, you have to be using iTunes as your web browser. With Internet Explorer or any other browser aside from iTunes, you get an error message saying that you must use iTunes.
What these have in common is that the server and client are tightly coupled, so that the same entity must own both.
So here's a potential litmus test: what makes media open is whether any potential pair of clients and servers can work together to fetch it and render it."
Wordpress question
Template Tags « WordPress Codex.
I have a Wordpress question, if someone could point me in the right direction...
I have wordpress in domain.com/blog/. On another page (domain.com/index.php), I want to display the latest 10 posts in certain categories. How can I do that? What files do I need to include, and such.
A pointer in the right direction would be enough - I'm just not familiar with the whole Wordpress Way, so not sure which files to start hacking.
Thanks!
A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis
A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis: "I have been using a lot of new web services lately. It's part of my job to do that. New companies submit business plans for us to evaluate. The first thing we usually do is use their service. Most of what is getting built today requires a fair amount of user participation and thus a lot of attention."
Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville
Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville: "Unfortunately, Tim is suffering from apophenia. I think he caught it from Clay Shirky. I hope they both get well soon. People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away."
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Beyond the basics
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Beyond the basics: does Windows media Center support RSS 2.0 with enclosures? In other words, can you plug in an RSS feed with video enclosures and will it automatically download videos? (like iTunes does?) I haven't been able to figure this out...
RashmiSinhaSaturday10AM - TagCamp: Rashmi's notes - good reading.
Yahoo travel rocks
Yahoo travel is rocking the online travel world. I just noticed this innovation: instead of making you enter dates and then telling you what prices they have flights available for, they let you look for prices for a destination on any date, tell you the cheapest offerings, and then let you search for dates that those flights have seats available. Amazing. The UI for that part is functional and looks like this:
As far as I know, no other online travel service lets you search like this. I've been waiting for this for years.
iTunes 1-click is pretty fucked up
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: "Dear Apple developers working on the podcasting portions of iTunes, ...".
The Apple 1-click subscription technology is broken. What's worse, after Lucas told me I should remove the content-type application/rss+xml from my pcast files in Mefeedia, so I did but it breaks iTunes compatibility. So iTunes is totally messed up here. Let's hope they fix this soon and we can leave this behind us.
Archive
In the old days, before the blog, I used to write "articles" (yes, actual html pages), "upload" them and everything. They're not particularly relevant anymore, some are embarrasing, but here they are, for posterity and because nice URLs stay around. The only one that's still really relevant is Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion. Old pages on this website:- How people really browse.
- A short and easy introduction to everything. (I still love that title!)
- Content management: how to let users add formatting
- Email interface design 101 (this one has a few interesting ideas in it)
- Funky forms for interface designers. (pre-AJAX)
- Finding blind spots in navigation. (still somewhat relevant)
- Illustrating ease (my attempt to start a library of illustrations of the idea of ease of use
Wired News: We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?
Wired News: We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?: "Friendster, which today has millions of Filipino members, is one of a number of advertising-supported internet sites grappling with the dilemma of how to take advantage of unforeseen overseas popularity. Such sites are finding that business models that work in large, developed countries need serious readjustment in nations with small populations or low internet-penetration rates."
Sam Ruby: Actually innovative
Sam Ruby: Actually innovative: "If youâre working for an actually innovative startup, please consider thinking about i18n, unicode, and all that jazz. Actually, do more than consider it. Just do it. Not everyone speaks English, and thereâs no reason to restrict âWeb 2.0â? (thereâs that involuntary shudder again) to English speakers."
And: "
Totally disagree. i18n is extremely resource intensive. Everything being equal, the startup that iterates on the English product will easily beat the one that doesnât iterate on the multi-lingual product."
It depends. I18N can let you win over a lot of markets the other guys are ignoring. Big deal.
braintag: Mark Napier @ Eyebeam 10/27/2005
braintag: Mark Napier @ Eyebeam 10/27/2005: "In order to preserve his work beyond the "life" of his pieces, he's archiving his source code to microfilm."
That's an idea.
braintag: MySpace vs. My Space
braintag: MySpace vs. My Space: "Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven't been able to get out of my head since:
Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?
Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?"
An insightful post, check it out.
Some tips for new Typepad vloggers.
Now that Typepad has integrated videoblogging, I wanted to share some tips for new videobloggers. Some of the stuff that we've learnt over the past year or so doing this.
1. You have something to say. Try the videobloggingweek (where you post 1 video every day for a week) for yourself and at first, you'll feel like "what can I have possibly to say". Then you realize everything is interesting. Every day, there are at least 5 videobloggable moments.
2. It's about connecting people and speaking truth. Vlog what you really believe. It's a great exercise in not becoming the fake person, the corporate drone you always feared of becoming. I think people become that way because they just lack the practice of saying what they really think.
3. Small digital fotocameras (the Canon elph for example) work fine. It's not about the gloss.
4. As you become better, you can do most editing while filming. As you film, your edit-eye knows what to film and how it will be used.
5. Make sure to always put your url at the end of a video. You don't know where it might end up, at least like this people will be able to find your blog.
Go to Mefeedia.com to find about a 1000 videobloggers. And add your feed if you're videoblogging too.
Finally, if you're really into this stuff, join the videoblogging mailing list, the best place to learn more.
Enjoy!
Google Base = RSS database?
Google Base Was Sort of Live. So Google is doing a simplified kind of database.
Why would they do that? I heard a talk with a Google engineer addressing the SQL crowd a while back, saying that a massively distributed, simplified database (no complex queries), using RSS as a data transport mechanism is the wave of the future.
Presentations 101: have a fight.
VCLP0112.MOV (video/quicktime Object) Somehow, having a fight during a presentation seems more entertaining than not having one. (Not that I had it planned that way.)
All that alpha, limited beta and so o web2.0 stuff these days. Them kids! Mefeedia went into public beta after I coded it together in two days in December 2004, and has been running happily ever since.
Oh, and today we moved to the new server. Dedicated and shiny :)
You’re It! » Blog Archive » Peter Morville: the Tagsonomy interview: "the semantic poverty of tags."
We're fixing that, though.
ACNielsen News Release - 19 October 2005 - One-Tenth of the World’s Population Shopping Online
Just when I wanna try AdWords, I get this: " AdWords will be offline for 4 hours beginning immediately." Damn!
petervandijck’s blog - hey, Wordpress does blog hosting now! They're sending out invites.
socialight launches. It's a mobile location aware app, I did some user testing for them earlier this year. Check it out. Basically, it lets you annotate your environment with photos, text and such, and then your friends can pick up those annotations later.
What it's not
I'm working on version 2 of Mefeedia, my personal crazy project. In about a month plus some, it'll go live. And:- It's not Web 2.0. What happened with web 1.0? Or the plain web? Is anyone getting excited about that anymore?
- It's not the Flickr for video. Clearly, Flickr will be the Flickr for video.
- It's not 'an amazing new way to'. OK, so it is the best place to find indie video. But it's not that amazing. Jeezes.
Findability and folksonomies
I am blogging some stuff from the iainstitute mailing list, whose archive is currently not public, which is kinda ironic for an organization that focuses on findability.
Anyways. Peter Morville (with a new book on findability) and Thomas Vanderwal (who coined the term folksonomy) sparring over folksonomies:
Thomas, refering to an article Peter wrote:
"I really like most of the article. I agree with the Wikipedia section, but have more scepticism as the *folksonomy* entry is nearly always wrong these days with the definition and examples it gives.
I do start running into problems with your article in the folksonomy area. I agree that early on the Technorati folks coopted the folksonomy term, but they have shied away from its use of late as they realize it is not what it is doing with their tagging effort.
What Technorati is doing is what Cory Doctorow labelled Metacrap.
Technorati tagging is a gory mess, it adds little value, it captures a variety of tagging (and decidedly non-tagging -- commercial weblog tools have their categories counted as tags by Technorati) practices with various points of view and gumbles them up. It could even be worse than Metacrap. I have talked with them a fair amount about how to approach fixing it and time will show if they have an interest.
It seems you have had blinders on with the folksonomy tools since the IA Summit in Montreal Peter. As the serendipity tools like http://del.icio.us have been growing up into fairly decent findability tools as their corpus of materials grows. The creator of del.icio.us has left his day job and has been focussing on the tool as a full-time job and has five other developers now making the product better. They built their own search engine which has just gone live and is permitting their corpus, which is based on their contributors' point of view, to be used more easily.
Having just returned from Europe from the Euro IA Summit, I had a lot of discussions with people there about folksonomy. Many wished I had presented on that subject or were writing a book on the subject (hmm...). There is a problem in Europe and with the rest of the world
that folksonomies help resolve, it is a cross-cultural tool. It easily leverages the language of those tagging from one culture and uses the object being tagged as a pivot to find other cultures vocabulary for similar objects. Folksonomies are quite a popular tool in non-parochial Amerian eyes. They help greatly with findability.
The key piece is that the folksonomy tools are broad folksonomies so people can pivot.
[...]
Peter answers:
I'm glad you enjoyed (most of) the authority article, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I do think folksonomies as an experimental subject are very interesting, and I don't dispute that tagging can improve findability and refindability. I'm just not sure that most people most of the time will find it worth the investment in the long-run. I forced myself to try del.icio.us before the IA summit panel so I'd have something useful to say about it. I haven't used it since. In any case, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some (but not all) of these issues.
Thomas:
You really should try del.icio.us again, particularly since most of what you stated is has not been the case for many months and you are a voice of authority. You should also try Yahoo's My Web. Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand.
[...]
Peter:
When I get a chance, I will revisit del.icio.us and explore Yahoo's My Web.
Then I will be much better prepared to criticize them :-) In the meantime, I
will maintain my skepticism, based purely on my problem with the following
proposition:
"Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand."
Google Desktop takes no time and the refindability payoff is arguably much
better.
The case against findability.
Things should be easy to find - an information architect could agree with that.
The recent problems surrounding Google maps sound, from a distance, silly. That crazy Indian president! What is he talking about?
But culture is a funny thing. At the IA retreat a few weeks ago I showed a screenshot of the levis website. Totally offensive to me (from Belgium), none of the attendees noticed a particular problem. The thing with culture is, what makes 1 person from 1 culture angry, won't mean a thing to someone from another culture.
I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is âtapuâ?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn't be shown to just anyone.
I guess I'm trying to say: this idea that information should be freely available is a cultural one. And it's not always necessarily (this is painful to say) right.
This is a real wheelchair ad!
Colours In Motion Spazz_G Everyday Wheelchair: "Have you been dreaming of that unique custom wheelchair that would not cost you an arm and a leg?"
Unbelievable.
alarm:clock: Peter Rip Lets It Rip: "So where are we not investing? In companies that are only focusing on the social/collaborative aspects of the Web (for example "collaboration-assisted search engines"), There will certainly be some big successful companies, but it is hard to have an informed opinion about which of the many will have a sustainable advantage. We are in the prediction business and we don't know how to predict those markets."
Apple put Steve Jobs' speech online. Apple - QuickTime - Apple Special Event - October 2005
"It's great, it's fantastic, it's fantastic, it's fantastic."
And: "It's great!"
People keep talking about what a great presenter Steve Jobs is, but he pisses me off. He's got charisma, but the "great fantastic" bit, god, that's just... amazing! Fantastic!
Selection readers
Yes! That's me!
Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Saddle Up to the MiniBar: "We also know there are "selection readers" out there. (I'm one of them.) Selection readers are just what they sound like: people who select text in a document as they read it. Maybe it's a kind of nervous habit. For me, I think I do it to kind of help me keep my place in the document."
Compelling experiences
How to make money with digital lifestyle aggregators - Part I :: AO: "So personalization and customization find their destiny intermixed with Integration and Aggregation. The only way to produce compelling enough experiences is by integrating a wide range of built-in constructs, combining that with agregated web servcies and content and topping it all off with unprecedented levels of control and customization. In one product or service."
Marc Canter is so full of bullshit. Or, he just writes really badly. "Compelling experiences"? Spending too much time with the suits Marc? And get a spell checker.
And then: "branded memes and viral uptake". No, not just bad writing, he's lost. Bye Marc. See you later.
Yeah, I'm in that mood again.
Refactoring or starting from scratch?
For the next version of Mefeedia, I got 2 great developers. That's important for what follows.
I coded Mefeedia in PHP, in a weekend, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. A lot of projects start that way.
Over the past year, I've been spending months and months of real time developing the site. The architecture and the code aren't bad. It's kinda scalable.
I was talking to my devs, and they said: "Why not use Rails". It's the new hot thing. And i'm sure it's got lots of advantages. But I also know the power of refactoring, and that's the way I really wanted to go.
In the end I decided to go with Rails. Throw away all that code. And we didn't have a lot of technical discussions about the pro's and cons of both approaches. I made up my mind when one developer said: "I've been dreaming of a chance to work with Rails."
Happy developers are productive developers. And that's all there's to it.
The video ipod versus the psp for videoblogging
What's the difference between the video ipod and the PSP, related to videoblogging? What I'm interested in is this: how does this help spread the voices of millions of people through video, taking back a medium (video) that has been owned by Big Media for pretty much ever.
The basic difference seems to be that Apple opens up their platform, while Sony closes it. It is almost impossible to get your video on a Sony. It is trivially easy to get it on your video ipod. Just install iTunes and it's there.
Sony makes its money of the sales of games (a bigger industry than movies, remember?) and movies. Although I don't know how many people actually buy movies for PSP's, here in NYC in Harlem PSP's are everywhere, but people rip DVDs using a bunch of softwares. Supposedly Sony looses $$ on the sales of the PSP, which makes sense, because it is superpowerful: amazing games, wireless internet, and all that for the same price of the ipod? They have to loose money on that.
Meanwhile Apple makes money off the hardware. The music sales don't make a lot of money, and I don't expect the video sales to do this either. It's all about selling ipods. Which are (really) technically fairly simplistic devices. There are a lot of better portable video players out there already, but Apple wins by providing the complete package: device, UI and content via iTunes. Easy.
So for people with a real voice, videomakers, vloggers and bloggers, the ipod will be their biggest audience for a while. The PSP has a much better screen, and is technically much better suited to playing video, but the platform is so closed that you basically need to make a deal with Sony to get your video on there in an easy way.
iPod video with vlogger movies in itunes
iTunes 6 seems pretty vlogger friendly: I already had a bunch of subscriptions to videobloggers in iTunes 5. iTunes 6 adds a new section "videos", and it imports all the videos from video podcasts. They even have their own category, next to "Movies", "Music videos" and "TV shows". That's great news.
Here's a screenshot of iTunes' video section, showing video podcasts that I already had in my iTunes imported:
(promo) Again, if you want to find some good video podcasts or videoblogs as we call them to fill up your iTunes, check out Mefeedia.com, the best place to find indie videos.
the new video ipod creates a hungry market for short videos
Endgadget's first impressions of the video ipod: "What it needs most are more shows!"
Exactly. I've been waiting for this. Apple just created a huge market of people hungry for short videos. In 320x240 format. What's gonna happen when you unwrap your new shiny video ipod? You're gonna listen music. And watch some videos. Millions of people will do this.
After a few weeks, they'll get bored of watching the same old commercial, big media stuff on their devices, and start looking for free, interesting short videos. You'll discover someone somewhere is making video you just have to watch. And it will be dead easy to subscribe, letting your ipod filling up with video goodness. You'll find yourself watching Big Media less and less. Times millions of people. This is another step towards what we've been talking about: Big Media will no longer be the only media. Your favourite TV show might be someone you know. I'm excited.
Video ipod - indie video producers rejoice!
Apple is releasing a video ipod. This is great news for videobloggers and other indie video producers: demand for short videos will surge. Most vloggers have been producing content in 320x240 anyway, so it will fit the new ipod screen perfectly. Gotta get one now.
30G up to 75 hours of video, $299. 60G up to 150 hours video, $399. Shipping in one week. (Endgadget)
Of course, Jobs made some good deals with BigMedia: you can buy TV shows from the iTunes Music Store - Desperate Housewives, Lost and more shows from ABC and Disney. Five shows will be available to watch on iPod or computer: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Nightstalker, The Suite Life and some other Disney thang. $1.99 an episode.
The pricing is right. 2$ for commercial content.
But the idea is problematic if you believe in indie video. Apple will clearly do what they did with podcasting, and provide mostly Big Media content, with popular indie media mixed in. But where is the long tail of video? Where can I find the very specific stuff I'm interested in.
OK, that was a retoric question. Mefeedia is the best place to find long tail video.
Unfortunately the site is down right now, in the middle of a move to a dedicated server. I guess my timing was a bit off on this one.
(via Rodrigo)
Authority
Authority
"But then, authority was appropriated by the Technorati mob, where it swiftly lost definition in a tangled tag soup of popularity, power, trust, credibility, and relevance. These words were tossed around indiscriminately in a Bacchanalian festival of semantic anarchy."
Don't try to take on Peter Morville with metaphors, or he'll bust your chops (kick your ass) like he did with David Weinberger's Tree and Leave metaphor. Here's another great one:
"Fortunately, before the tag clouds could totally eclipse the sun, a new entity emerged as a source of authority and illumination."
Tag clouds that eclipse the sun! There's a metaphor that really expresses how the library science crowd feels! And he goes on:
"Though folksonomy was born on an information architecture list, it was quickly hijacked by the Technorati."
Go Peter! He's single-handedly (the rest of the IA community isn't doing much) taking back pride for information architects around the world.
Read the article. It goes on like this. Great stuff.
(Oh, and yeah, web 2.0 and all that!)
PCWorld.com - Gadget Freak: 'Must-See TV' Hits the Web? Finding Great Online Video: "As with regular old TV, the challenge is to find stuff worth viewing."
Yahoo! Search blog: Es Tu, Français? Yahoo is expaning its (frankly) groundbreaking work in I18N search.
At the IA retreat
I'm at the IA retreat in NY, and it's great. A few things I've learnt so far:- Nobody in the US knows the British TV show "Allo Allo".
- Making wireframes is too slow. But then again, wireframes are the perfect inperfect tool. A boundary object.
- Our tools are getting old: can't easily spec Ajaxy apps, portals, ...
- We need affordable methods (says Olga, and I believe her)
- When God said 'Name these animals', Adam (from the biblical story) got the first IA job (and God was the first client).
- "Tagging" can't really be translated very well into Spanish.
- "Usability" in Swedish is a real word (not a neologism like in English): Anvandbarhet" (sorry, no crazy Swedish accents).
Wired News: Tips From Top Taggers.
When taggers start to share best practices you know this whole folksonomy thing is starting to work. I was waiting for this!
iPod video
Damn speculation! The iPod video buzz is going crazy - supposedly Apple will come out with a video iPod in a week or two. And I just got my PSP today.
What will this mean for videobloggers? A lot of demand for short video content. Go to Mefeedia.com to find the most complete directory of videoblogs. A lot of cool stuff out there, and I'm working hard on the new version of Mefeedia to make it easier to find stuff. Which will be needed, because if Apple follows its approach of promoting commercial video content in its directory (trailers, short movies, ...), like it did with audio, then iTunes won't be the best place to find independent video. Mefeedia will.
So let's not speculate about whether Apple will release the iPod video - they will. No way they'll leave this market to Sony. And the "when" question is kinda boring. It might be within weeks. I'd bet on it, seeing that Christmas is coming soon and all. But whatever.
The bigger question, and the bigger revolution I think, is what will we be watching on that video iPod (or PSP or any other killer device that might come along). Will it be "repurposed" tv content? I hate that word to start with. And sure, the Simpsons are funny on any device. But if that's all we do I'd be dissapointed.
Steve Jobs will undoubtedly have pulled the iPod trick and made deals with lots of BigCo video providers. So expect Pixar content, lots of tv stuff, all that jazz. Boooring!
I hope that we'll start to watch independent video. Movies made by you, me and your grandmother. I mean the creative, funny, boring, niche stuff people are starting to create and put online by the thousands. I hope that your favourite show (no longer a "TV show") could be someone you know. The long tail of video.
What will you be watching on your brand-new iPod video? I'll be looking out for videoblogs myself.
Comments opened up again!
I have upgraded my Wordpress install to the latest and greatest, and installed some funky-looking comment spam killers, which means that finally the comments are open again for all to enjoy. Comments will show up immediately again, instead of waiting for days or weeks for my moderation. Enjoy! (And try to leave one here.)
When your subversion host goes down
I've started to use Subversion for versioning, together with the excellent TortoiseSVN client, and I am hosting my SVN repository with CVSdude.com. I was just about to get pretty giddy about how cool this versioning really is when working together with other coders, but this morning they're down. What a dependency!
What do you use? What do you do when your repository host goes down?
Amazon.com: Books: Ambient Findability: Peter's book is out, go get it while it's hot.
I noticed that Amazon changed the shape of their book page: they finally got rid of those side navs that nobody cares about. Page shape is one of my "things", the default for many designers is to do a top and sidebar, and then use that on every single page of the website, whether it makes sense or not.
But different types of pages need different overall shapes, going as far as even getting rid of the global nav if needed. It makes the site much more focused and usable. Here's 1 example: the instant archive page at mefeedia. It chucks the whole global nav altogether, and that's not always a bad thing. I still have to test that particular one, by the way :)
BBC NEWS | Health | Words 'can change what we smell': "labelling an unpleasant smell with a more appealing name can improve its aroma."
Who said labels didn't matter? Eh? Who was that? Stand up you crazy fool!
If I ws in London I'd be heading here: World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures
This is too cool - a Photoshop clone stamp brush for real life!
Watch movie 2.4 min 25.1 MB
(Original post, via The Last Minute)
For everyone who commented - your comments should now be approved. i just deleted 1000s of spam comments. I hate that shit. PHP and MySQL are loosing the plot?. The IA's should program has some good comments too. I have to fix this comment spam problem...