"it's gonna be crazy" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Richard BF.)
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Where are all the UK start-ups? (plasticbag.org)
Where are all the UK start-ups? (plasticbag.org). Indeed! And the Belgium ones? In Belgium, for example, startups US style (a few people come together and create a great product) are almost non-existent. It's hard to get money, it's hard to get any kind of support, you have no peers and everyone looks at you like you're crazy.
In NYC, on the other hand, a week doesn't go by where I don't have beer with people doing startups. The difference is amazing.
Sometimes you can be in NY (the Bronx here) and feel like you're in South America. Watch movie 0.8 min 2.4 MB
(Original post, via diariodeviaje)
Using video to explain features or tell stories about features
37 signals have a post today showing a video explaining features of some product. Ruby on Rails has been using video to show off the product pretty well. Since I'm working on Mefeedia, a website for videobloggers, I've given a lot of thought to the use of video.
There are various ways in which to use video. You can make videos showing off features. Great. You can be lucky enough to have users making videos to show off features (like here for Mefeedia). Even better - sometimes at least. And you can use video for more "soft" purposes, like to tell stories about your site.
For example, I made an Instant Archive feature for Mefeedia, where vloggers can put an archive of their videos with thumbnails on their site. I did it while talking to my users, and Michael shot a video when we came up with this. That's the advantage of having videobloggers as users.
The video is brilliant, really showing the foundation story of this one feature, and the enthusiasm we felt. It comes straight from the heart. It is linked from the Instant Archive page.
The 5 stages of videoblogging:Watch movie 1.2 min 5.3 MB
(Original post, via We Are The Media)
Did you encourage a videoblogger today
As the early videobloggers, we need to tell people about this, and show them. I was just encouraging a potential videoblogger, and to show them how fast it goes, here's the movie (10 mins later - Quicktime, about a meg).
Haven't videoblogged in a while. I downloaded the Ourmedia uploader and it's good. I build this Instant Archive feature on Mefeedia today, and everyone just plain loves it, and it just struck me how crazy it is that you can truly only build good things if you really, really talk to users. Here's the movie. (Quicktime, about a meg)
Video archive
This is my video archive. This page will always contain all my videos.What services out there let you view, in real time, another computer user interact with their screen? I don't need audio - I have a phone. It needs to be low-install on the users' side. And I don't need heavy applications, all I want is to see the screen of the other user and how they interact with it. The usability applications I've seen are overspecced and expensive. Webex is expensive. Any pointers?
Joel on Software - Hitting the High Notes: "You can't afford to be number two, or to have a "good enough" product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean, so good that people remark about it."
Sometimes he slips but Joel can really - really - write.
Shelley: Snapshot in Semantic Time: "I also wish more folk would take the time to pull together the threads in a meaningful way like Peter Van Dijck did with the early semantic web discussions."
We have a long way to go in enabling better conversations with our blogging tools. And better story telling. A blog post now is text and links. That's good - especially the links. But there are many more structures that we should support, like the semantic web one I did. I had to do that manually. Or like what I was trying to support with XFML: mini structured directories that can link together. There is so much, and microformats are leading some of the way.
Of course, with video it becomes even more urgent. You can't quote a part of a video right now, except in an experimental tool at Mefeedia. It's hard to link to videos you like, because you don't have a thumbnail available, or size information, and you really want to indicate size, type and such when you link. Except at Mefeedia, where I try to make that easier. It's hard to link videos together in conversations. I'm working on that.
It's all about mixing the ideas the social research people have about helping people to structure stories and conversations, with the ideas the web people have about web 2.0, you own your data, distribution and such. That mix will make some damn powerful stuff possible. I really hope we can break the wall of big binary video files, and make them more webby. We need that in order to have the kind of conversations blogging has enabled for text.
Vlogger for hire
Hello?: JOB HUNT: Mica is looking for a position in a media, arts, advertising organization and has an impressive resume. Spread the word, she's good.
Just back from a long drive to Toronto, an Indian wedding (congrats Ro!) and a long drive back.
A 60-second animated short showing the progress of tagging on Technorati.com between January and July 2005 -- from zero to 20 million tags. Animation created by the Art and Computer Science research group at Carnegie Mellon.
Watch movie Quicktime, 1 min 11.6 MB
(Original post, via Ourmedia MediaRSS Feed)
Funny first person view of the hills of San Fransisco in a car: Watch movie Quicktime, 1.3 min 4.9 MB
(Original post, via MICHAEL VERDI)
Paul and Patty rock!
Watch movie Quicktime, 0.8 min 1.9 MB
(Original post, via DLTQ.org)
We can play their game :) vlogging talking points
AOL portal
Openvision.tv are launching a new desktop video aggregator. It has an option in it to search videos, and you can select various sources to search - Yahoo, the internet archive, blogdigger and Mefeedia. If you search Mefeedia, you will get a lot of videoblogger results - as opposed to just the "funny videos" floating around on the internet.
I had an insight the other day when looking at AOL's new video portal. They are aggregating television programs, movie trailers and news clips and such - which I guess makes sense for AOL to do. You're a media company or not. And their search gets to the millions of "funny" videos floating around on the web. But look at what's on their portal and it's just sad. A whole bunch of boring video. Great job!
Go to Mefeedia instead, and you'll find a tiny, tiny group of people starting to produce and syndicate original long tail video content. Real stuff. And this is the content that is going to change things, at least a bit. Message to AOL/bigmedia: it's not about putting television on the web. That's where they go (predictably) wrong.
But I digress - what's cool about Opentv's Mefeedia search isn't just that it finds you videobloggers (which is why I call Mefeedia the "the best place to find videobloggers"), it's that it's based on just RSS. All I have right now on Mefeedia is RSS everywhere, no API, no nothing, and that's enough for them to create a useful search. So I thought that's kinda pretty fucking cool.
One of the longest running videoblogging projects: Squeeeeze.
Watch movie Quicktime, 1.2 min 6.8 MB
(Original post, via Luxomedia)
IA in germany
Article about the state of IA in Germany. In one word: not so great.
I wonder about this. IA in the US is doing good because there is a lot of demand. Companies understand they need us. Do companies in Germany don't want IA? Don't need IA? Doesn't it fit in the culture of how websites are developed?
Flickr continues to do interesting stuff with tags. Now we have clusters: Flickr: Photos tagged with love
Wired News: What's This? A New Planet. IBut is it a "planet"? Let the classification wars begin!
Learning Dutch: Watch movie Quicktime, 2.6 min 11 MB
(Original post, via We Are The Media)
Discussion about who defines what "media" is. Watch movie Quicktime, 1.6 min 3.1 MB
(Original post, via DLTQ.org)
Recent patent applications result in talk about Google ranking. Basically: incoming links still matter a lot. And some other stuff.
"looking into the lens" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at DLTQ.org.)
"couldn't really get a job..." (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Steve Garfield's Video Blog.)
"A star wars fight on stage?" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Ourmedia MediaRSS Feed.)
"finding nemo, for real!" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Dailymotion.)
We go round and round:
"it's important to try to look into the dirty face of reality" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at blip.tv.)
relPamyment is like syndicating your tipjar.
RelPayment: how to get paid. An overview page we wrote for videobloggers on how to use relPayment.
I am not sure if this will take off, but at least now there is a possibility. If videobloggers want to use it, they will, and if aggregators start to support it, it will be another babystep towards videoblogging viability.
The important thing to note here is that watching video through an aggregator is, in terms of cost, fundamentally different from watching text. The text is already contained in the RSS feed, so it has already been downloaded. The video isn't. It's an enclosure link, so for every viewer that watches it, the videobloggers' bandwidth gets hit. The same applies to podcasting.
RelPayment is an attempt to make this "stealing of bandwidth" a little bit fairer videobloggers.
Again, I'm not sure it'll take off. I'm not sure videobloggers are all that concerned about money. But if there's demand from the vloggers, it might.
Russell Beattie Notebook - What's Wrong with All The "My RSS" Portals. Some good points: the standard "a-box-per-feed" won't cut it.
Metathought productions? I wish I thought of that. A trailer for a movie about media as an echochamber. Sounds familiar, bloggers?
Watch movie Quicktime, 6.9 min 15 MB
(Original post, via Everyday Films with Eric Rice)
Videoblogging in the Sahara: Watch movie 5.5 min 17.3 MB
(Original post, via the RAD blog)
The Long Tail: Filters 101: an interesting taxonomy of filters.
Mica: "there's a lot to think about!" Watch movie Quicktime, 0.7 min 1.8 MB (Original post, via scratch video)
A nice example of a videoblog. Watch movie 5.7 min 18.7 MB (Original post, via Ourmedia MediaRSS Feed)
Forbes.com put Mefeedia in its 'Best of the Web': "BEST: Breadth of offerings, including links to other vlog portals. Quick free registration. WORST: Forums are like a ghost town and design is wanting."
All true :) Their "Obtain the Forbes Best of The Web logo for use on your site" is coorporate bullshit though: you need to fax them for approval to use their logo. You got to be kidding me - what a scam.
Bloug: World's Oldest Information Architect? (check the great picture!): "Mariano Amartino's abuelita, 89 years old, has a message for the folks at O'Reilly (which I've taken the liberty to translate): "Where the heck is the Spanish version of the second edition of the Polar Bear? Enough waiting already! You should be very, very ashamed of yourselves."
This is why we set up the translations group at the IA Institute. Here's the Spanish page, with a whole bunch of articles about IA in Spanish. But not enough.
The best compliment ever for Mefeedia: "I love what you did to the place. So close to homemade but no lumps".
Although there are plenty of lumps left :)
Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (via David)
Discusses, basically, how tag usage evolves and how different people tag differently.
"At a really grand level, if you can imagine a one hundred year tag-cloud around a gay novel, then it might start with lots of people using the tag invert, with this gradually giving way to homosexual, then gay and potentially after that, queer."
That's all pretty interesting, but things get much more exciting when we starting thinkig about other languages and really different cultures.
I wrote about tag namespaces before: "tag ânamespacesâ? will develop, somewhat mirroring languages, but also other social groups like interest groups, specialist communities."
In other words, different communities develop their own categories and language, and this will be reflected in their tag use. We might even be able to infer communities from commonalities in tag use.
See also "Tagclouds and cultural changes", which talks about the spreading of the âAjaxâ concept.
Today I'm reviewing (and perhaps testing) a location aware mobile media app. Fun!
So I checked my stats after a long time and poorbuthappy.com has been serving over 1,000,000 pages (not hits) a month for the last few months. Wazanga!, I would say, were I to say such things.
Yahoo's new cross-lingual (not multi-lingual) video search is wicked cool, but they have this weird use of a checkbox. There are 2 radio buttons and one checkbox. If you click the checkbox, the two radio buttons grey out. The only explanation I can think of is that it's a hack in the code - somehow it was easier to implement this than to just have the checkbox as a third radiobutton (which would be the correct way). Strange though, to see such a beta UI hack on Yahoo.
Sometimes a picture works better: this is how Mefeedia (the first video aggregator) supports rel="payment". If you put a link with rel="payment" in your blog post, Mefeedia will show a support link in its interface.
When we thought of it, it made sense. Only slowly am I realizing now why it makes sense, and why it might make less sense for text bloggers.
Rich media aggregators (or enclosure aggregators) like FireANT, Mefeedia and iTunes, don't get their content from the RSS feeds that's already been syndicated. The media content is linked from the RSS, not embedded, like text content. So you HIT the owner's bandwidth every time someone watches or downloads a movie or a podcast. It costs them. That's why it makes more sense to have a payment link for rich media than for text media.
Or it might just be the early morning coffee.
Cross lingual search
Yahoo! Search blog: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?: Yahoo is getting some brilliant cross-lingual search out there. Cross lingual search is when you retrieve documents in various languages. There are different ways of doing it: translate the query, or translate the documents. I think they're translating the queries. But they go the extra step and provide machine translations for the returned results.
Congo Girl - Thoughts about Kinshasa: "It is coming up on a year now that I have lived here, and in talking to a colleague a week or two ago, I realized that adjusting to this environment has been difficult for one reason that I had overlooked. I am trying to adjust to two new cultures. The first is, of course, Congolese culture. Very different from the US, the South, New Orleans -- though I've found more links between NOLA and Kin than I ever would have though possible. The second is Belgian/European culture. As a previously colonized country, there are a lot of holdovers in style and approach and work ethic and education methods, as well as food and drink and entertainment. When I am inclined to escape from Congolese culture and retreat back into what I know, I find it isn't really there. "
The unexpected culture adjustments are often the hardest ones :)
