I decided to start editing really short bits of the Colombia documentary I did but never edited... Valentina

This movie is an experiment with subtitles, and a movie about talking to someone about videoblogging. People get really excited :) aboutmetv

Here's Jay explaining how playlists work on me-tv. The idea with these is that our users create their own help systems by explaining how certain features work to each other, using video. The About me-tv playlist (keyword aboutmetv) will automatically pick up these explanations.

We're experimenting with user documentation in video format. Here's jay explaining how peopletags in me-tv work. I'm adding a playlist keyword to this post as well: aboutmetv.

Watch the movie

Paul English: how to set up 2 wireless access routers and connect them to increase range for your home office.

Bootstrapping out into open space - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog: "I look at nifty services like del.icio.us, BlogLines, and Flickr, and think, Hey, I have some good ideas, too. I could possibly put together something like this. But how the !@#$% do those guys pay their hosting bills? Let alone make a living?"

Here's a great overview of social networking-y companies and their business models.

Lightweight Business Models Lightweight Business Models at Web 2.0 (JeremyZawodny's blog): "Don't build a ton of features, build a few really great deep features". Yes yes yes.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005: (About Flickr an opening up API's as a business strategy): "Capturing the creative energy of the hive can be scary. It requires giving up some control, and eliminating lock-in as a strategy."

Opening up your API's doesn't reduce lock-in! If an ecosystem of applications develop that depend on your API, how exactly does that reduce lock-in?

I just bought 512M of RAM for my laptop. Can I keep the old 256M RAM in there and have a total of 768, or do they not mix? My laptop is an hp pavilion 5700 running Win XP. And if not, anyone want an old 256M RAM module?

Why on earth would a spammer make it super easy to filter them out by adding the unusual word "holdem" in every post? I don't get it.

Problem with Google Ads security certificate?

I really don't know what this means, but did Google forget to update their security certificates or something? Trying to access google.com/adsense, I get a security warning in both IE and Firefox, see images below.

chongqed.org: Preventing wiki spam

Do you GET this? It's big. Videobloggers invade the TV box.

Yahoo! Video Search. Here's the story: "Heck, we can see entirely new rich media aggregators and tools being built" (ahem).

Welcome to Technology Review: Brilliant article on API's and control, and why Google better watch itself: "He agreed that if Microsoft got 'hard-core' about search (as Bill Gates has promised), then, yes, Google would be in for a very rough time. Why? Because in contrast to Microsoft, Google doesn't yet control standards for any of the platforms on which this contest will be waged - not even for its own website. Although Google has released noncommercial APIs - which programmers may use for their own purposes, but not in commercial products - until recently, it avoided the creation of commercial APIs."

Microsoft launched a new recruiting site for designers: Microsoft Design. Well done, with case studies and what not. Worth looking at even if you're not looking for a job.

Forbes.com on wikis: Extreme Blogging

Michael wrote Using a Wiki for Documentation and Collaborative Authoring.

Ah, so Bryan Bell (who also designed the xfml icon) did the RSS "xml" icon. Which should have said "RSS". Obviously.

Now that I'm self-employed, I need some business cards. Two questions: one, a good online place to print them? Vistaprint gets decent reviews, and you can get 250 cards free (+ 7$ shipping), although I don't mind paying a bit. Two: should I have different cards for different aspects of my business?

I'm psyched like a baby whenever I find something new that works with me-tv, like the new channel 9 feed from Microsoft I just added :)

Maybe I'm cheesy but I really like the idea of a Voice Recording Picture Frame as a present for my mom.

Lou has some questions about Enterprise Topic Maps.

I met with Mica, Kenyatta, Josh and Jay today to discuss the future of me-tv. I will talk about that more later, meanwhile, here's the video (Quicktime, about 4 Megs). I was psyched when I realized what a fantastic group of people were together in that room! The movie includes the first secret preview of the upcoming ANT tool which is like ipodder for video.

I am looking for a piece of PHP code that returns URL's found in piece of text. I need it to recognize the urls in the following example (found in an RSS feed), which my current code can't handle.


<a href="http://www.michaelverdi.com/video/watermark.mov"target="_blank"><img src="http://www.michaelverdi.com/images/watermark.jpg" border="0" /></a> <br />That's right, I spent all weekend at my computer for your viewing pleasure.


Two good friends got married today, to Willie and Melina, I wish them all the best. I made a movie too, the quality is really bad, I'll figure out how to make that better and maybe post it again tomorrow. But here it is .

me-tv is still in alpha, but already some cool stuff is becoming possible. Watching video online is just a drag, and me-tv makes it easier, and you know what, for watching old-school TV it sucks, but for watching all that other stuff, it rocks. Feedster has a videoenclosures feed, which I fed through me-tv. This is what it looks like through me-tv:

Google Suggests (beta) is great fun, try it out.

Guide to Ease �

As an experiment (this should work), I'm reblogging a link to a video interview I did with Jay. If I add in the link to the video in this post, me-tv should pick up this video as well, once I run the cron job.

What is a camel? A camel is a horse designed by committee.

Bienvenido | Colombia Guide

I have an HTML/CSS question about this page. You see where it says "Submitted by Peter", and there's a star next to the name. Why does it wrap to the next line? (Firefox and IE) I can't figure it out, except that it might have something to do with the css (that I didn't write myself). Anyone?

James
is doing some interesting innovation with taxonomies and folksonomies and what not. By the way, the aifia-members list has a great conversation going on about folksonomies - join aifia to get the goods!

Challenges with automated downloads: Blogdigger Development Blog: "Even moderately to unpopular podcasts could incur large bandwidth costs (case in point: within a few hours of putting the Blogdigger podcast on the Blogdigger media feed, it was downloaded several hundred times; still I've yet to receive an email or comment telling me how hilarious it was, which obviously means no one listened to it ;)."

Selfpromotion: Blogdigger Development Blog says (about http://me-tv.com): "It is simply brilliant." Thanks.

Locals playing with digital camera | Poorbuthappy guide to India

I added signing up to the me-tv alpha today. A feature/bugfix a day keeps the doctor away. It takes me about 2 hours every day. Bootstrapping. I'm happy I released early, I have already over 50 people using it and they provide great feedback on what's important to them. It's a videoblog browser, by the way. In some important ways, it's different from a text blog browser. Is it different enough, or will Bloglines eat my lunch? Keep tuned.

Anyone know how to hack the Magpie RSS Parser to support enclosures? Enclosures use attributes instead of element content, and MagpieRSS doesn't support that.

The crazy thing about videoblogging, and what gives me hope, is that the videobloggers (I'm not a real videoblogger - they are) are WAY excited. I mean, you remember how you were excited about your first contact with the web? Your first website? Like that.

Mica told me how Charlene found out about this new medium. Mica showed her videoblog, and Charlene came running upstairs (if I understood this correctly) all excited, and then started calling her in the middle of the night with questions about how to do this. They've been posting a video almost every day. Imagine the drive behind that. People want this. They want to have a voice.

Anyway, I am hacking together what will hopefully not be known as a "vogbrowser". Check it if you're interested. It's still buggy, but it's getting better every day. Check out Mica, Jay and Charlene's feeds, as good examples. I am working on recognizing more types of feeds... (My friend thinks it's "better than tv").

I just made 3 short phonecalls to Belgium (from NYC), using SkypeOut. It was cheap: only 15 cents, and worked great.

Yahoo! News - U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture: "Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government says. Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence."

Topic Exchange: Channel 'multilingual_blogging'

Joel on the impossibility of translation.

ongoing � When Secrets Make Sense: "The point about incompatible architecture is right, by the way; by analogy, if the OpenOffice guys could download all of the Microsoft Office source code tomorrow, it would probably slow them down more than help them."

Open source is something strange. I was looking at Zend's contest for PHP5 code: most of it is typical open source programmers: programmers doing programmer stuff: message boards, application environments, all that. One project stood out for me: PHPClick: " phpClick is a web-based web application development tool targeted at nonprogrammers." In other words: create forms and such without programming. Now that's something I haven't seen done well, yet. I tried it out and was expecting a typical programmers' tool, but behold, the interface looks promisingly usable. Here's a screenshot.

At the right you see componens (checkboxes, text, ...). If you click on them, they'll show up in the preview screen. It's like Visual Basic!

The project still isn't really functional - I hope they are working on the code as much as on the interface (an unusual comment for an Open Source project!) And let's be superficial: they have a nice logo too:

Later: I was clicking around, and behold: "phpClick is developed as part of a collaborative Virginia Tech and PennState research effort." So that's why the app felt so un-typical and innovative. There is solid research behind it. :)

Can I just say, again, how much Wordpress rocks? I went to my Video entry category, and, on a whim, added /rss2 to the URL. And behold, a beautiful RSS2 feed shows up. Nice work.

I almost hesitate to report on this, but might as well get it out. Momentshowing: The Story of Bandwidth II: Duncan has already used of 1000 Gigs (!) of bandwidth this month on his Typepad videoblog. (I estimate that's costing Six Degrees US$ 400.) Big ups to Typepad for taking this kind of abuse in stride. Videobloggers (many of whom are on Typepad) are holding their breath. Then again, with the recent funding of US$ 10,000,000 Six Apart got, and their plans for expansion, surely including media like video, they probably don't mind spending some cash for that videoblogger goodwill :)

Momentshowing: The Story of bandwidth:

Momentshowing: The Story of bandwidth: "hahahha I literally used up 1GB last night. Typepad only gives me 3GB a month...but still doesnt worry about us going over. So far."

Typepad has been letting people post as much video as they want, which is why a lot of videobloggers use it. But as videoblogging becomes more popular, that just can't last.

NY Mosaico

NY Mosaico a good site on cosmopolatinos in nyc.

Toward a Literacy of Cooperation

More typical american words: condo and suv. Yesterday, a Belgian colleague told me he was working on a site and they had a "community" tab in French "communite". In Flemish (=Dutch) though, "community" translates into "gemeenschap", which has sexual connotations.

My Dutch readers, have you seen a good translation of "community"?

virtualteams.com: Networks and virtual teams: article on how far-flung teams can be super effective, if they do 3 things:

1. They exploit diversity. The team can't just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.
2. They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.
3. They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.

I am starting to work on far-flung teams, and one observation so far: we've been wanting to do meetings over Skype, but because of technical problems, we went IM instead. IM meetings are extremely effective. Something about IM gives you a few seconds to think before you talk. It just works. Meetings last only 10 to 20 minutes, and we usually take 2 to 4 decisions in such a meeting (2 people). If you've worked in coorporate America, you'll know that's much better than the standard (meetings 1 hour, 1 decision per 3 meetings). Imagine the time we save! We haven't gone back to Skype yet, and I don't think we will.