Streaming Video Hosting: US$50 a month, 25 Gigs of bandwidth.
YickertyYackety: Videoblogging: (2003) "Is videoblogging a wave of the future? Probably, eventually, when someone comes up with something good to do with it. But not for this site while I'm paying $10 per gig. And for me it conjures up visions of public-access TV. So I'll stick with the mainly text variety for the time being."
$10 per Gig? That's way too much!
I added "Textamerica Introduces Camera Phone Video Moblogging" to the Video Blogging Timeline. What important videoblogging events are we missing?
VideoBlogging : How To Video Blog From Mobile Phone: "Mo Blogging is blogging from a mobile phone. One of the earliest growth areas of videoblogging is blogging little videos from mobile phones. The quality is low by default, so bandwidth is less of a problem."
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen blogs about videoblogging at solitude.dk.
News.com started doing email alerts, taking a cue from Google. They also seem to be starting an aggressive campaign to sign up members by making their new series reports downloadable as PDF for members only.
News: "Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet. Viewers will be able to scan an online guide and download any show. Programmes would be viewed on a computer screen or could be burned to a DVD and watched on a television set."
Darknet - Wiki: "Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television is an upcoming book from John Wiley & Sons. It focuses on the digital media revolution, exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media."
The soon to be published book is open for collaborative editing on the wiki. Nice idea, sure to get publicity. I'm curious how it turns out. Editing is really an art, I'm not sure a wiki will work. Then again, I've been wrong before. Many times!
I like the idea behind the book. Take the media back! That's why I've started me-tv.org, and I've got some other plans.
Was the bible the first blog?
Semantic World and Cyberspace - the Holy Bibel as Placeless Content: "Inside a book, a destinction into chapters was made. So we have John 1,2,3,4,5 ... 21. In each chapter the verses where numbered. The verse number is written after the chapter number, normally like: "John 3,15". And voilá, we can identify bible passages in all languages and cultures and over the last 1000 years with this system. Great, isn't it, if you read age-old books about the bible, they use the same URIs as we do, where do you find this persistency anymore ? If I go to the St. Stephen's Cathedral in the Center of Vienna, there are stones from the 15th century there quoting bible passages, using the same identifiers as I am using here to quote Joh 3,15 (this is in german). So referencing works in all Bible Translations in all languages and cultures."
Meatball Wiki: DoubleWiki. Here's an example. Some interesting structure for a wiki: 2 columns with a pro and con. More ideas on DebateTool.
Shelter.nu : Here is a How to Topic Maps, Sir!: "This is not a tutorial. This is an essay written to be preceding a tutorial I'm writing about Topic Maps and how to Sort your CD collection with it, which in itself will come in parts. The reason for this prelude is two-edged; philosophy vs. real-life;
There is a great deal of philosophy involved in working with Topic Maps. Not in the sense of arguing for extentionalism or purport a theory of when cats die in boxes, but in the sense of epistemology, the philosophy of learning. It is about how we perceive things, how human cognition works, about how we label things, how we categorise and find our way in the vast information layer between our brains and our tools.
The other reason is that this essay was easier to write. Bare with me."
Alex is writing a tutorial on topicmaps that I'm really looking forward to. To start things off, he wrote this article. Check it out.
Added what I think is the first videoblog post ever on the Video Blogging Timeline. If you know of an earlier post of video in a weblog (before November 2000), let me know. (Or add to the page)
I started a Video Blogging Timeline on the wiki. Contributions very welcome!
SubrosaSoft.com - FTP Droplet: could be another part of the technologies needed to make videoblogging painless. You set it up, and drag&drop a file onto the icon, which then gets FTP'd to a server. It even copies the resulting URL into your clipboard, so you can past it in a blog entry. Mac only. although I know similar products exist for Windows.
Mega Upload :: PHP File Upload Progress Monitor: "It took me five years to figure out something that PHP cannot do. For a recent project we needed to display a progress monitor as files were being uploaded to the server. We quickly realized that PHP cannot produce such an indicator dialog."
There's also the Rad Upload Java applet, lite version free: "The Plus version allows you to drag and drop entire folders onto the 'drop target'. The applet will then upload each file within the folders and their sub folders recursively. This recursive folder upload can be made to either a web or FTP server." I'm sure there's other solutions as well. (like ImageUploader, and ActiveX control)
I know you get a server error when trying to submit comments. I'll look into it when I have a moment. Meanwhile, sorry.
Pac Manhattan: in Washington Square Park, kids from NYU are playing LIVE pacman games. Pretty cool.
A Modest Search Algorithm Proposal || kuro5hin.org: "The problem with your approach is not that you can't code (I'm sure you can) or that I'm employed by some evil commercial-code corporation (I'm not). The problem is that it's just so damn stupid." And more fun discussion.
Videoblogging "Moments"
Jay is videoblogging what he calls "moments": very short videos, empathically not telling a story but showing a moment. Jay used to work for CNN, then quit and went to public access TV, and now is starting this videoblogging thing. One to look out for if you're interested in the evolving language of videoblogging.
(Note: please stop making yourselve look silly by calling this vblogging or vidblogging or something like that. Videoblogging is good enough.)
Lizard Hill Web Hosting: 40 Gigs of traffic a month, $US 15. Plus a good recommendation for this host from someone on the evolt list. More recommendations for hosting video are welcome!
FX-Host: 120 Gig transfer, 20 US$ a month. Or a dedicated server at Uzipp, 700 Gigs bandwidth (should be enough to serve some video) for US$140 a month.
I host many of my domains with Uzipp (one of their cheaper packages), and I'm happy with it. Uptime isn't 100%, and the mysql serer goes down sometimes, but I have unlimited domains and lots of bandwidth for less than the price of a meal a month.
Again, tips for hosting video welcome!
Streamload: hosting provides 60 Gigs of bandwidth for US$40 a month. Is that a good deal? I'm looking for ways to host video.
Product Tour: Media Center Edition - NewsGator Online Services: "Designed for machines running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, NewsGator Media Center Edition will display your selected content from syndicated RSS and Atom content feeds on your TV."
Some mockups for what a videoblogging tool should look like: VideoBlogging : Video Blogging Tool Interface. I'm just not sure if this is technically possible/doable.
Drupal 4.4.1 release: The next version of Drupal is released, and its developers still DO NOT seem to think that a "remember me" feature is central to a community system. Result: every time you use it you have to log in again. This truly amazes me. On the mailing list, it was stated that: "The reason "remember me" was removed is not because the remembering is broken per se, the problem is that it is not possible to choose the behaviour anymore due to PHP overriding Drupal's cookie." In other words: "we can't make this work".
Raw: RAP is good!" Danny Ayers likes RAP (an RDF API for PHP). I need to try it.
Momentshowing: the F*ckng process: Jay is also trying to figure out how to best post Video to the web.
Wordmap - Home: "Wordmap allows an organization to consolidate its terminology and categories into a single enterprise taxonomy. The taxonomy ensures that all of the organization's applications use the same language to organize, store and present information." (From the new Google ads on my archived entries ;)
Shutterfly have an almost perfect interface for uploading images. You can just drag and drop a whole bunch of images into their upload area, and they appear there, together with a status bar per image and an overall status bar. A
A screenshot to illustrate:
I like the Shutterfly service. You upload digital pictures, order prints and they send them to you. Good quality, great service.
As an experiment, I added Google ads to the archived entries on this blog. The ads are really good actually, lots of taxonomy companies and such I hadn't seen before.
EasyTopicMaps : TopicmapsAndRdbms
So I started a wiki about Video Blogging on Me-tv.org, a domain name I registered last week. Sometimes I go crazy with registering domain names, I don't know why that is... I liked this one because it's kinda short and speaks to the idea that you can create your own TV channel. (If we get the technology right, that is.)
Good Friday afternoon stuff: Joho the Blog: Edge-based about-ness: "What something is about often is so implicit that it's precisely the thing that's not stated. And sometimes a page can't even know what it's about: the manual about O-ring maintenance couldn't know that it would actually be about the Challenger disaster."
(via Adam Curry) Program Details for Mosaic2004 04 29: "Mosaic features selections from daily TV news programs produced by national broadcasters throughout the Middle East. The news reports are presented unedited and translated, when necessary, into English."
ongoing · Web Services Theory and Practice: "For big systems with open-ended scaling requirements, architectures that are asynchronous and queued rather than call and response generally seem to win, big time. It's not an accident that IBM and Tibco were making millions selling big robust asynchronous queuing infrastructure long before anyone started talking about 'Web Services'."
Raising the Humble Chicken || kuro5hin.org: "For the last two summers I have maintained a flock of chickens. The results have been ... interesting. More eggs than I could eat, interesting evenings, and a freezer full of what I consider very healthy meat. I plan to share my experiences in this article with the hope that somebody might be inspired to raise a small flock."
Design of a scalable linux fileserver: "512 Mbytes RAM. My mobo can take 1 gig max, so I will be upgrading it with another stick when funds permit. You definitely need a gig of ram. This is the most expensive part of my server - spare no expense to get as much memory as you can."
Some ideas on how to use linking within video on the web on a new Wiki I created: VideoBlogging : How To Link.
After a few weeks of having some small videofiles (300K-ish) up on my site, they have risen to my top files in Kilobytes. I think this is because they load if you load my homepage. I have to find a way to not have them load upon pageload.
---hits------Kilobytes-----File
1 17407 1.90% 628562 6.13% /colombia/forum/7
2 35934 3.92% 612624 5.98% /ease/
3 11476 1.25% 429830 4.19% /colombia/
4 14274 1.56% 341307 3.33% /colombia/image
5 11992 1.31% 340047 3.32% /colombia/life/culture/59
6 935 0.10% 159048 1.55% /ease/video/MVI_1282_very_high_low_audio.mov
7 47945 5.22% 144318 1.41% /colombia/misc/drupal.css
8 1180 0.13% 89122 0.87% /ease/video/MVI_1264_videoblog1.mov
9 48120 5.24% 88647 0.86% /colombia/themes/poorbuthappy/poorbuthappy.css
10 884 0.10% 83637 0.82% /ease/video/MVI_1285_high_low_audio.mov
"Nested Facets ~ Common subdivisions
Claudio Gnoli posted a message to the Faceted Classification group explaining how the Library folks have known (of course!) the concept I discussed recenly of "Nested Facets". (Bad name!)
"Peter,
something very similar to your idea exists indeed in general bibliographic classifications, both faceted and non-faceted: it is usually called common subdivisions, or common auxiliaries, or even common isolates.
Common subdivisions are not a feature exclusive of FCs, hence a librarian would not call them "facets". I agree, however, that they are used in a way similar to facets, and maybe can be seen as a first step towards the idea of FC, namely of concept combinability, which was developed later (since 1920s) in library science.
Faceted classification systems, like BC2, have both common subdivisions and facets. The main difference is that facets are limited to a specific discipline -- EG "habitat" is only a facet within zoology -- while common subdivisions can be applied across disciplines, as in the example above with education and geography."
InfoDesign: Special on Jared Spool. Interview with the excellent Jared Spool: "When a design team has to tackle one of these designs, how do they know what content is required? They could do field studies (contextual inquiries and ethnography) to determine who the users are, what content they need, and when. However, that's an expensive, time consuming process and it comes at the beginning of a project, when resources and funds are extremely tight.
[...]
This research can be very expensive. We fund most of it with money from our conferences, roadshows and publications. A small portion is privately funded with client consulting.
We've come a long way from our roots of being a usability testing service. We really don't do that anymore, primarily because our research has shown that the most successful design teams are those that do their own testing. Farming your testing out substantially reduces its effectiveness. Instead, we help teams start and maintain their own internal testing process.
[...]
It's interesting to note that the more we play down our opinions, the more clients beg us to give them and tend to seriously consider them when making their decisions.
[...]
Since UIE started as a consulting outfit, we had to learn quickly how to prove to people we were valuable. After all, when you're a consultant, you don't eat if nobody believes you're of value.
I learned quickly that business executives didn't care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn't get us any more work. [...] We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got.
[...]
Yet, was the iPod's design process a standard one? Nope. Have we dissected the process, so that everyone in the field knows exactly how they did it? Nope. Can we explain why Apple is in the process of shutting down all their usability labs? Nope. Have we even tried to answer these questions? Nope. "
Sorry for the extensive quoting. Read the article! Jared is very, very good.
Google files for unusual $2.7 billion IPO | CNET News.com: "Internet search leader Google filed to go public on Thursday, seeking to raise $2.7 billion in an unusual auction-style offering that will give the founders rare control over the company."
And they should, or Microsoft, with its (latest report) 53 billion cash reserve could just buy them outright and take over control.
Information Outlook: Happiness is taxonomy: four structures for Snoopy.(libraries' method of categorizing and classification) Good, long article. I missed the talk at the IA summit.
Quick-'n-Dirty methods to determine which competing label is better: "Cell Phone" or "Mobile Phone"?
On the SIGIA-L mailing list, Stephanie Berger recently asked: "My cohorts are not sure whether to use "cell phone" or "mobile phone". Any evidence that one is better than the other, or one is used more often than the other?"
This is a good example of the kind of labeling questions information architects face all the time. The answer to these labeling questions will depend on the target audience (a better label for whom?), on business requirements (maybe the business want to promote one term over the other) and on the context in which the label will be used.
I'll discuss the conversation that followed here and afterwards point to some useful tools for if you have a labeling question yourself.
Andres Sulleiro: "Without any empirical data I will go with my own opinion. [...] A quick survey of the phone carriers seems to suggest that "wireless" (as in "wireless phone", "wireless customer") is most common among US carriers, though you see some references to "mobile" as well. T-mobile, a European company, uses "mobile" which is more common in Europe as well as being the name of the carrier."
Method: check what other websites call it.
Jason Cho: "I think "cell" is more widespread in the US as Andr�s noted. "Call my mobile" can sound pretentious to Yankee ears. But I would think everyone understands the term "mobile" on a business card."
Method: personal experience.
Peter Van Dijck (and others): "Google for "cell phone" (including quotes): 6,230,000, Google for "mobile phone": 6,360,000. Looks like a tie, assuming your audience is similar. Just pick one and make sure your search engine knows both terms."
Christina Wodtke: "Yahoo for cell phone : 16,800,000, yahoo for mobile phone: 21,200,000. What does this really tell you? you'd have to know who each engine indexes, how much of the web, etc.. better to use a magic 8 ball. ;-)"
Method: check popularity of the terms on the web.
Peter Van Dijck: "My next step would be to find out what people search for on your site,
or if not available, on the web (assuming that's more or less your audience). Google adwords can help."
Method: Find out what people (preferably your target audience) search for.
Dave: "I like "mobile" for the reason that Christina stated (forward compatibility); USers and non-USers will equally understand it. Also, it is more interoperable w/ most of the vCard based addressbook programs out there. I don't know any that are using "cell" or "cellphone" ... I also like the clear and easy two word approach of "mobile phone" ... I'm always wanting to say "cellphone" where "cell phone" is really the more correct version. "cell" though just doesn't feel like a real word b/c the "cell" doesn't fit a meaning to me. I know what it means if I am forced to think about it, but it really doesn't mean anything to me at all."
Method: personal experience, check what software programs use.
Christina Wodtke: "> As can Overture's keyword tool (couldn't find URL straight away).
You also might consider some adaptation of the freelisting technique on a subset of your target. E.G., a write in survey: what portable electronics do you own, then analyze for use of "cell phone" and mobile phone".
Method: freelisting technique.
Eric Reiss: "Having worked closely with several telecommunications companies, including Tellabs (US), Nortel (Canada), ADVA (Germany), and NetTest (Denmark), this discussion is one I've heard before. Europeans generally don't recognize the term "cell phone." North Americans seem to accept both "cell" and "mobile." ATT insists on promoting the term "wireless." In most instances, we've agreed on the word "mobile" since it is understood by the widest audience. Nortel, for instance, used "cell" almost exclusively until the late 90s, but now leans toward "mobile." I think there is a trend here."
Method: ask the subject matter experts.
Pabini Gabriel-Petit: "There's also Wordtracker.
[...]
In this vein, you might try just walking up to people, holding up your cell/mobile phone, and asking them what they call it."
Method: Analyze what people search for.
Method: Find out what labels your users use.
Quick-'n-Dirty methods to determine which competing label is better.
So, as a review, here are some of the methods used to determine which label is better.
1. What do you think?
Method: personal experience/insights.
2. What do your users think?
Method: freelisting technique.
Method: Find out what labels your users use: show them the item you're trying to label and ask them what it is. (You could build an online tool for this).
Method: Find out what people (preferably your target audience) search for / check popularity of the terms on the web. Overture's keyword tool. Google adwords. Wordtracker. Google and Yahoo both list how often a term is used on the web (use quotes around your terms!).
3. What do the experts think?
Method: ask the subject matter experts.
Method: check what other websites/software call it.
Gotcha's: be careful when using these techniques. You are looking for a label that works for your audience and your business requirements. Most of these techniques use audiences that may be very different from yours, and most are indicative only (ie: they're not hard science). Use your judgement.
The LaCie Bigger Disk: a 1 terabyte external harddrive. US$ 1200, ships in May 2004. So by the end of the year the price should have fallen under the $1000 barrier. It's not particularly cheaper than buying smaller external harddrives - the prices continues to hover around US$1 a Gig.
I can't seem to find a good explanation of how to host a bittorrent file on my server. Arg! Pointers welcome.
unmediated: a proper marriage of tv and blogs.
A Google search for Jew does not show an offensive link as the first or second result anymore.