I know that there are some who are probably sick and done with this song, but it’s been stuck in my head forever now. So, I hope it gets stuck in yours. Sucker.
Wikis in Plain English
As if they were paying attention, CommonCraft has produced another video to help explain the world of Web 2.0. I often link to Wikipedia in my posts, but there might not be a lot of people who know how it works. Better yet, there are some out there who don’t know that you can apply the same functionality that they use on that site, called Wikis (creative, huh?), to nearly any site that you want to.
Curious to learn more? Watch this video.
RSS in Plain English
I am in the midst of a relaunch of JEMM.com, a small business back in my home state of Iowa. We are taking it into new directions, many of which they have never witnessed or knew about before I got my hands on the site. I’ve also been muttering the words “Drupal” and “RSS” quite a bit, not to mention “search engine optimization” and “content management system”.
The Drupal part is something they are grasping well, and it is so nice to have a CMS in which nearly everyone at the business can have a helping hand in building the site with. The learning curve is getting easier everyday, and I’m discovering what it’s like to teach Drupal to new eyes, especially those who are still on the outside of what Web 2.0 really is.
The RSS part is another story. When I pointed this video out to them, they came back to me with a much better understanding of what I was trying to teach them. Plus, it’s hard to convey my daily interactivity with this stuff on a regular basis.
Still wondering what RSS is? Watch this video by the folks at CommonCraft.
Talking to Boris about my adventures, I’ll try to convey more about the creation of JEMM.com on a Drupal platform. If anyone wanted to help me out with some design input, I’m all ears. At this time, we’re much more focused on content.
Lou Barlow – monkey begun
Lou Barlow[wiki] has been a guy that I’ve been following for a long time, but I fear that I am going to completely embarrass myself right now. It wasn’t until this past Friday that DaveO gave me the full back story on the guy, and I discovered that Barlow was one of the founding members of Dinosaur Jr.[wiki], a piece of rock and roll history that has alluded me up until now.
Like any bit of discovery that I stumble into like that, I try to get the complete story as much as I can. Venturing down the YouTube route, I found this clip of Dinosaur Jr. performing on the Jenny Jones Show. Wait, what the… Jenny Jones? Yeah, that floored me, too.
So many years of flipping through CDs at the store and thumbing through station libraries, always thinking, “Hey, I should give that a spin sometime.” I never did, and now the price is being paid. I feel like I should be flogged.
Google eating FeedBurner
All of my RSS feeds[wiki], including all the podcasts that I am involved with producing, are routed through FeedBurner. Argue what you will about the intelligence of this, but there are so many qualities about doing this that makes it a no-brainer. You put one feed into it and it can make it readable by nearly anything out there that can digest XML. As Dave cleverly puts it, it’s the special sauce that spruces up your RSS feed.
So Google is buying FeedBurner for a cool $100 million. What does that mean for us podcasters?
Both of the podcasts that I currently produce have their subscriptions pushed through FeedBurner. Based on that idea alone, I take comfort in the fact that this service will continue for a longer time and not having to fear for the lifespan of the operation. Like it or not, Google will be around for a while, so that means that they’ll be “burning” my feeds as well.
If FeedBurner went out of business, a huge portion of podcasters would be scrambling to recover, not forgetting the numerous bloggers out there who use the service as well. Sure, the technical fix on our end would be easy, but not all of your listeners pay attention to these tidbits of news. If the feed stops updating, a subscriber might shrug their shoulders and just assume that the podcast doesn’t exist anymore, not even bothering to see what happened. Audiences can be rebuilt, but on a worldwide platform, that’s tough. All you can hope for is that the community built around your podcast is strong enough to spread the news of your continued, just that we’re over here now.
This is a total catch, but it’s the reality of the situation. That being said, it’s comforting to know that this service is going to continue. What Google will do with it remains to be seen, and some are already predicting the future, based on the trends that “the Goog” has done with other ventures.
The one weakness that some people have said they suffer from is in number and variety of ads to run. That won’t be a problem any more if Google scoops them up, they’ll have an army of sales people and the AdSense machine behind them.
User Control Over Data
The other issue that some people have raised is that FeedBurner has too much control over their users’ feeds. That concern is going to be taken much more seriously if they become a part of the Goog. Data mining is not inherently bad, and Google’s going to get a whole new frontier for it opening up if they buy FeedBurner. What’s the solution to privacy concerns? In the long run, people are going to come to understand our digital assets, including our clickstreams and other data, as a resource that we graciously let these vendors chew on for as long as we are happy with them. Just like interest I draw on my bank account is mine to take out of that bank along with my deposit at any time – so too will we someday have the option of nearly one-click export and erase OUR data from any given vendor. Big vendors will understand this or they will lose. [marshall kirkpatrick]
There’s too much that we know and don’t know about the future to come for FeedBurner. And if we really want to speak of track records, remember that Google picked up Blogger in 2003 and took a long time to really do anything notable with it, especially in terms of the changes in functionality and physical relocation early this year. Changes to FeedBurner are bound to happen, and being that Google is somewhat wise to the way they develop things, this could be a positive outcome. It remains to be seen.
It’s a Matt Mullenweg world
I caught this video interview that Matt Mullenweg[wiki], Mr. WordPress founder himself, did with CNet yesterday. It’s really worth watching because you get his insights as to this whole Web 2.0 revolution, of which some say is dead, and other interesting things that he’s been more or less involved with.
I especially like the part about how he developed spam filtering for WordPress because he didn’t want his mom, who suddenly decided that she wanted to start blogging one day, to get bombarded by spam. More so to the fact, Mullenweg didn’t want her getting blasted by the naughty and not so friendly stuff. Akisment was basically born out of that.
One thing that he mentioned was a tool that I was instantly interested in. Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that you can install to have your browser data mirrored between every computer that you need to have synced together. Being that an iMac has been a new addition to our home collection, I have to say that I see why he endorses it. I love being able to switch from my laptop without the headache of not having all the same bookmarks on both machines, and this is far less complicated than importing them between the two. It also works for cookies and all the rest of the data you need and want.
To round out the day, WordPress 2.2 was released last night, up from the most recent version of 2.1.3. There are some decent additions to this edition that makes me pretty interested to really try it out.
- Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
- Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
- Widgets are now supported in core
- Protection against activating broken plugins
- “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
- Improvements to comment management
- Code optimizations and speedups
- Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
- Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
- WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
- JQuery support
[gunters]
Dang that Mullenweg. The guy has been busy.
Hum – stars
Hum[wiki] surfaced on my playlist this morning, so I thought I would poke around on YouTube to see if any, still rabid fans have posted anything there. As you can see, they did.
The track “The Pod” was the one that grabbed my attention this morning, but this video for their song “Stars” tripped my memory a tad. I know it’s such a low-fi video, but this was in the days of the mid-90’s where video production wasn’t as accessible as it is now. We were talking that not many people actually make videos these days, and that’s really interesting because all you need a laptop and a camera.
Anyway, it was one of the first few shifts at KRUI that I discovered Hum. For a few weeks, that zebra on the cover of “You’d Prefer An Astronaut”[wiki] made me curious, but I never gave in until a caller requested this particular song.
Aside from the sudden, quiet to loud beginning of the song that completely over modulated the air signal by peaking the needles solidly in the red of the VU meters (meaning that listening to this on the radio end, it sounded really distorted and like crap), I was immensely in love with the thick, heavy sound that Hum is so well known for. Even in those wee hours of a Saturday morning, sometime between 4AM and 7AM, I knew that this was something to make a note of. One of those moments you remember when and where you were at a time that you discovered something influential in your life.
Hum put out another album after that, “Downward is Heavenward”[wiki], but the band parted ways nearly two years following the release, the farewell show taking place on the final night of the last millennium. There has been a reunion show more than a handful of times, and Matt Talbot went off to lead Centaur[wiki] as well as pop up in other various projects, one of them recently being Neverending White Lights[wiki].
Thus ends this musical lesson journey inside my mind.
Follow up thoughts on SuperHappyDevHouse
My post about attending the SuperHappyDevHouse at the Bryght offices in Vancouver was pretty last minute, so I thought I would do my best to give a post-game reaction to the festivities.
In all honesty, I went there with the intent of doing something kinda geeky and fun, but the fun really got put in front of the geeky. While the true hackers and do’ers were on the main floor doing some, what looked like, intense coding, I was manning the grill for hot action with some brats. And the way the sun was shining on the rooftop patio, I quickly made myself at home up there. The keg was up there too, so I was far from alone.
Talked to a lot of really cool folks while I was up there. In no particular order, Jordan Behan, Roland Tanglao, Jason Vanderhill, Boris Mann, Richard Eriksson, Kris Krug, Ianiv, Ivan, John Biehler, and big shout outs to good pals Duane Storey and the Dave Olsen.
I’m unaware if anything monumental came from the event, but there were a chunk of folks who were looking to do something that sounded neat. I don’t think that I was completely out of my element there, but hard coding is a tad out of the realms of the things I know and like to do. I overheard that one of said coders asked Rebecca why she was there once they found out that she was “just a blogger“.
Bottom line, I had a lot of fun. People that I hung around and chatted with were a great group of folks, and we certainly had a good exchange of ideas, concepts, slams, jokes, laughter, and so on. Being that I have a few Drupal projects that I have been working on, these are the right folks to be talking to.
Switching over to Google Reader
Call it being a late bloomer, but I have seen the light when it comes reading all the RSS feeds that I do. Ok, you can all start laughing at me now, at least for those of you already in the know. Google Reader? I’ve made the switch over the past week and am quite happy.
I made a post sometime ago about how I was using Vienna for this purpose, and that endorsement still stands. Great open source application, but too tied down to a single computer. Happily, we’ve made an addition to our collection of computers, and that’s on top of Rebecca’s MacBook that she got about two months ago.
Bottom line, I need to have the ability to get to my stream of information from all three locations; my laptop, Rebecca’s laptop, and our iMac.
The interface was something that I was instantly enticed by, and it truly makes for being efficient. Instead of a third party, stand alone application, I can have everything focused in a single browser window, open a string of tabs, and parse my way through pages of text to read. I call that being effective.
Still need a reason to buy into reading RSS feeds? Lee LeFever, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Northern Voice last February, put together this short video to explain RSS quickly and simply. Get educated and then get efficient.
Joost
When I first heard about Joost, I thought not a lot of it. On demand video over IP. I love my TV in doses that I can control, but there really wasn’t much more that made me want to check it out. That changed this afternoon when I got myself an invite to try out the beta, so here’s my initial thoughts on it.
Addictive. Turning it off was, I admit, difficult to do. Anytime you can give me access to watch content from around the world, I’m curious. I don’t care what language it might be in, but that won’t stop me from checking it out. Even this beta version has a lot of content that I can see myself getting into, I’m more curious about other things that are slated to come on board, namely The Soccer Network. On top of that, get me on demand Cubs games and I’ll be uber hooked.
I only spent about twenty minutes watching the content that is currently available on Joost, and the quality wasn’t that bad at all. In fact, I found myself watching Fifth Gear[wiki] for a few of their clips. I’m not a car guy, but now I get why people are so hooked on this show. They do cool things about cars that I’ll never own or care about. Still, that shows the effectiveness of technology like this. I might actually stop and watch this on the “normal TV” if I stumble onto it.
I think it’s pretty cool. I’ve heard other people complain about it, but the guys behind Joost are working on making it better. At least I hope that’s the case.