Category: Web 2.0

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Use new media for action, not just voice

I’m taking a cue from Adam Curry, and you can bet that he’s not the first person to be saying this. It’s just something that I heard recently on his podcast, and the sentiment is echoed in an article posted on MacNewsWorld recently.

Kenton Ngo is a policy wonk. He dissects election data using mapping software and reads transportation bills. He hosts a video podcast on his blog, one that draws as many as 2,000 readers a week.

Ngo is recognized at political rallies and has joined conference calls with Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, but he has never voted in a primary or general election. He has never paid property taxes. He is not registered for Selective Service.

Ngo is 15 years old, has a driver’s permit and braces, and is a member of the West Springfield High School debate team in Northern Virginia. [macnewsworld]

Blogs and podcasts are the new way for disseminating your thoughts and opinions about politics. I am all for that. Speak you mind, shout for the truth, and encourage people to bind together in an effort to change things.

I’m kind of sick of it. The reason being, nothing has really changed. We write away on the web only to see not much for results. This kid in Virginia has a great thing going, but there has to be more.

The methods are there. We have all sorts of ways to send out messages to the masses, so why not use it to actually do something? Less talking, more action, so to say. Use these technologies to make a run for public office. This is what I would like to see.

I admit to being a hypocrite with my own post here, but the idea is something I’m a fan of. I’m also far from being a good candidate for the effort. However, I’m all about new media and helping out.

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The vowels of the internet

I’ve been going to the last few Metroblogging Vancouver meetups, and there are usually a lot of interesting conversations. Some of them, as you can probably imagine, stem into the realms of being slightly geeky.

For instance, the point was brought up that there has been a natural progression of using vowels as a prefix to a website domain, company, or product name. For the life of me, I’m not sure where the letter “A” fits into all of this, but “E” and “I” have been front and center for nearly two decades now. Email, iTunes, iPod, and so on. Keep going down the line and one starts to wonder about “O”, “U”, and (some times) “Y”. What’s the next, new, hot thing going to be? What way will these letters be used and abused?

Of course, how can you not talk about YouTube? Everyone is now that Google just picked it up for a pretty penny. Someone brought up the idea that it should have been “uTube” and not “YouTube”. This would have fit into that natural progression in the world of Web 2.0. I’m not sold on it, but the thought made for some good laughs.

However, utube.com does exist. Thing is, they don’t do anything with video.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Utube.com, a Web site owned by a supplier of used tubes and pipes, has been swamped with visitors confusing it with online video service YouTube Inc. and has been barely operational since Google Inc. said on Monday it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.

“I’m at a point now, all I want to do is to make the site work,” Ralph Girkins, owner of the site belonging to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., told Reuters on Thursday.

“Today, it’s been up the longest it’s been up for a week — an hour and a half,” said Ohio-based Girkins.

utube.com is the sixth most popular U.S. manufacturing Web site, ahead of Whirlpool Corp., according to data provided by HitWise.

On Monday, Girkins told Reuters an intermediary who said he was acting on behalf of YouTube had offered $1 million to buy the Internet address, but he turned down the offer and was holding out for $2.5 million to $3 million.

A YouTube spokesman said it had not made an offer and had no plans to do so.

On Thursday, Girkins said he had received about 20 phone calls from people who offered to sell his site for him. He has not been in contact with Google or YouTube, he said. [reuters]

Now it could be that this guy was thinking way ahead when he registered this domain, but he's certainly sitting on a gold mine. I find it fascinating that there is nothing Web 2.0 to the site itself. It makes complete sense that people would think that when they hear people talking about YouTube, they would think "utube" when they sat down at a browser.

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Chicago has a secret radio project that’s about to launch

I have a friend who works at Chicago Public Radio that clued me into something that is happening there. SecretRadioProject.com doesn’t give a whole lot of details, and the information that I was getting from Paul left me with more questions than answers. That’s just because I started throwing out some technical questions, and he isn’t the most technical type of guy.

Chicago will soon be home to a new radio station that is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.

It’s a creative free-for-all, with no shows and no stuffy time slots. Engaging hosts guide you through the day – whether you stop in for an hour or a quick coffee break.

Every time you tune in, you’ll hear something new and surprising – music, interviews, shout outs, essays and more. All with a local bent and an unmistakably Chicago voice.

And the best part: this radio comes from you. You’re the creator, deejay, producer and editor.

Give us your take on what’s happening in your neighborhood. Share your deepest thoughts, confessions and opinions about your world. Upload audio to our website and tune in as we play it for all of Chicago and the world to hear.

It’s two-way radio: an ongoing conversation with Chicago. Radio of, by and for us all. [secretradioproject]

Paul also added something to the effect that it will be all new content with a YouTube like archive, uploaded from anyone and everyone. This won’t be tied to NPR but will be very tied to the Chicago metro area. However, this will be a service of Chicago Public Radio.

It’s very interesting to hear about, and Paul went offline before I could IM anymore answers out of him. Regardless, the scope of the project is daunting. Radio is in desperate need of rethinking how to exist within a world of changing media. This could be the best experiment I have seen yet to try and do just that.

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Podcasting and the Meta Argument

At BarCampVancouver, Ryan Cousineau[wiredcola] led a session called “Sturgeon’s Revelation”[wiki]. The idea that “ninety percent of everything is crud” was the center piece of this session, applying it to pretty much everything that exists in the world of Web 2.0[wiki]. The main topic of focus, however, was podcasting[wiki].

Darren Barefoot made a recent post regarding social networks and podcasting, citing that the resources are not there for the medium as there is for photo, video, or link sharing. This idea speaks a lot to what Cousineau was getting at with his session, and much of his thoughts on the topic is posted on his blog.

When it comes down to it, there is not an easy way to share content within a podcast unless you listen to it. You can’t Google search for information that can be found in a podcast. There are such things as show notes and tags that people apply to the material that they publish, but not everyone does it, nor does everyone do it the same way.

The only solution to this problem is to transcribe podcasts in their entirty so that anyone searching for a topic can locate it in your podcast as well as anywhere else on the web. Quite often, this is where people with low opinions about podcasting derive their argument, and I’ve heard this thought propelled by a lot of bloggers. Yes, blogging is a very quick way of publishing information for the world to read in nearly real time. It is instantly indexed, searchable, and archived.

Generating audio for a podcast can be done in the same way, but often is delayed and ineffective with being timely. The podcast itself, in its raw form, is a bunch of ones and zeros, and no one has developed a way to index the contents of a podcast so that it is searchable across the internet. No matter how great of material that you have in a podcast, some one finding that gem of information inside forty minutes of a mp3 won’t happen unless they download it and listen.

This is where I start to agree with the point that Cousineau is saying and the thoughts presented in Barefoot’s post. The conversation that you can get from podcasting is vastly different for the ones that happen through blogging, Flickr, or YouTube. “Feedback” is the better word for what goes on with a podcast. Continue reading “Podcasting and the Meta Argument”

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Making a switch over to Firefox

Screenshot of my Firefox setup Being the Apple fan that I publicly am, I’ve also been very partial to Safari.  That changed the other day when I launched Firefox while just being curious about how it stacks up to my “usual” browser.

I really like Safari.  That being said, in the past few days, I am not longer using it as my default browser.  The element I really liked about Safari was the RSS feature.  After numerous, spinning beach balls(Apple users will know what I’m talking about), I grew tired of how it behaved.

It’s annoying and time wasting to have that happen.  RSS was made to make getting info more simple and quick.  On top of that, Safari does not fully support WordPress.  So for creating my posts, I ran Camino along side Safari in order to use the “quicktags” feature in WP.  You can’t use that in Safari, so posting with that browser reverts back to manually typing up HTML code as well as your text. Can you see the headache going on here?

I also experimented, briefly, with making Flock my standard browser, if not something to use in conjuntion with Safari and replacing Camino.  I can’t say that I was overly happy with its performance, RSS interface, and overall feel.  I still think that it’s a great browser, but the development needs to keep going on it until I would be comfortable using it full time.  Maybe it’s something to keep revisiting as the built-in blogging and photo sharing support is pretty cool.

That being said, I think I am 80% with being fully converted into using Firefox.  The ability of using plugins has already found me pretty happy.  Using Tab Mix Plus and Wizz RSS News Reader has me feeling even more efficient than I did with Safari.  Additionally, I’ve changed the theme to make it look more like Safari.  That might sound sad to some folks, but having it look like how I’m used to made the change all the more easier.

Pages load quicker than before, and I mean that by being more snappy.  Clicking on a RSS article has the page load in a few seconds.  And if I want to blog about something I read, I open a new tab and make a post.  Even publishing a podcast gets easier because if I need to search for info to add a link into the show notes, eveything is all in one.

These are just some preliminary thoughts about the switch.  I have to say that I’m pleased with how easy it was, but my experience with doing these things might be more than the average user.  For now, I’m sticking with Firefox.

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Blogger taken into beta by Google

Finally, after buying Blogger a few years ago, Google is starting to make some changes. I would say improvements, but that remains to be seen.

The new Blogger is only available to new users and a select group of existing users right now. A full roll-out will happen “eventually,” according to Blogger’s Buzz news blog. Blogger users who want to try out the new tools can sign up for a new user account under a different name, then merge their accounts later.

New features include the addition of tags, which Blogger calls “labels,” to posts and photos. The new beta also has updated privacy and user management options which allow for private posts, tiered user permissions and multi-author blogging. Blog owners can define whitelists of “blog authors” and “blog readers” who have access to publish and read blog content. [wired]

When I first started out blogging, and like many other people out there in the same boat, I used Blogger. And for those just getting into the whole blogging thing, it’s great. More importantly, it’s free. All you need to get going with your own blog is an unused name for your URL and internet access.

Oh wait, did I just say that it’s great? I meant to say that it can be a real pain, and that goes beyond your butt. The reliability isn’t always the best. Somedays it will publish your posts, other days you’ll sit staring at the screen screaming, “Oh come on already! PUBLISH!”

There’s lots of other things about Blogger that made me jump to WordPress, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s about time Google did something about it. They’re promising lots of changes to come. I’m curious to see what they come up with.

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Blogging from inside Lebanon

Blog: Back to Iraq [Christopher Allbritton]There’s been a lot of discussion about the war in the southern region of Lebanon being different from any other conflict that we have ever experienced, especially in this Web 2.0 world.  People are blogging about it and posting videos on YouTube as everything unfolds, offering a unique, personal observation of what is going on there.

I’ve been paying attention to a blog, Back to Iraq, for some months, and this guy seems to have a knack for finding himself in, or even seeking out, tight situations.  In fact, Christopher Allbritton is a freelance journalist who reports for numerous news organizations, Time Magazine being one of the more well known ones.  After living in Iraq for about two years, he relocated to Beirut, well before the recent conflict.

His recent post is an amazing summary of the hardship that the civilians are eduring through all of this fighting.  I’m sure this won’t be the last time something like this will be said.

The Israelis have started shelling or bombing Dahiye again. While writing this, a massive blast rattled my windows. I can only hope that something can be done to stop this.  [back-to-iraq]