dcinput

It’s been 12 days since my last post. Rubbish.

I’ve been completely caught up in the final phase of a big project at work which is literally been sucking all my time. In fact I’ve barely been online at all and have completely lost touch with what’s going on. If anyone ever tries to tell you that digital intermediate is easy, they’re lying.

A while back I wrote that I was going to start researching topics that I thought were interesting to the world of digital cinema and that I would write about them as I learnt new stuff. Well I’m going to link to two good Ze Frank episodes where he looks at the subject of copyright. Here and here. It’s complicated ok.

“So in my adulthood I decided to go back to my childhood strategy: just start playing with it. Very quickly you start to understand the activity or idea that is at something’s core”.

This is a key idea IMHO. You can procrastinate all day long but at some stage you have to start the thing you are planing to do. The more you think about something the harder it can seem. It’s often more productive and fun to figure stuff out as you go along.

Blog posts have been rather less daily than I would have liked this past week. I am right in the middle of the final stages of a very big project and have been doing 12-16 hour days. Looks set to continue for at least another week.

Good Ze Frank from last Friday about how we’re all learning about this internet thing we’ve built. Ugly.

I’m going to see the new Superman movie in 3D at the Imax on Wednesday. Not so good to hear others that weren’t too impressed.

Today I am in Wales in a small town which I can’t pronounce let alone spell. It’s incredibly beautiful here and very remote. There are cows in the backgarden and sheep outnumber humans 100-1.

Last night in the local pub many of the locals were speaking Welsh, which is a very bizare language and rather similar to gaelic. We’ve taken a trip to see a waterfall which is higher than Niagra Falls, though not as wide, and we also went to a massive man made lake which supplies the entire town of Liverpool with water.

I love the country side!

Pictures to follow when I get home.

One year ago today: “A possible terrorist attack has occured accross the London tube network. The whole network has been shut down. On my way to work on the Silverlink this morning we were told that due to an emergency the Victoria line was closed”.

That day I had a strange feeling something wasn’t quite right about half way through my journey to work. When I arrived everyone had gathered in the kitchen watching the TV. We were all in shock, hardly anyone spoke as we watched the live coverage on the BBC. All mobile networks were down and so we sent out emails to all our friends to make sure everyone was safe.

Having only recently started blogging, I searched the web for information and was completely amazed by the ripples accross the blogosphere. It was my first ever experience of networked journalism and also of how the web community could come together to offer support.

The comming months were to be pretty difficult times for Londoners. The atmosphere on the daily commute was seriously tense for many weeks and I know of several friends that were routinely stopped by police and searched simply becasuse of the colour of their skin. One friend was stopped so many times by police wearing machine guns that he temporarily moved back to Australia.

One year on and London has recovered well though I still am very aware that another bomb could be on every tube and bus I board.

I heard yesterday that Amanda Congdon the host of Rocketboom was leaving the show splitting from the show’s creator Andrew Baron. I’ve watched the show for well over a year now and in that time it has entertained me immensely but also certainly has changed how I view this thing we call the web. Amanda and Andrew thanks muchos!

Is it bad news for Rocketboom? I think not.

How to find a replacement for Amanda Congdon

Amanda has done a really fantastic job getting the show to where it is today. My honest opinion though is that I had kind of gotten bored of the format. The exagerated head movements, the throwing of the sheets of paper, that weird machine that she uses to start each video clip. Lately I was getting that ’same old, same old’ feeling.

On the other hand I have really been loving some of the new field reporters who each have very different styles of vlogging. I love the variety, you know being able to see things through other peoples eyes. The fact that Andrew and Amanda relinquish complete show control to these guys is fantastic.

My idea is this: have “Guest Presenters”. Instead of the same person week in week out lets mix it up a little by having people we recognise from the web present some shows. Sometimes just one show, maybe they do a whole string of them, maybe they come back at a later date if they were liked. Suddenly the show has no boundaries: you shoot it in a style that fits the personality of the “Guest Presenter”.

Imagine if you tuned in one day and Ze Frank presented a few days and what about a few days with Marc Canter, Dave Winer or Adam Curry? How about those two Chinese students that lypsync to Backstreet Boys tracks in their bedroom? The potential for the internet to find interesting characters is enormous. Sure, currently many of the known faces are the geeks, but it won’t be like that for ever.

How about if Rocketboom helped to bring in the interesting artists, scientists, politicans, fashion designers, journalists, business men etc of our world into this new open way of doing things? Now that really would be great.

Just my two pence.

dcinput vlog #2: The French in Picadily Circus

Ok so the French beat Portugal in the Semi-Final of the World Cup last night. The match was a little dull and my legs were very sore from standing up but the scene at Picadily Circus afterwards was interesting. vlog #2 illustrates why most people don’t use crappy camera phones for taking video.

The Register: “SGI to emerge from bankruptcy cocoon in September”.

SGI CEO McKenna laid out more of SGI’s product plans here.

Great exit interview questions to store away for a rainy day

I read this Scoble piece called You’re exit interview of me a couple of days ago but forgot to link to it. He’s answering questions from his readers about leaving his position at Microsoft. Some really good questions and I found his answers very well thought out. It’s funny I’m finding myself far more interested in his Blog since he resigned. Not sure why exactly. Maybe because he’s jumping into a space which I find very interesting.

Much ado about journalism

Jeff Jarvis: “This isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network”.

One of the things that bothered me about the “citizen journalism” tag was how it felt so lonely. In the back of my head I had a picture of this renegade guy running around the streets with a camcorder trying to track down what was really going on in the world. This film noir vision isn’t what the internet is about at all. Part of its charm is its abilty to bring people together so they can interact and create things. It’s just a big playground.

Yahoo News: “Paris wants blanket wireless Internet cover by the end of 2007, helping to make it the most connected capital city in the world”.

This would be way cool. The coffee and croisants are infinitely better in the cafes over there. Do I even need another reason to go hang around in wonderfull Paris?

Crazy bird action on Rocketboom.

Ze Frank: “Since this massively networked world is still in its adolescants, we’re still trying to work out the rules of communication and friendship”.

Unhappy Customer

I had my phone stolen on Saturday night. If I’ve met you in the last month or so then unfortunately there is a good chance you have been deleted as I haven’t backed up in that long. Anoyingly I’ve also lost lots of nice photos I’ve taken recently, the perils off local storage eh.

This afternoon has been spent dealing with the mess that is Carphone Warehouse. When I bought the phone from them, they ‘forgot’ to tell me that I would be paying my bills through them. What this means is that when something goes wrong you have to do everything 5 times as their systems don’t link up properly with Vodafones.

Most excellent laptop customisation.

It looks like the new version of my phone takes video. Once I sync my contacts maybe I’ll try to become vlogger.

dcinput vlog #1

It’s BBQ weather here in London. I highly recommend the portable Smokey Joe Gold from Weber. Perfect for the park. This weird contraption on the right is the Chimney Starter, a geniously simple and highly effective way to get the coals red hot in around 10 minutes. Here is dcinput vlog #1

Happy Birthday Ali Menzies! Why has she stopped blogging?

Looking at my sidebar it’s high time I did some category pruning.

Thoughts on Gnomedex and all things virtual

Having learnt from Bloggercon last week that trying to do too many things at once can be bad, I decided to stick to the webcast and IRC for the first day of Gnomedex 6.0. Streaming video was a huge improvement on just having audio. It’s far far easier to get an understanding of what is actually going on in the room. Though it seems that maybe bandwidth problems got the better of them since after lunch only an audio stream was being cast.

The IRC really adds an interesting and useful extra dimension, especially for those like me who are not present. I suppose it’s kind of like having people sitting next to you to bounce ideas off of except that in real life you would find it hard to sit next to 120 people all at once. Due to this virtual proximity of so many people, the level of banter tends to be rather high but it helps to keep the conference interesting and, for the most part, is harmless fun. In addition interesting points do get raised and discussed in the backchannel, it serves as a bullshitometer where people get called out pretty quickly if they are talking rubbish and finally it does help to give some idea of the ‘mood of the crowd’. Though sometimes you wonder whether its just the troublemakers that are speaking up.

Being able to experience this virtual community for the first time in a real meaningfull way has been for me the most rewarding aspect of both Bloggercon and Gnomedex. This sort of thing is probably old hat for many people who attended but its new to me. No doubt I have violated backchannel etiquette on several occasions, but c’est la vie when you’re a newbie.

I’ve added the new category ‘virtual communities’ as I’m sure I’ll be talking about this topic some more.

You can track whats going on at Gnomedex here.

Dave Dederer of the Presidents of the USA led an interesting discussion about the music business in the digital age and covered important topics such as copyright, intelectual property and the ease of getting laid. He started by covering parts of a couple of Lou Reed tracks on an accoustic guitar which came accross real nice over the video.

Senator John Edwards lead one of the sessions though dispite his efforts it kind of turned into a question and answer session. Though I don’t give a monkeys about american politics, it was certainly interesting to see a guy like him trying to understand this new world we’re creating by starting a dialogue with the geeks and in a very open setting [ie. broadcast live to the world]. Just in case he does get to the top I thought I should take a few snaps: singing, dancing and for some bizare reason hitchiking.