dcinput

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.

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.