dcinput

It’s been a quiet a day on the blogging front today due to being in the throws of the final phases of a big project at work.

I’ve also been spending lots of time exploring the inner workings of Wordpress with the aim of re-designing the site to both look and work better for the sort of writting I tend to do.

Wordpress has a feature called asides which allows you to post small amounts of information that might not deserve a full title. I tend to do this lots throughout the day and keep longer posts requiring titles for when I have time. I just need to figure out how to display these two types of posts nicely together. Ideally I want to be able to group all asides and title posts I make on any given day under one date.

Jeff Jarvis in Davos: “I say media companies must turn from owning content to enabling networks”.

Steve Garfield has some first impressions of the Nokia N95. I want one!

Hugh MacLeod: “if I was walking down the street and I suddenly got hit with the itch to draw something, I could just nip over to the nearest park bench or coffee shop, pull out a blank card from my bag and get busy doing my thing. Seamless. Effortless. No fuss. I like it.”

Kosso: “The best thing being, when things are easy, more ideas come”.

Blogging tools aren’t cutting it for me

Kosso is right and it’s why I’ve been spending lots of time thinking about how I can get the most out of my blog. There’s been some conversations about this recently in the scripting news comments. I’ve found that the normal title-post way of blogging just doesn’t fit in well with my life.

I want to be able to post little snipets throughout the day, with quotes and small thoughts. These posts don’t need or deserve titles and comments sections, they just need a permalink. When I blogged with titles it always felt hard to blog, it felt like a chore. I wrote far less often, I was less curious, I learnt less. That’s when I changed to the dcinput daily posts.

When I have more time I like to be able to write essay type posts which do require titles. During these periods I am mentally in a different mode. It’s when I look back and reflect on the daily posts and gather together thoughts in a more in depth way.

Blogging tools need to be made to fit in with your life and I don’t think they are right now. I don’t want to live to blog, I want to blog to live. It’s the reason Hugh MacLeod draws on the back of business cards. It’s the reason I carry a note book in my pocket, it’s the reason I’ve started using Google notebook lots recently. When inspirations strikes, record those ideas before they get lost in the ether of life.

How can I get Wordpress to work with both my styles of writing?

It shouldn’t be for just writing either. I imagine a world where I can live free from the burden of technology, collecting media snippets of every kind, logging my life as I go along and later using this log to create canvas’ that tell stories that I can seamlessly share with others. The best way to learn is to teach, the best way to teach is to keep on learning.

Google images

What’s going on with the new feature in Google images where a picture gets highlighted when you drag your mouse over it? I’m sure it didn’t used to do this. It doesn’t really help my searching. The point here is that I don’t always want to be looking where my mouse arrow is. I’m scared to put mouse over the page now, it slows down my eyes scanning for images since it forces them to look somewhere. Though it does tell you the image size which could be useful. Maybe you can turn it off in preferences?

I just bought my own private television station: marksmith.tv. I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.

The Future of TV

This past week I’ve been following a conversation that started with Mark Cuban and later added to by Dave Winer. The penny didn’t drop however until this evening when I read this article by Doc Searls.

Mark suggested that the recent push to get your computer hooked up to your TV so that you could display internet content on it was actually the wrong way around: let people use the internet to upload content to satellite and cable companies and these then send it to our screens using their networks.

His point was that sending data over the internet requires one stream per person, per video (unicast) whereas traditional TV methods only require one stream to deliver to everyone who is subscribed (unicast). Streaming over the internet is way expensive.

Dave suggests is that set top boxes will have HTTP servers in them aswell as the decoders used to make sense of the satellite or cable signal. TVs themselves will have HTTP clients inside them that will act as viewers. You’ll be able to subscribe to marksmith.tv no sweat.

With equipment comming out soon like the Red Camera which allows you to digitally shoot the same quality as 35 mm film and with a price tag of $17,000, it won’t be long before the price is driven down even further. Young film makers are getting really excited about this. Home cinema projectors are cheap and extremely good quality. I have an HD one in my flat and it is incredible.

As the barriers of production and distribution are erroding, the reality of fully digital film making pipelines is getting closer than some realise. The next few years will be all about indie film making.

Doc Searls: “The marketplace that emerges in that flat new world will be many times larger than the old pyramids it replaces”.

I spent today at the London Geek Day Out organised by Hugh MacLeod. The idea being that we spend far too long on front of our computer screens and so are desperately in need of some culture.

Faced with this scary prospect, it was thought best to first meet up for lunch and a couple of beers to dull the pain. We then all moved on to the National Gallery where, for at least one whole hour, we freely self administered ourselves with 200 years of culture. And boy did it feel good.

It was great meeting people from all walks of life and in a small way the art has quite honestly made me look at the world with a slight tint of creativity. Hopefully it will have worn off by the time I get to work tomorrow. Hugh thanks for a seamless afternoon.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice the indie film makers responsible for Four Eyed Monsters are videoblogging daily from the Sundance Festival. If you don’t know anything about them then watch a few of the videoblogs they used to promote their film here [start from the bottom].

The teaser video they made before they left is here.

You should be able to find the the videos as they post them here.

This year the Sundance Channel has been setup where you can find all sorts of interviews and festival dailies.

If you work in film keep an eye on what’s going on here because the indie film makers are really starting to embrace the web and use it, not only for distribution of media but as an entire platform for making films. As people in the film industry we need to be following these digital media evangelists, interacting, connecting and experimenting with them, finding out how they are making films in this new world so we can figure out how we can help them.

All I can think right now is why am I not at Sundance?

It’s very interesting to see how other industries are being affected by the web. Jeff Jarvis tells a story about his experience of working for People, following 289 people loosing their jobs at Time inc yesterday.

Watch YouTube videos on your ipod or psp with Free YouTube to iPod Converter.Some Wordpress tricks and plugins.

The latest podcast from fxguide is with Tyler Leshney from Ascent Media talking about their Digital Media Data Center in Burbank and how they maximise content lifespan. If you want to know the sort of world I work in, listen to this.

Will Video For Food: “Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg will give aspiring filmmakers from around the world the chance to earn a $1-million development deal at DreamWorks”.

Ze Frank has been playing with his Wii.

I’ve had a Wii at the flat since they came out and they are a lot of fun. Four player tennis gets pretty interesting, I’ve had other people’s controlers hit me in the face a few times. I’m not massively into gaming so the novelty is starting to wear off. I don’t know where Ze’s getting his games from though, sounds like pirate Wii games to me.

Follow this link for an amusing take on the Anshe Chung Second Life Scandal.

Tickets for the Camden Crawl are on sale. Here’s a video from last year. I love living in Camden.

Hugh Macleod: “These days I’ve started seeing the internet as just a manifestation of something far more primal and ancient […] It’s all about Human Connection. Love. Everything else is secondary”.

8/12/06: Susan Buice: “Feeling connected to the world and to other human experiences is what makes me feel alive and happy. When I don’t feel connected I feel like a meaningless blob of flesh and I want to die”.

Valleywag: “We suspect that companies such as IBM, which have assigned marketing budgets to Second Life, expected to reach corporate decisionmakers, rather than a few fetishists who got lost on their way to the nearest online brothel”.

I agree with Hugh that humans have an inbuilt urge to connect. We want to connect with people in all sorts of ways, we also want to connect ideas in our head together and share these with others. Why did I post the last three links? Because in some way I felt they were all connected. I didn’t start out with the aim to do this, it just kind of ended up that way. I think connection (love?) is how we make sense of things.

Mark Pilgrim has written a history of DVD copy protection which is very interesting, especially in the light of all the talk about the Netflix anouncement which I’ve been waiting for since Scoble wrote about it.

Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service, will give customers the choice of either having the DVDs sent out to them or watching the content straight on their PCs.

Screencast Demo of the new service.

Robert Sobble’s not too happy about the streaming: “Hollywood: you need to find a better solution”.

Dave Winer: “It’s another example of the movie industry’s lack of will to compete”.

Mike Arrington: “Studios contributing to Netflix’s new service include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema.”

Thinking different…

This video for the Apple “Think different” campain is great. Ignore for a second that it is an Apple branding exercise and just look at the message. This is the sort of thing that is happening on the web every single day.

I’ve been reading Jello Biafra’s Wikipedia page.

He is an american punk rock musician and politcal activist best known for being the lead singer and song writer of the Dead Kennedys (78-86). Inertia, my high school’s best band when I was there used to do loads of covers of theirs.

A bit of Googling revealed that his record label Alternative Tentacles have a podcast covering the music they release and also some polical speaking by Jello.

I also found a very old interview with him by an impressively young Jools Holland.

Wordpress not good for my feed?

I’ve noticed recently that because of the way I write the blog if you read this via the feed you might miss updates that I make throughout the day. I tend to make one “dcinput daily” post and add to it. Unfortunately if you read the post early in the day and mark it as read in your aggregator then following updates won’t show up. I am looking for a way of using Wordpress to get around this currently so sorry about that. Suggestions welcome.

Windows adverts sure aren’t what they used to be. Bring back the 386!

Robert Scobble: “[Verisign are demoing] a peer-to-peer system for selling and distributing high-def videos. It really rocks. I downloaded a movie while there in the booth and the quality wasn’t distinguishable from the HD-DVD’s I get from Netflix […] It made me realize why would any of us go into a Blockbuster in the future, or wait two days for a DVD to show up from Netflix.”

I recently visited a dvd authoring facility. The people there were all extremely talented and they have to be because the one thing I noticed was how incredibly complicated it is to make dvds. If you can download HD quality movies in a resonable time, I can’t see a reason for dvds.

Remember photobooths?

I mean the old ones that took 4 pictures, one at a time so you had to choose which one you looked less rubbish in. When those dissapeared from the back of supermarkets a little piece of me died. One of the greatest things about getting back to reading feeds is that I’m able to keep track of great things people are doing again.

Bre Petis has been doing some great photography projects recently including the webcam photobooths, fauxtography [with Steve Garfield], the stranger project and the self portrait cult. Bre is awesome!

Mark Chandler: “Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity”.

How interesting to see a guy at the top of Cisco calling Apple out like this in such a public way. Will Apple respond? I dought it. They don’t have a voice on the web. Steve Jobs certainly doesn’t. I have friends inside the company, if they decide to have a voice they get fired.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls has this to say about companies having a voice on the web:

“The party’s already started. You can join or not. If you don’t, your silence will be taken as arrogance, stupidity, meanness, or all three. If you’re going to join, don’t do it as a legal entity or wearing your cloak of officialdom. Join it as a person with a name, a point of view, a sense of humour, and a passion.”

…and Memeorandum shows us that people sure are talking about it.

Robert Scobble: “I’ve never seen a blog used like this”.

UCL News: Professor Mette Hjort will give a public lecture on ‘The New Danish Model for Filmmaking: A Cultural Resource for Small Nations’ next Wednesday.

Al Jazeera: “US forces, backed by helicopters, have raided the Iranian consulate’s offices in Arbil, the Kurdish capital in northern Iraq.”.

Most popular Bre Petis snaps.

Hugh McCleod: Hollywood endings.

Time Magazine: “For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.”

BBC Nottingham: “Pizza delivery man Paul Knight has been taking the internet by storm from his kitchen in Annesley, having recently won an award for Vlogging in America.”

Just found the New Mediacrasy audio podcast. I’ve looking for a purely audio podcast about videoblogging for a while so that I can listen to the goings on in this space while I’m on the move. Kind of hard to find the feed from their site but it’s here in case you want to subscribe through a podcatcher. I’m off for a walk on Hampstead Heath to have a listen.

Really awesome line rider: Jagged Peak Adventure.