dcinput

The Fake Steve Jobs: “I’m a middleman. That’s it. I’m like the guy who runs the record store down the block from you. If the record labels want to ship their records in cement blocks dipped in smallpox, what do I care? As long as the kids want to buy them”. The more things disintermediate, the more they re-intermediate, it would seem.

Ze Frank on procrastination.

Ali McClymont makes awesome London Snowman.

Yahoo Pipes…

I’ve been trying to play around with Yahoo Pipes. This web application that runs in your browser allows you to pull in RSS feeds from around the web and mash them up together in interesting ways. Techcrunch description here.

The GUI looks very nice. What I found interesting is how it seems to be based around similar node and flow metaphors used in many vfx 2D apps like Shake, Fusion and some 3D apps like Houdini. The aim is to allow non-programmers to be able to harness the power of the web.

Whether this will work or not, only time will tell. The apps mentioned above have certainly allowed many non-progrmmers into the world of vfx but this medium is inherantly visual, and since most people have a pair of eyes, there’s an inate understanding. My instinct is that mashing up RSS feeds full of different sorts of non-visual data is going to be way more cerebral and less immediately fun.

The other problem is that since it’s all web based, the Yahoo servers have to take the workload and so far they seem to be going down all the time. In principle though I like the idea. Lets see what happens.

I’m heading over to Cardiff shortly where I’ll be meeting several of my uncles for a weekend of rugby. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Ireland - Wales international match. I’ve never been to Cardiff before and also never been to such a big sports event so I’m pretty excited

Light blogging for the next few days.

Scott Kirsner: “I would just note that most TV and movie execs think of user-gen as the Internet version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and that’s a mistake — it’s much broader and more diverse… and that pigeon-holing seems like the kind of thing that’s destined to lead to some strategic blunders”.

Jeff Jarvis: “That is the job of media, government, business, and technology: to enable us to make better connections, to set the conditions for our collaboration. But this will frighten them more than it has already.”

It has been really interesting following Jeff at Davos this year. Typically a conference for the elite, for the fist time I felt I was able to see inside it properly. How very interesting to see his observations of the rich and the powerful starting to realise that the internet is changing things in a big way. Even more interesting to hear him say how unprepared they are for their realisation of the shear magnitude of this change. They are in for a shock.

BusinessWeek: “Uploading video to the Internet is so 2006. Now the question is what to do with those clips once they’re in cyberspace.”

I’ve been waiting for an article about this subject for a while now. Digital asset management is the world that I live in and its pretty complicated. The internet disintermediates and it does this faster than people expect. The role of big film and TV companies will change in the comming years and they need to be paying attention to this.

Something pretty bizare has happened to the layout on the blog, sorry about that, I’m looking into it.

Update: Strangely publishing this post seems to have fixed everything.

Very busy but productive day at the office intersperced with learning how to touch type. I spend such a long time writing, I figured that the time I would gain from learning this new skill could be repurposed into doing more interesting things, and that this far outweighed the slighlty scarry notion that the separation between mind and machine would become that little bit more blurry.

TypeOnline is an online application that I’m finding very good. So far I am mainly learning about the ‘home’ keys which are the central line of keys on the keyboard. Did you know that the little indentations on the ‘f’ and the ‘j’ are there on purpose to help you put your hands in teh correct position without looking at the keyboard? Well I didn’t. Anyway touchtyping is hard.

I really was looking to find a copy of The Typing of the Dead, a game where by typing correctly and quickly you save youself from vicious flesh eating zombies. Quite literally you ‘type or die’.

Is anybody going to the Mobile Metamorphosis evening organised by Chinwag? Drop me a mail if you are.

Dion Hinchcliffe: “The emergence and rise of mass social media”. Great diagram.

JD Lasica: “Some folks are calling BarCampUSA 2007 the “Woodstock of this generation.” They’re hoping 5,000 technology and video aficionados will turn out in the wilds of Wisconsin for a four-day event Aug. 23-26″.

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.

MiniBar - the web meetup for Londonites

Friday night I was at the London MiniBar at Corbet Place, Old Truman Brewery. This was a chance to informally meet and chat with other people who are involved or interested in web related projects. With so much of the web related action seeming to be happening stateside it was really good to meet people who were London based.

The theme for this months meeting was “Online Video - What to do with all this user generated content?”. Michela Ledwidge did a presentation on Modfilms that aim to become a platform for storytellers to exchange film components and remix them into new works. I had a chat with her afterwards and the project is definitely one to keep an eye on.

John Wilson was live blogging the event, info about the other presentations in his post.

It was good hanging out with Toby Harris (*spark), Ali McClymont (superfineshag), Amit Kothari (QuotationsBook), Marton Dow (Rightscom), Deirdre Molloy (Chinwag) and Pete Tayor & Nana Aganovich (Aganovich).

The MiniBar is rapidly gathering momentum, I’ll certainly be there next month.

Arin Crumley’s latest videoblog “The Collective Experience” made at the Sundance Film festival looks at whether going to the cinema is dying out. Arin is a natural born storyteller.

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”.