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« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »
You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see how that could come about from open source software. The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.
-- Don Norman
Eric at Outhink pointed out this interesting product:
"Flow is perfectly suited for personal and group information management alike -- publicize your content through Flow's multiple publishing options (web servers, web logs, RSS) or set up a share-space to grant multiple users the ability to edit, discuss, organize and use the same content."
Based on the little information on the website, Flow looks very nice, but it seems like it only runs on a Mac and with Safari (I haven't tried Flow yet - the Mac I had suddenly died). Cost is $99 + additional subscription service for peer-to-peer option.
Obviously, it would be great to see a free, open-sourced and cross-platform version of this.
SpinFlow.org is free and cross-platform, but has nowhere near the web features of Flow at this time. Feature of this nature would be easy to add if SpinXpress were open-source. Resources, collaboration and freedom to create is the key here.
Unfortunately many companies, like Outhink and Near-Time, still appear to want to build proprietary systems based on the open-sourced efforts of others.
Outhink attempts to give back to the community in it's support of
creative professionals. I hope Near-Time will also contribute to the
communities that help it grow.
But the use of open-source software for commercial purposes can be a slippery slope as Linksys has recently found out. Linksys was extremely diligent in respecting the conditions of the numerous open-source licenses for the components that it exploits. Nonetheless, they received a fair amount of bad press for being a little too close to the boundaries of these licenses (in one case they had to argue that their changing of a config file they shipped was not in violation of a specific license.
I think it would be better to avoid these problems altogether and "share-alike" as they say over at Creative Commons.
Freevlog.org points the way for free services and Steve Garfield recently pointed out a new version aimed at commercial services like TypePad. Of course, this site's located at Feevlog.com.
There is still a long way to go before anyone makes any true progress towards simplifying the work-flow process that both SpinFlow and Flow are trying to address:
Create, Gather, Organize, Publish and Collaborate.
I've been talking with renegade at Luxomedia about the idea of some sort of playing or trading card for vloggers. I think it would be fun to come up with something in time for the next Vloggercon.
Rene just turned me on to a related idea: Flickr Badges. Very cool. I gotta make one.
I agree, "Vive la Rene-zistance!"
Here in San Francisco, they are making a Media Center in the Apple store. (basically it will be computers with FCP and iMovie on them and people around to help answer questions), which I think is perfect to showcase what we do.
from schlomo at schlomolog.blogspot.com
FCP is Final Cut Pro (of course).
Raymond Kristiansen was describing the videoblogging community to a newcommer recently and was extremely kind to include me in some very fine company:
"...as a purely community forward-driving force, Jay is up there. Richard is a relative newcomer to the scene, but he also is one of those who leave comments on people's sites and draws us all together. And then there is Markus Sandy too. And Ryanne Hodson. And Michael Meiser. And Clint Sharp. And Eric Rice. And let's Not forget Michael Verdi!"
Raymond is one of the people who first inspired me to videoblog (along with Ryanne and Renegade) and I am so very happy to say that I have come to thing of each of these people as a good friend.
Thanks for the kind words, Raymond. His site is dltq.blogs.com. He is experimenting with more facets of videoblogging, podcasting and blogging than anyone I know. Do check out his great work.
This time from MIT...
I have worked on all kinds of surveys and so I thought this one might be interesting. It was for a while, but like so many of these, it was toooo long.
Once when I worked on a contract for a medical diagnosis system for Pfizer. They created a survey to test for depression. An "instrument", if you will. On testing, it took well over two hours to administer the on-line depression test and if you weren't depressed when it started, you sure were by the end. Interesting note: if the medical application detected you were suicidal, it would immediately halt because of liability issues.
This blog survey finally got the better of me too (perhaps it is a ruse and they are really studying how long people will take a survey). In any event, by the time the blog survey got to the list of "do you know a ..." type questions, I pressed "done".
Also, I've generally not been satisfied with the available responses given in many multiple choice questions. This one is no exception as it attempts to force you to select from choices that do not really represent the full range of possible responses (at least for me). I wish they would have an "other" option more often (Yea, yea. I know. It makes the stats harder).
I first saw mention of this on apophenia.
When I was a young mathematician, I worked with a person who always wrote his own textbook - his way - I must admit that they were far superior to others in numerous ways (no pun intended). This was because he was a leader in that area of mathematical research.
Later, as we both got into personal computers and programming, his teaching and textbooks began to cover ground that many had already trodden. Again, it was necessary to do it "his way". Here, the benefits were less obvious. Often, these books added a certain small mathematical twist that was interesting to a few; but I often wondered about why there was a need to write yet another book on Pascal.
One day, my mentor announced to me that he was going to write a "C" book. I was abhorred. I loved my K&R (still do - Kernigahan and Ritchie for those who do not know). There is no other introductory book on the C programming language that stacks up to it. Those who did not care for it were invariably light-weight's when it came to programming. It's a book that I can still enjoy and benefit from re-reading today, even though I no longer program in C (or C++ for that matter).
I told my friend and teacher this and asked him to carefully study and master K&R before adding yet another C programming book to the countless others that do not even come close to igniting the passion for this archaic language, and always relevant style and words of wisdom, that many of us had.
This "little book" is to C programming, what Strunk and White is to writing style.
Today, I am tasked with building new communities. But I see countless ones already and many that need help in various ways.
So why build yet another?
Why not take all of the resources and content planned for new community development and offer it to OurMedia, as an example. How much could an extra paid programmer or two help? Or a graphic designer?
We can all help guest moderate more - they are always asking. We can participate more.
Why develop the infrastructure for proprietary web services, when they could be integrated into others automatically?
Why build so many new communities? Why not join others and help make them richer?
"Inspiring, guiding, and educating citizen journalists and the news organizations that work with them."
Link: I, Reporter.
Link: Luxomedia: BlogHer Spin!.
Thanks so much Rene.
I took the camera down to the Ojai Farmers' Market this past weekend. I'll post a few vids.
This first is a great example for how supporting creative people helps us all out. Notice how it just takes a few to help. Even children know.
It's also a music video of sorts. I love South American music.
This beats the hell out of shopping to Muzak(tm) in a supermarket.
Click the pic to view the vid.
Richard made a screencast of ANT.
All day long I've been griping to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group about the troubles with Archive.org accessability and the Apple Quicktime Fast Start option.
So I went to watch Richard's latest gift to humanity and guess what happened!
It's like waiting for that client call or meeting.
I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
So I made a screencast of Richard's screencast. What else could I do?
I love the RichardShow. I love Scratch Video. I love ANT (FireANT).
Thank you Richard. Thank you Charlene. Thank you Josh, Daniel, Erik, Jay and Ryanne.
Click the pic to view the vid. Better if you use ANT, because this is a bit large (10 minutes, 36MB).
I once set up an account on Ta-Da lists. Created a simple grocery list and then stopped using the product. It never took hold (yet, you never know).
I think SpinXpress faces a similar dilemma. Once you have it setup, you need something to make you use it and see it's value or you will just forget about it. We need to address this on SpinFlow, but that's another website and another story.
Back to Ta-Da...
During that short trial of Ta-Da, I did subscribe to my list via RSS, however, and the feed is still being pulled today. I was experimenting with "digital lifestyle aggregation", which is Marc Canter's meme (personally I don't think the name will ever take, same with "vlogging" - but the ideas are right on!)
Except that I notice that there are new items (not grocery) showing up from other lists (and their usernames). I cannot view the associated data, as it is password protected, but I can see the entire item name and who the people are.
So be careful on your item titles if you use Ta-Da (or anything else, like secure blogs); they will often show up in strange places and some people can add 1+1, especially if they know you (e.g., a co-worker).
I wish I wasn't so busy that I could fill out a report for Ta-Da, but I can't debug everyone's software and services and so I hope this post will make it onto their radar.
Sounds like a GUID problem to me. It might be because the account lapsed due to inactivity and some ID number was reused? Not so GU in the ID in that case.
No matter, I should not be seeing this personal data.
Delivering quality web services to people can be very challanging and 37 Signals has been breaking new ground with their web applications. However, the pace of web development these days is such that testing often takes a back seat to development.
I think testing should drive development.
I got this from Cody at Bluehost:
"I don't appreciate you posting my full name on your blog without my permission, it is copywrited and I will take action to have it removed if you don't."
I love the way he spells it!
I wonder if he ever considered using a Creative Commons licence? LOL!
I've asked "Copywrite Cody" to step aside and let one of the more senior staff to take over. Hopefully they will respond a little better than this poor fool.
All my webapps at BlueHost went down last week. It was clear that the MySQL databases had crashed. Must be all the activity from our small number of users (not!). I filed a support request and got back the usual embarrassing and trite message (3:34pm on Friday):
"We have received your support email. Great technical support is what sets us apart from our competitors. We will respond as quickly as we can to resolve your issue."
I hate crap like that. Makes you wonder about the lack of imagination and integrity of the person who wrote it.
Especially when the hosting service turns out to be hiding the fact that it is so small and underfunded that, according to their support genius Cody Burdick, no one is available for support on the weekends! Here is the first bullshit reply (10:04am on Monday)
"i am not seeing any errors, most likely there was a user causing high load or causing mysql to crash."
Yet, as always with these guys, the problem mysteriously fixed itself around the same time. Later, when I inquired about more information and why there was such a delay in response, Cody replied:
"You sent a ticket in Saturday Afternoon, we are closed on Sudnay, you got the response the quickest I could get it to you, and the problem wasn't occurring by the time I got to this ticket. There really wasn't much more I could do for you."
It seems like Cody's clock is not the only thing running a day late.
Now I know the secret. Why are these hosting places getting so cheap? Because they are obviously cutting back on both the number and quality of support personnel.
I guess Cody is bucking for a job at either TypePad or Blogger.
Of course Cody did point out one useful thing, that I could find my answers in their on-line knowledge base. I'd like to be able to say the same thing one day. I tried to help someone with ours...
...But, of course, it wasn't available like yours Cody.
Thanks for doing your (cough) "best". Hope you had a pleasant and relaxing "great day" off (on my dime, I might add). I know you must feel great when all you have to do is resolve each expression of dissatisfaction with:
"No problem, Have a great Day!"
Keywords: isp, hosting, service, support, problems, sux, sucks, bluehost, rip-off, crash
Things are still all FUBAR at TypePad apparently. It's ironic that they are having so much trouble with TypeLists. Whenever I try to add one and press "save", nothing happens. Hurry up and wait. Maybe if I leave the browser window open, it will eventually save.
TypePad's response times are just getting abysmal.
I'm afraid to post another support ticket after the last incidence where that creep from SixApart (Anil) offered up pure bullshit and then tried to actually sell me on moving to Movable Type. What next, harassment?
Get a clue Anil, you may be helping SixApart, but who cares? You're not helping us. In fact, get on the cluetrain please. Just Google it. And read the Creating Passionate Users, you need it big time.
OK, I have to admit that I was confused. Nowhere did I see an indication that BlogHer was only for women and, frankly, I assumed the BlogHer organizers to be above any exclusivity.
However, I know there are times Alicia would like to hang just with her friends and so I try to be aware of when I'm welcome or best off doing my own thing (it's not like there's an abundance of spare time you know).
I encouraged a number of women to look into BlogHer, but it did not occur to me to attend (intrude, I thought).
But now I see that there is a call for more men to participate and I am delighted for a number of reasons (in no particular order and not complete):
The Internet is a fantastic aid to communication. It can link you with people you know and work with. It can connect you to people you need to meet and who can often help you in what you are doing. It can even help you get a clue!
It doesn't take a challenge to get me to go. "Courage" doesn't even come into it. I wanna go see Ryanne and make better vlogs!!!
Why help others? Why help people get access to technology? In particular, why help women to get funding and access new technologies?
Click the pic and find out. This one's a bit longer, but there's much to cover. I'd have shaved, but I'm working on so many wonderful things, I just have to record this, upload and move on to the next action item on my TODO list.
A story about early computing, for Jay.
One person that I should mention in regards to all this is Dr. Robert Fullilove. He was our NSF contact and someone whom I came to think of as my friend.
Bob is still hard at work today helping young people understand HIV and AIDS. He's the associate dean for community and minority affairs and a professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University.
Thanks Bob!
I'm desparate (so no apology needed).
I need to get some money.
It's time to take this to the streets.
Click the pic to view the vid.
To be continued...
I met with Gordon Gould of WeblogsInc to talk about future directions in blogging, tagging and aggregation. We had another one of those great talks, hanging out at Zen Zoo in West LA.
I asked Gordon one of my favorite questions. If you keep up with this vlog, you already know what it is. This is number 2 in a series and I hope to capture a lot more.
As a videographer, I particularly love that moment of silence that seems to always come just before things get really interesting. You can't stop "filming", that's for sure.
Gordon shared some interesting thoughts about what does and will make him happy.
Thanks Gordon!
Click the pic to view the vid.
The connections one makes through blogs often lead to some interesting people.
I found some thought provoking questions about the notion of gender bias in this post by Elisa Camahort -- one of the co-founders of BlogHer -- in her "worker bees blog".
Seems like lots of people are reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink".
I'm too stoked. Chris Ritke was kind enough to ask me for an interview for his podcasts. I had too much fun and it's now on the 49Media.com.
Please visit 49Media for the complete post. Here is a link to the mp3 file.
"Chris speaks with Markus Sandy about Spinflow.org, video blogging, vlogifying people and organizations, Podcast Hotel, Spincasting, videoblogging street teams, Blogher & a Spinflow sponsored west coast vlogger meetup, SpinXpress and more."
Chris was also so kind as to put the podcast on the Internet Archive. Thanks Chris.
I am excited to be working with my friend Rachel Toole. She is home from NYU for the summer and we are collaborating to document the process of implementing SpinFlow principles at Outhink, Inc.
Yes, Outhink. Everyone can derive value from more SpinFlow training and discipline. Like Tai-Chi or a martial art, SpinFlow requires study and practice. There are no colored belts, but clearly there are masters and there are people who have a passion to create and wish to spin and flow media with ease.
So how are we doing it? First we are establishing modern networking lines of communication between us and, to that end, we have created a pair of blogs (mine's a vlog, hers will be soon also; others may follow).
Much of our discussions and activities will revolve around using SpinXpress, ANT and vlogs. You can find all the details and my first video related to this on my new vlog. Rachel is free to do whatever she likes with her blog and I think it's already very interesting.
You are invited to observe and participate through the comments, we are very interested in your feedback and value quality interaction.
The final cut: his investors backed out. You really must read his account of it all.
Link: 59Bloggers -- The Movie.
Interesting site. A Window into Collaborative Investigative Filmmaking
Link: Echo Chamber Project.
Relating to the last post, I have put out a call for collaboration to the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group. Hopefully some of those good people will get interested in this.
You don't have to be a member to collaborate, everyone is welcome to submit a vid.
Even you Michael. Click the pic to view the vid.
This is a first draft of an ongoing topic that I would like to discuss. I intend to update this document over time as I get your feedback and additional experience.
As I talk to more people about sponsoring creative professionals to just do what they are already doing, I am often asked to justify the expense. There's money involved (not much actually) and so of course there is always another question or challenge to "just giving it away".
I figure that this will be an on-going exercise as I don't ever want to stop working in this way. In fact I want to do it more.
I also figure I will have to repeat this many times and for many people; so I might as well blog it, get your feedback and then hand out the link to this page when future justification requests come in.
So here goes. I hate this really, but I need to take the time from what I'm doing to get this out now.
I would not want to be John Hart today. He is experiencing the darker side of group collaboration. It has been quite something to watch. Basically, it went down like this as far as I can tell from quickly going over all the relevant emails and blogs (please let me know if I got it wrong in any way - times may be a little off due to timezone issues in messages):
Wow! I just found something amazing! I found a complete duplicate of my "zzzzzzzz-list" of bloggers that I used to read but no longer find relevant.
Even more amazing is the fact that the list is also the list of bloggers who appear in a so-called documentary called "59 bloggers".
What's most amazing is that the "former Hollywood executive", John Hart, who seems to be behind the "59 bloggers", has attempted to usurp the name "Blogumentary" which was first coined by Chuck Olsen of Secret Vlog Injection long before Hart showed up on the blogging scene.
What's worse is that Hart has responded rudely to Chuck's polite requests to try and work the matter out.
Luckily the "59 bloggers" documentary may never see the light of day as it appears that funding is lacking for this project. This guy's so desperate that he has apparently threatened legal action against Chuck. Hopefully potential sponsors will realize the potential backlash of bad publicity that will no doubt ensue.
This is not true collaboration and I have no intention of supporting or viewing "59 bloggers".
I do look forward to Chuck's truly collaborative and honest "Blogumentary".
Please email John Hart at john.writer@gmail.com and urge him to show a little respect and to consider interviewing a more interesting set of people.
Aside: Even Lessig is on the "zzzzzzz-list" these days. I must admit that his name came up for consideration as a keynote speaker recently and everyone involved agreed that he seemed to be going on about the same old things these days Pass. We get it Larry, you're preaching to the choir. Perhaps he's trying to get the chior to sing? I dunno. Check out my "Promises, Promises" playlist on WebJay for my favorite Larry Lessig mash-up.
Have you ever noticed how often it says "comments will be re-enabled soon" over at Creative Commons? Weird.
I just found this banner in the sidebar of a site that Raymond had mentioned in a recent post to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. Interesting site.
Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by
corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i —
represents the rights of the individual...
I like this alternate image too: 
I recently returned to Los Angeles with my friend Dave Toole to meet with people in the entertainment and gaming industries.
One of the highlights of the trip was a wonderful dinner in an old Craftsman style home near downtown. My grandparents and relatives all lived and died near here. It has always been a strange place for me.
Lot's of memories. Lot's of ghosts.
Here's a little collage from the footage I shot in the car as we drove into town. The music is called "Los Angeles (Intro)" and is by Novokain and is available on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
This is for the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group's Video Music Week. Happy birthday folks!
Click the pic to view the video.
I hate to say it, but TypePad's service is really starting to degenerate. Mainly it is a response time issue on editing (especially simple things like bookmark lists), but also a page serving issue on viewing the blogs themselves. I ran some simple tests on retrieving some files and TypePad was abysmal compare with even a shared server from BlueHost.
Anytime now, people will start talking about them like they do now about Blogger.
I guess that means a migration job to one of our new webservers and so we will move to Word Press as that is already available and easy to install. Lots of people appear to like it and so it looks like there is pretty good support if you know where to find it.
The Yahoo! Videoblogging Group is one such place. They have recently been working out the best way to produce RSS feeds with media enclosures under Word Press. Good job folks!
I am doing something similar with SpinXpress at the moment. I have enhanced my older RSS 2.0 feed generation servlet to now handle media enclosures and hotcha! I've got SPIN group content feeding into aggregators like OWL, Thunderbird and ANT. Gotta get that new Safari and try it out to. And the new iPodderX. I hope it's better than the older iPodder software I have tried several times - it sux!
Unfortunately, so does TypePad these days.
Wow! Good things comes in pairs? Threes? Someone just sent me a link to Toolfarm, a site for creative professional tools, mainly pug-ins for Adobe and Avid products it seems. They have a post about SpinXpress! Too cool. Getting the word out. I had heard that Robert at Outhink was talking with them.
I am new to Toolfarm and appreciate their notice of our peer-to-peer, secure, private, invitation-only collaboration and file sharing application for Mac's and PC's. They're site is similar to some of the better developer plug-in sites that I am more familiar with.
As I get more into video editing, I'm sure I'll be checking them out more. Right now, I am starting to look at JahShaka, an open source video editing platform and tool that supports a wide variety of plug-inz (note the z, in this case). As I learn more about this, I'll learn and report how the open-source approach meshes with commercial sites like Toolfar. Often, the two work together as I have seen with the Eclipse development platform.
Have you ever done business with Toolfarm? What was your experience like? Would you recommend them?
Too cool! We recently posted SpinXpress on downloads.com and something unexpected happened: we got A LOT of new users from Spain. Go figure. Not sure why Spain over anywhere else (other than that they are so cool over there, of course - I love traveling in Spain).
i just noticed (via a Technorati search on SpinXpress) this posting about the product on a Spanish language blog. Too cool!
My spanish is a little rusty, but the post and comment seem to be mainly informative and say that we are like Grouper, except on the Mac too.
Thanks folks!
I posted an article on "Collaborative Video" at spinflow.org, please check it out; I'd really appreciate your feedback (or pushback! I like that word.)
It covers a wide rage of group efforts centered around video in general and videoblogging in particular.
Here is clip from yesterday's videoblogging video conference in which Nathan Peters is discussing music and video collaboration.
Just one of the many topics dicussed.
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