Archive - 2005

November 13th

Sharing videos

Colin’s class is covering vlogs this week. I haven’t really played with vLogs, but I did recently read TechCrunch’s review of free video sharing sites, so I figured now is a good time to play with them a little bit myself.

As background, I have a Cannon PowerShut S410. It can record very brief video segments. I took a brief video of Fiona and started uploading it to the various sites.

Youtube is the oldest and most established. They convert the videos to Flash and add their watermark to the video. They take a little while to convert the video. They do a nice job of pointing out similar videos based on tags. Perhaps this is the flickr of the vlogs.

Castpost gives a nice URL and is easy to use. In a lot of ways, it feels a bit like blogger.

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November 11th

Originally uploaded by Aldon.



Originally uploaded by Aldon.


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November 10th

Surfing the Non Profit Blogosphere

Recently, folks at the Non Profit Blog Exchange have been preparing for their next virtual event. I took this as an opportunity to add several non-profit blogs to by bloglines.

Today, I read a few interesting posts that I would like to highlight. Over at Mission Based Management, Peter Brinkerhoff writes about Sarbanes-Oxley and its implications for non-profits. He links to a couple good resources on the subject.

Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote about what is going on in Jordan. Ethan co-founded Global Voices, a site that calls attention to important blogging around the world. Reading both his blog and the Global Voices blog is a great way of getting a much richer picture of what is really going on in our world.

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November 9th

How are blogs changing the political landscape?

(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)

Today, I received an email from Mike Lidell, the director of Online Communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asking me to join in a blogger’s conference call with Senator Chuck Schumer, DSCC Chair.

In contrast, I received a bulk email from Howard Dean entitled “Investments pay off”. It asked for a $25 contribution. Rahm Emanuel, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a bulk email entitled, “Democratic Vision Wins Out” asking for a contribution. Emily’s list sent a bulk email “Insider News - Setting the stage for 2006” asking for a contribution. The bulk email from Eli Pariser of MoveOn was entitled “Good election news! Now let's win big in 2006” and asked me to donate now. Jim Dean, of Democracy for America entitled his bulk email, “...And We're Only Getting Started”. It also asked for a contribution. John Kerry’s bulk email was entitled, “Reality 2, Bush 0” and asked me to click on an online petition calling to withdraw 20,000 troops over the holidays and asking for a contribution.

November 7th

Blogging about medicine

Two blogs I’ve really been enjoying recently are B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog and Joe Salvati’s State of the Heart Blog

Joe has written a very compelling blog about his experiences with heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. B.L. writes about corporate blogging strategy. Joe, meet B.L. B.L., meet Joe. I think you might want to compare notes about Joe’s recent post Direct TV.

Joe writes, “I was contacted by administrators from the Clinic. It seems it had been brought to their attention that I had been writing a very public account of my experiences while under the care of the clinic. I was told that there are “…many people paying attention to my blog and if there is anything that I am or have been unhappy with I should speak directly with a “patient advocate”.”

I would love to hear B.L.’s take on Joe’s experience. Meanwhile, a close friend of mine has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Tomorrow she is having a lymph node biopsy. Perhaps we can convince her to write about her experiences, if only to get better service.