Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
National buy Outright Barbarous Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 10:11Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. April showers bring May Flowers. Hopefully, the May Flowers won’t bring much more pollen. I’m not sure if it is the pollen, a virus, or what, but I’ve really been hurting this week. I have a bunch of things I need to get done today, and I’m way behind schedule.
At the top of the list today is to promote Jeffrey Feldman’s book launch for Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. The book is supposed to start shipping today, and Dr. Feldman is encouraging everyone to order the book today on Amazon as part of the online book launch party. More details can be found on the event at Facebook. While you’re at it, stop by at Dr. Feldman’s blog Frameshop.
Beyond that, if you are in Connecticut, you need to call your State Senator today, to let them know that you oppose efforts by Republican State Senators to make it harder for people, especially, the poor, minorities and the elderly, to vote, by requiring that they get photo identification.
With all of that, I need to throw myself into the day that is starting the wonderful month of May. Let’s see I can rack up another National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) of putting a post up every day. So far, I’ve managed to do it for the first four months. Let’s also see what other great opportunities can come this way this month.
Posting Content Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/29/2008 - 19:12Between PodCampNYC, recent announcements and my constant explorations into publishing content online has caused me to stop and rethink some of my current publishing strategy. I am writing this as much for my own benefit to clarify my thoughts as I am for others interested in exploring different forms of content publishing.
Video
Currently, I have three devices that I use for shooting video. The first is a Panasonic PV-GS39 MiniDV Camcorder. It records up to 90 minutes on a MiniDV tape, which I then transfer using a FireWire cable to my laptop. The limiting factor, however, is often how long my batteries will last. If there is a lot of recording, I can use multiple tapes and run off of power from an outlet. When I have my footage, I do my post-editing with Microsoft Movie Maker. If I want to record anything long, that is what I use. However, the amount of work necessary between shooting the video and posting it online is considerable, and I don’t use the MiniDV that much any more.
My second digital video device is a Canon PowerShot S410. I have a 2 Gigabyte CompactFlash card in it and can shoot quite a bit of video that way. Unfortunately, the PowerShot only allows video segments up to three minutes long. However, you can shoot many segments and then splice them together in postproduction.
I used to use a mini-USB wire to copy images from the PowerShot onto a PC. But, the PC I had set up to do that on crashed, so I’ve taken to popping out he CompactFlash card and sticking it in a slot in an HP Printer that I have. The card then becomes a removable hard disk accessible from the computer connected to that printer. Like with the MiniDV camera, if I want to do post-production, I use Microsoft Movie Maker.
The third digital video device that I use is my Motorola RAZR V3xx cellphone. Videos on this are limited to about 16 seconds. They are even lower quality than I get on the PowerShot. Yet what is great about it is that as soon as I finish recording my clip, I hit send, and it is on its way to various video sites.
Sometimes, I also take still pictures and machinima that I mix into my videos. Machinima is making movies using computer games. I’ve shot a little footage from Second Life using Fraps to capture the images. As my kids explore other virtual worlds, I may try some footage from some other virtual worlds.
I’ve also played a little bit with Blender, which looks promising for creating animations.
Typically, I send videos from my cellphone directly to YouTube, Blip.TV, Facebook and send a copy to Kim. Flickr now supports short videos, but I haven’t sent a video to Flickr yet. They only support short videos, and I don’t really see any great advantage to adding them as yet another video storage location.
Utterz also supports video, and I sent a short video from my cellphone to Utterz as well. Yet, I don’t feel any need to send videos to Utterz. Anyone following me there will probably find my other videos.
There are other sites kicking around that add things like categorization of videos, subtitling, the ability to edit online, etc., but I don’t shoot enough video to find these services all that compelling.
What I don’t currently have in my mix is any good video streaming. If I had one of the good Nokia phones that streams on Qik, you would see me on Qik and Seesmic.
Going forward, I will keep posting to YouTube and Facebook to get people to see the videos, but my primary source will be Blip.TV. Special videos will get cross posted to Orient Lodge, with some description. I need to make sure Twitter to picks up Blip.TV postings
Still photographs
I can use the MiniDV camcorder to take pictures as well. It stores the pictures on an SD card. However, the pictures aren’t very high quality, so I haven’t bothered to get an SD card to store in my MiniDV camcorder. Instead, I tend to take most still pictures using either my PowerShot or my RAZR. The PowerShot has many more features and produces a much higher quality picture, yet I don’t always have the PowerShot with me, but I almost always have my RAZR, so I take a lot of pictures with the RAZR.
I cannot think of any time that I’ve done post production processing of any of my still photographs, with the possible exception of rotating them 90 degrees. If I were to do any post processing, I imagine I would do it in Gimp.
When I upload pictures from the PowerShot, I use the same procedure as I do for the videos. These pictures typically only get stored on Flickr. From my cellphone, I send my pictures to Flickr, Facebook, Ringo, and Kim. I recently sent some photos from the cellphone to Utterz, but my concern about Utterz applies the same for still photographs as it does for video.
When it comes to pictures from Second Life, I send them through BlogHud to Flickr. It keeps a copy on BlogHud and adds details about where the picture was taken. I’ve used other services for Second Life images, but I’ve pretty much settled on BlogHud.
For some videos, I post the thumbnails from Blip.TV to Flickr. One thing that I’m missing is the ability to post pictures with geographical information. I found one site that might do this for the RAZR, but it presented several difficulties, including sending the pictures and the geographic information together in the same data stream. For those of us with unlimited MMS but very limited data packets, this just isn’t a good idea.
Another thing that is missing from the still photography mix is a good way to read mobile bar codes. I haven’t found one that works properly with my model of Razr.
So, all of the key pictures ultimately end up on Flickr. Like with Blip.TV, I need to make sure these get cross posted automatically to Twitter. This may produce some duplication for videos that I’ve cross posted from Blip.TV In addition, special photos from Flickr will get cross posted to Orient Lodge. In particular, I like to do this for Wordless Wednesday.
Audio
I don’t do a lot with Audio, but I’m looking to do more in this area. In the past, I’ve used a microphone to record onto my PC and edited it with Audacity. For my purposes, that works quite nicely. These files I share as attachments in Drupal. When I can’t find a decent quality-working microphone, I record voice notes on my cellphone which I send as an email to myself.
In the past, I used to use Odeo as well, and I think I might still have it up and working, but I ran into various problems with it and don’t use it very often.
At PodCampNYC, I spoke with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I liked the description of how it works. I came home, ran a test session, which worked quite nicely, so I scheduled my first broadcast. Unfortunately, I ran into a long list of technical problems and spent my whole time slot attempting to get it working. I’ll probably give it another shot next Sunday. If that works, I’ll keep going. If not, I’ll walk away until they can convince me that they’ve worked out their bugs.
As I tried to get things going, I received several emails from tech support about how they were working on fixing things, but things never got fixed, and although I asked for follow up what happened, I never received any follow up, so at this point I am skeptical.
I was pleased with my first tests of Utterz, so I expect this will become my standard repository for short audio. It posts to Twitter, and I can cross post audios that I like to Orient Lodge.
Bookmarks
Right now, I tag most pages with del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. On my main machine, I have GreaseMonkey set up so I can tag pages in both systems quickly and easily at the same time. I was using ma.gnolia, but didn’t find a find a nice way of integrating it with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, so for the time being I’m not doing much with ma.gnolia, although it does have a nice automatic feed into Drupal. I pull in some del.icio.us feeds into my Drupal site, and I may get around to reviewing that again soon.
Short text
I’ve updated my status on Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, Utterz, Twitter, and other sites. I’ve set up feeds so that when I post content on one site, there is short text that shows up on some of these different sites. I’ve added sites like FriendFeed into that mix. I’ve added complicated paths where a Facebook Status gets added to Twitter, and directly to Jaiku as well as to Jaiku via Twitter. It is probably time to restructure all of this.
Longer text
I make a general rule to put any longer text that I write on Orient Lodge. If I’ve posted it elsewhere, I post links to the other places I’ve posted to. As noted above, some videos from Blip.TV, pictures from Flickr and audio from Utterz will get cross posted to Orient Lodge, as will some bookmarks.
Location
Perhaps the next thing to add into all of this will be location. Sites like BrightKite, Fire Eagle, and older attempts like MeetMoi have tried to bring in a location component, but none of them have really gotten my attention yet.
Attention data aggregators
Right now, I plan on pulling most of this together via Twitter. Sites like FriendFeed might do a better job of it, and I’m busy populating sites like that, but I do like Twitter best.
Another thing that is interesting to note is that many of these sites have social networking components, but what matters is their role in distributing different types of user generated content, and not the social networking in and of itself.
Slowly, I will get my feeds into these systems running more smoothly, then a new system will come along, or I’ll get a new device and I’ll need to rejigger the whole system.
Quick Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/28/2008 - 13:11
The show on BlogTalkRadio failed due to technical difficulties. I’m still waiting to find out from them what went wrong. I’ll probably write up more details later. On the other hand, Utterz has worked nicely. I hope to add both of them into my mix. Depending on timing and talk about them when I visit Fiona’s class on Friday. Also, at some point I want to put up a blog post about how all these and other new sites are changing my approach to posting different forms of content online.
Today, per Chris Brogan, is supposed to be blog commenting day. Leave a comment on at least three or five blogs, depending on whom you listen to. I haven’t started adding my comments, but will try to get to that later. It does give me more reason to put off writing a serious blog post today.
Metanomics will be speaking with Glitteractica Cookie today. I intend to be there as a bear, instead of as the dolphin I sometimes appear as when reporting in Second Life.
On top of that I’m tired. Lack of sleep from PodcampNYC, rainy day, allergies or a cold. Just not a lot of energy to write up the really great blog posts that I have pending.
Job Application
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/02/2008 - 17:32Today, I applied for a part time blogging job. It is with an interesting group and the money would certainly help. I made it through the first cut, and was asked to submit three sample blog posts to them related to their blog. I wrote the blog posts and I kind of liked them, so I thought I would post modified versions here.
In addition, I spent a couple hours on the phone talking with a researcher about technology in Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid. This discussion fed into my thoughts for the first blog post.
The Invitation to Innovate
As the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign continues, candidates seek to learn from the experiences of Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid. They have build some powerful tools, but it seems like they are missing the most important tool, the invitation to innovate.
During the summer of 2003, I worked with a bunch of dedicated volunteers trying to help create DeanSpace, an online social networking tool aim at increasing citizen involvement in the electoral process. Campaigns today have taken some of the best ideas from DeanSpace and used them for their own campaigns, but what was most important was the feeling that many of us had of being heard, of being encouraged to participate in new ways.
Now, as Blogger in Chief, I hope to talk about many great new ideas around technology and science to make our world a better place. Yet it is the invitation to innovate that is the core idea that I bring with me.
So, let me offer this invitation to you. What are the best new ideas you have heard? What can we do to spread these innovations? Let’s innovate together.
Virtual World Accessibility
Recently, I’ve been learning a lot about accessibility issues in virtual worlds. People with disabilities can connect to places like Second Life, and be free of their wheelchairs. They can dance, go down waterslides and even fly. They get the opportunity to visit with other people that they can’t easily do in real life because of mobility issues. It is a powerful tool. That is, of course, if they can connect to Second Life in the first place.
My brother visits Second Life. So does my nephew. My mother, on the other hand is elderly. She has essential tremors and finds moving a mouse or typing on a keyboard incredibly difficult. Yet people are exploring new interfaces to facilitate using computers.
Two such tools have caught my interest recently. One is the Neural Impulse Actuator which has recently begun shipping. It monitors impulses on your forehead and can be used to control videogames or computers. Could this become an interface that would help my mother?
The other is the 3D Camera. This is a video camera that captures three-dimensional information and is being tested as a control device for virtual worlds. Raise your left arm to do one thing, raise your right arm for a different action.
Both of these tools were designed primarily for able bodied gamers, but they provide an interesting illustration of the principal of universal design, the idea that if you design things well, they can make life easier for everyone, no matter what their ability levels are.
My mother worries that as her tremors progress, she will lose more and more of her ability to communicate. I hope that accessibility tools like these will help her remain able to communicate far longer.
Right to Dry
Sometimes, the best ideas aren’t about how to take advantage of the latest technological innovations. Sometimes, the best ideas are about how to get people take make better use of tried and true technology. Right to Dry laws are a great example.
Outdoor Passive Solar Clothes Driers, commonly referred to as clotheslines have been in use for ages. However, gas and electric powered indoor clothes driers have become more and more popular over time due. According to Project Laundry List, Electric dryers use five to ten percent of residential electricity in the United States. Getting more people to use clotheslines is a simple way to help battle global warming.
Unfortunately, in many places community covenants, landlord prohibitions, and zoning laws prohibit people from using clotheslines. Project Laundry List, along with other Right to Dry activists are working hard to make it easier for people to hang out their clothes. At the same time, their efforts are raising awareness about the benefits of returning to the clothesline.
So what bright ideas do you have to use either new, or old technology to help make our world a better place?
Being Heard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 18:36A lot of my therapist friends are talking about HBO’s series, In Treatment. They argue about whether it is a realistic representation of therapy. They question whether it is misrepresenting the experience of therapy because of problems of how it was translated from the Israeli series “Be Tipul”.
The New York Times reviews the series with an article, He Listens. He Cares. He Isn’t Real. In the article, Diane O’Rourke, a medical writer from Chicago is quoted, “There is an old saying that most men would rather have you hear their story than grant their wish.”
When asked about this I responded that as a blogger, putting my story online daily, so I might not be the best person to ask this, however, I've often felt that the deepest wish that many people have is simply to be heard.
