People keeps talking about del.icio.us, MySpace, Digg.com, Flickr, Folksonomies, Second Life and you name it.
So you don’t really understand all this stuff and want a very quick lesson in the wonders of social media and a pretty big chunk of what this Web 2.0 thing is all about? Thanks to Spannerworks you can read this free eBook: What is social media. A very nice introduction!
(Via Micro Persuasion)
SageTV is a very interesting media center software for Windows and Linux. Now they’re looking for beta testers for a Mac version as well.
Sage is turning into a true cross platform media center software. My early experiments with Sage was very promising and now it seems like it’s time to give it another go.
The SageTV placeshifter and SageTV media extender is very interesting. Now, if you can start combining boxes and operating systems you have a very nice media server that can stream your media around the house to thin clients, windows, linux and mac boxes.
(Via PVRWire)
I stole this headline from Jeff Jarvis. He is talking about Fox News:
FoxNews takes the Bill Clinton interview down from YouTube. Fools. They would be getting a whole new audience. They’d be even more part of the conversation.
I agree. Fools. One thing is that taking it down is a fight that they can’t win.Here is the results for the search “bill clinton fox news” on YouTube right now. And that’s only YouTube. Once it’s out there you can’t stop it.
But Fox is a commercial company. Of course they want to take their content down from YouTube. How on earth are they going to earn money from this distribution channel?
They want people to watch the clip on www.foxnews.com. In their own web-TV. A web TV with some problems:
After emailing myself the link from the FoxNews player I was able to provide you with the direct link to that clip – FOX News Video: Heated Discussion. Warning: it’s a popup, so the player wil probably be stopped by your popup stopper.
So, people want it on YouTube. They want to discuss it. They want to paste the clip on their blogs and comment on it. So what should Fox do? I actually think that having the clip on YouTube will drive more people to their traditional channels. That they will earn more even if they can’t directly tie an income to the clip on YouTube.
But my suggestion right now would be that Fox take control. It should have been Fox that posted the clip on YouTube in the first place. They should have made their own submission the preferred among the YouTube crowd. By submitting it first. Maybe even before it was aired on traditional channels. They could also have added extra value to their own submission by including clips that was not aired on traditional channels.
YouTube are kind enough to provide Fox with a counter that will show how many people watched the clip on that channel. How about including commercials in the clip they post on YouTube? It shouldn’t be too difficult to price it, given that they have the number of viewers.
I am using Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 to administrate my images. To make collections, simple editing, tagging and organizing.
I have more than 30 000 images in my collection and Photoshop Elements is one of the programs that actually handle that amount of pictures.
The picture module in Windows Media Center is pretty limited. And it does not support automatic rotation based on EXIF info. That is extremely annoying. And, when I have tagged a series of images with “The best pictures from the summer of 2006” I want to be able to run that exact collection as a slide show on my TV.
Now, if you install Photoshop Elements 4 on your MCE box you will get an option in more prorgrams that starts a Photoshop Elements plugin for MCE. It has the pretty slow and boring navigation like online spotlight services and most of the other plugins for MCE, but it lets you browse tags, collections and calendars from Photoshop Elements in MCE on your TV screen.
I must admit that on my 30 000 pictures collection it is quite slow, but as long as I have made the collection in Elements first this is a nice way to look at it on the TV screen.
And, it lets you view PSD-files in MCE and rotates images based on EXIF info…
I just metioned that the big screen in your living room is something completely different from your computer screen.
For the people that want to know more Lasse Klein recently did a very good article on how to design for the television screen.
He promises to keep this article updated as well. Could turn out to be a very good reference for television design.
Oyvind answers my quick link to Fortune Magazine with a very good post on how the net will change your media habits. I decided to comment on it with a separate article here:
Moving the internet into the living room has been done before. But the big problem with the WEB-TV products of the late ninties was the fact that the companies making those products didn’t understand the living room situation at all and thought that web pages as we know them today would be a good idea on the big screen. They soon realized that it was a horrible idea. Traditional web pages are not designed for the big screen and a remote.
So, over the last couple of years products like the media center softwares you find here and connected hardware boxes like the proposed Apple iTV box, the Xbox 360 and other devices starts to bring content from the internet into your living room with a front end that is tailored for the big screen and remote control navigation.
The quality on YouTube and Google video is not at all tailored for the big screen, but that quality will be better. And I think we’ll see that the audience develop a tolerance for low quality on certain types of content combined with a need for high definition and very high quality on other types of content.
This is the long tail entering a space where the big broadcasters have been ruling for the last decades. I repeat, we’re up for some groundbreaking change…
Fortune Magazine’s Devin Leonard has a very interesting article on viral ads:
And here’s an intriguing question: Can YouTube and Google Video figure out a way to make this a business? If so, could they become the web’s equivalent of the broadcast networks?
These are the sorts of riddles that keep media moguls awake at night.
I have mentioned this before. When the internet really starts to shift the flow of money in the media industry we are up for some groundbreaking change…
(Via Micro Persuasion)
Update:
It’s already in the trackbacks for this article, but I want to make this one even more available and decided to put it up here in the article. Brilliantdays: It’s epidemic – soon your tv will have a zillion channels. Read it.
Deskrama is a low-cost interactive space browser for three dimensional architectural designs. You move the screen on top of a drawing and it shows the 3D rendered picture of the building.
No point in trying to explain this here. Just click play and the video will show you how it works. Credits to Mr. Takehiko Nagakura.
http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Link to video on Revver.
Paul Neave is a complete genius that have made amazing stuff like the wonderful flash based frontend for Google Maps and Windows Live Local.
He has also made a very nice frontend for YouTube, blip.tv and Google Video. It’s called neave.tv and it’s close to a service that you would want on your media center. Slightly better keyboard control and it would have been perfect.
As far as I understand the content is selected by Mr. Neave himself. It’s a very nice collection of good stuff from the three video sites mentioned. Including a video that I put out there a while ago…
Most media centers is capable of starting internet explorer in kiosk mode. Meaning full screen without any toolbars. Simply make a shortcut in your media center of choice that starts internet explorer at neave.tv and you have yet another television channel to play around with. The command you need looks like this:
iexplore -k http://neave.tv
Neave.tv lets you play the videos in full screen as well. I wouldn’t recommend that if you have a big LCD. Image quality isn’t exactly what YouTube and the others are known for. And, neave.tv had problems scaling correct on a 16/9 monitor:
Anyway, yet another interesting experiment from Mr. Neave.
Inspired by Brilliantdays I give you the eirikso traffic list. It shows the sites that have given me the largest amount of traffic over the last year. I have removed the search engines.
These are the 42 top sites that have directed traffic to eirikso.com in this period. Most hits from digg.com and so on…
Lots of very interesting sites here. Thanks to all the people in this list and to all the other ones that have linked to this site! My site gets 18% of the traffic from direct hits, 69% from referrers and 13% from searches.
And Oyvind, you know that number 42 is the best place to be… 🙂
And what are people searching for when they find my site? These are the top 20 searches:
And how many people visit this blog each month? So far in September 24,963 people have been here. And here are the total number of visitors for the last five months:
Aug – 31,648
Jul – 29,395
Jun – 46,967
May – 53,356
Apr – 40,226
…I lost a considerable amount of hits in this count the last time I was on the front page of digg (in July). My site went down and most of the traffic went to a mirrored page that didn’t include the counter. However, you can see the impact of digg in Alexa. Quite a bit of traffic and it would have been a lot more if my site had stayed up. Digg eventually had to remove the link from the front page.
And how much money do I make from the Google Ads on the site? According to the AdSense contract I am not allowed to tell you, but a quick estimate tells me that if I keep the growth I have now I can quit my day job in about 50 years. 🙂
So why bother with the ads? I learn a lot, it pays for the hosting and and when adding up a couple of months of AdSense cash I can afford an occasional upgrade of my computers.
Last but not least, thanks to all my readers. To the people commenting and contacting me about stuff they find here. Keep it up.
I’ll keep on posting interesting, amazing, fun, boring, stupid, difficult and strange articles… A couple of them each week. Have fun and don’t forget all the cool stuff that’s already in here.
eirikso 