Register more than your domain!

February 11, 2008 eiriksoaccenture, domain names, flickr, marketing, porsche, twitter, web20, YouTube6 Comments

I just finished a post (norwegian) about the fact that we registered the name of our Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation tech blog “NRKbeta” on a lot of social networks and places around the web. We did that the second we decided on that name for the blog. And I think that is becoming an important part of your marketing strategy.

I try to be pretty fast on registering “eirikso” on the different services popping up around the net. You never know who’s gonna strike big, and right now it is quite nice that addresses like youtube.com/eirikso, twitter.com/eirikso and flickr.com/photos/eirikso takes you to stuff that I am in control of. Eirikso is my brand on the internet. If you try the same with NRKbeta we’re there as well.

So let’s do a quick test. If you happen to make very nice sports cars you might want someone that visit youtube.com/porsche to find something else? And Microsoft on Flickr? Probably not extremely important, but as big web sites become huge services and places where we spend a lot of time this is getting important. The second race for domain names. At this point http://youtube.com/…whatever company… isn’t close to the importance of http://www…whatever company… but it is getting more important as these giants grow.

And, if you decide to go out there and register your company just to reserve the space, then please put something honest in there. Register at twitter and simply post one single update. “Company nn has registered this user. It’s currently not in use.” or something like that.

My former place of work, the american consulting company called Accenture seems to have done something like that: twitter.com/accenture. Or have they? I don’t know if this is Accenture or just some dude that has registered that user. And that last twit is just plain stupid. You’ll never get any feedback by simply registering a user on twitter and start screaming “anybody out there?”. And my guess is that some clever people at Accenture have registered this one as well. And they don’t have to use it. But at least put in one video and a quick message. Same as for twitter. “This is the official YouTube channel for Accenture. It’s currently not in use.”

And please. Don’t bring back that horrible “under construction”-gif from the late nineties! Register to reserve the space. If you’re going to use it, do it properly, if not be honest and tell people it’s not in use.

Do you have any nice examples of profiles that should have featured something else? Like Porsche on YouTube?

Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) makes popular series available DRM-free via BitTorrent

January 29, 2008 eiriksobittorrent, miro, monsen, nordkalotten, nrk, nrkbeta10 Comments

I know many of you are still waiting for some conclusions after my recent visit to DLD in Munich. But I’ve been busy making stuff available on BitTorrent:

As one of many ways to reach people with our content we have decided to do an experiment and make one of our most popular television series available through BitTorrent.This technology makes it possible for us to make our content available in a very high quality without having to invest in large server farms and expensive bandwidth.

The very popular series called “Nordkalotten 365″ has been aired on traditional TV in Norway. Over 900 000 of Norway’s 4,6 million watched the show in average, and the marketshare was close to 50%! “Nordkalotten 365″ is now made available for download. In this series the experienced hiker Lars Monsen has traveled alone through the north of Scandinavia for one year. The first episode is already published and the next episodes will be made available as they are encoded.

Read the rest of the story on NRKbeta.

We are suggesting that people use Miro to download the content because it contains both the torrent client and the playback codec. But you can use whatever bittorrent client you want.

Now help us by digging this story!

The story has been running on all major news sites in Norway, and recently we made the front page of BoingBoing.

And yes, a report from DLD is on its way.

Minority Report with the Wii-mote

January 21, 2008 eiriksonintendo, project, remote, tracking, Wii1 Comment

I know you’re waiting for some articles from DLD in Munich, but I had to write them in Norwegian first. While you’re waiting you can have fun with this fantastic video.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

More details and more very cool Wii Remote projects over at Johnny Chung Lee’s page.

Cold, wet, dark, snow – some images

January 14, 2008 eiriksoamazon, cold, dog, images, norway, Photo, volvo, wet, winter11 Comments

Norway during winter. Some images from yesterday. All of them snapped by Eirik Solheim. Creative commons licensed. Contact me for commercial use.

Icy old Volvo in Oslo, Norway What should I say? Cool car.
(Canon 400D with Canon EF 50mm 1.4 @ 1/250 sec at f / 3.5. ISO400. Adjusted to B&W in Adobe Lightroom.)

Wet Dog. At Bygdøy, Oslo, Norway
Satisfied with the fact that the dog’s eye is pretty sharp.
(Canon 400D with Canon 70-200 F4 L IS USM @200mm 1/60 sec at f / 4.0. ISO200 RAW. Adjusted to B&W in Adobe Lightroom.)

Looking at birds. Speaking in phone.
I think this one would have been better with focus on the birds. Or maybe not?
(Canon 400D with Canon 70-200 F4 L IS USM @200mm 1/125 sec at f / 4.0 ISO400 RAW)

Lamp. Snow. Night. Evergreen.
Yeah, right – night. Not. This is Norway at 5 PM in January.
(Canon 400D with Canon 50mm F1.4 USM @ 1/125 sec at f / 2.2 ISO1600 RAW)

Snow. Night.
Camera and lens. Had to survive quite a bit of snow when snapping this image. Still works fine.
(Canon 400D with Canon 50mm F1.4 USM @1/80 sec at f / 2.0 ISO800 RAW)

Digital Life Design 08

January 10, 2008 eiriksoconference, dld, dld083 Comments

Thanks to Rodrigo I’ve been invited to DLD 08. A quick look at the program, and I immediately get high expectations: Jimmy Wales, Jason Calacanis, David Kirkpatrick, Matt Cohler, John Maeda, Caterina Fake, Martha Stewart, Niklas Zennström, Jeff Jarvis, Marissa Mayer, Bradley Horowitz, Naomi Campbell… Wow.

But if you want me to report on any particular speaker have a look at the program and give me a comment. I will for sure attend to the presentations by the people I’ve mentioned above, but there’s a lot of great speakers I don’t know immediately by name, so please help me. Do you see anyone in the program that I shouldn’t miss?

How to use Twitter

January 9, 2008 eiriksoevan williams, gapingvoid, hugh macleod, twitter, web205 Comments

If you’re already on Twitter then feel free to add me.

So what is it? To put it short it’s a blog where all the posts consist of 140 characters or less. No images, but maybe a link. It’s very easy to update. You can do it from your instant messenger, from the web or via SMS from your mobile.

But why? I can easily fill eirikso.com with 140 character posts. And, it’s not too difficult to post to my blog via SMS or IM.

There’s more to twitter than the micro blog it leaves on your own twitter page. You can follow people and people can follow you. Still, all of this is possible through regular blogs. I can follow your RSS feed and you can follow mine. But that’s the point where the usability and simplicity kicks in. Which lead to my experience with twitter.

I have been following it since the start because I got aware of co-founder Evan Williams years ago when he mentioned a service I made on his blog. Evan Williams made the utterly successful blogger.com, the not so successful odeo.com and now the maybe-becoming-utterly-successful Twitter.com.

Twitter is a service that people tend to love or hate. I can’t say I have been hating it, but it has taken me more than a year to understand why and how I should use it. Slowly, I get the idea and now I have decided to start using Twitter more. At least for a while.

You can use twitter the way it’s suggested on the page. “What are you doing?”. Let me see… There. I have now updated twitter. It took me about five seconds. Now it says: “writing a blog post about twitter”. If you’re a fan of my blog it could be slightly interesting to know what I am working on. But most of the time you would find it utterly boring what I was doing. And I think the people that hate twitter get confused by that suggestion on the page. “What are you doing?”.

So what got me from “why the hell would I use twitter?” to “I have decided to start using Twitter more”?

First of all, Mr. Solstad. When he got back from a conference saying: “at conferences twitter is very useful”. And I can understand that. It works like some kind of group SMS. When all your friends are on twitter you can use it to keep track of where people are going. What restaurant to meet at. What speakers that suck and which sessions to attend. At conferences there’s a buzz going on twitter. A combination of public messages and direct messages.

So I decided to follow twitter when I went to Bucharest to speak at NetCamp. And yes, tech savvy people at conferences use twitter. It was interesting to follow in real time what reactions people had to the conference and so on.

I also had the privilege of talking quite a bit to Mr. Hugh MacLeod. An avid twitter user and a person that use the service in a very clever way. He has more than 2300 followers on twitter and could tell me that when he visits a city for the first time he simply twitters “I’m in city nn, anyone that knows a good restaurant?”. Usually lots of suggestions chimes in.

Okay, so that’s something that works when you have 2300 followers. Right now I have slightly more than 20. But I know how powerful a tool like that can be. My blog has enough readers around the world to give me answers to all kinds of strange questions. But how do you get 2300 followers on twitter?

That was one of the parts that took me a bit of time to figure out. But it is obvious. You do it exactly the same way you get thousands of people visiting your blog each week. By sharing interesting thoughts, quality links, amusing stuff etc. And by taking part of conversations.

I have been following Hugh MacLeod on twitter for a while and he does this thing brilliantly. A combination of interesting thoughts and some regular “What are you doing?”-messages. It seems like it works like a draft for his blog. And it’s interesting to follow how he slowly builds a new blog post often based on thoughts shared on twitter first.

So if you want to take part in my experiment, then follow me.

And of course, post your suggestions, people to follow and thoughts in the comments.

An impressive yet simple photographic effect

January 8, 2008 eiriksoblur, bokeh, effect, Photo52 Comments

This one sparked a bit of interest over at the Norwegian blog I’m contributing to for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. So, I’ll share the story here as well.

Update:
Video tutorial on how to make that cardboard cover for your lens

I recently bought the lens you see in the image. Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM. Then Mr. Erlandsen pointed me to this.

Before you know it I made this one:

Equipped it with a snow crystal and mounted it on my camera:

Update:
I used some standard paper cutters to make the patterns.

Before you know it the images that have a traditional round bokeh:

…started looking like this:

Some more cutting and shapes and off we go…
Continue reading “An impressive yet simple photographic effect” →

Vimeo High Definition Web Video

January 4, 2008 eirikso720p, flash, hd, video, vimeo7 Comments

Back in October last year Vimeo added a possibility for users to upload HD videos. On request from a discussion I have going over at AVS Forum I decided to test it with one of the clips from my new Panasonic HDC-SD5. It is embedded in standard definition below. To watch it in HD you have to click through to the video and hit the “full” button in the lower right corner of the video. I would also recommend that you turn scaling off with the small button to the right when the video is in full screen.

Panasonic HDC-SD5 Test Clip 720 50p from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

And by the way. From my quick tests so far Vimeo really rocks. I’ll try it out over the next couple of weeks.

Test clips from Panasonic HDC-SD5

January 2, 2008 eiriksoavchd, camera, download, HDC-SD5, Panasonic, review, test clips, video81 Comments

For the last year or so I have been using my Nokia N95 as my primary video recording device. As you understand, I am currently more serious about stills photography. But I need to do occasional video recordings and the quality of my N95 is great for a mobile phone, but not very good compared to a proper video camera.

So I wanted something better than the N95, but small and portable. I narrowed my possibilities down to two cameras recording straight to solid state memory. The Sony HDR-CX7 or the Panasonic HDC-SD5. After some googling and a quick test in the store I decided to go for the Panasonic. Mostly because I don’t like Sony’s stupid memory stick and because I read that the AVCHD-compression in the Sony camera had some issues with high motion scenes. According to what I have been reading the Panasonic is not as good as the Sony in low light conditions. But a compression that breaks into artifacts in high motion is worse than a problem with some noise in low light.

I also like the navigation on the Panasonic better. Sony rely on a touch screen that force you to use both hands when operating. The Panasonic lets you operate most of the menus with one hand on the back of the unit. In addition to this the Panasonic has a pretty useful pre recording function and good macro possibilities. So far I have only one issue with the camera. A low volume high frequency noise that is captured by the microphone while recording. A well known problem on tape based and HD based cameras, but I thought that wouldn’t be a problem on a solid state camera. Maybe it’s a problem with my camera only. I’ll have to investigate this further. You can hear the noise in the last test clip. Downloads at the bottom of this article.

Both cameras are recording AVCHD, meaning heavy compression and a native format that is not suitable for editing. For the record, the Sony camera can also record standard definition MPEG2 (not very good for editing either), while the Panasonic is AVCHD only. I am not going to use this camera for making hollywood style movies. I am going to make some quick demonstrations for my presentations and for my blog. And the occasional documentation of some events in my family.

When surfing around looking for reviews of these cameras I was disappointed of sites that claim to have a proper review up, but don’t provide any test clips for download.

So to help people that is about to buy a new camcorder I’ll provide you with some test clips and images here.
Continue reading “Test clips from Panasonic HDC-SD5” →

Entering holiday mode

December 24, 2007 eiriksocold, frost, gustav vigeland sculpture park, images, Photo5 Comments

Actually, I’ve been running in holiday mode for two days already. Don’t expect too much here on eirikso the next couple of days.

Today we went out buying our traditional Christmas three. Cold, crispy, frosty and fantastic light in the Gustav Vigeland Sculpture Park. I live near by this park and have the privilege of seeing it in all kinds of weather, seasons and light conditions. I must admit that this one is my favourite. The statues really come to life with such light and the cold layer of frost and ice.

Click through to the gallery here. Have a merry Christmas and see you here in a couple of days!