Its not that easy is it?.

Ive been using Threadsy a bit, its quite handy, but very busy.

To be fair, I am probably what they call a heavy user, however, there are people who make me look part-time.

So, I watch 5 Gmail accounts, 4 twitter accounts, 1 Facebook, 1 Basecamp project, 6 WordPress Blogs, and now I have a Google Wave account to try and figure out how to work with.

Then there are the background sites you sometimes use, Flickr, Digg, Delicio.us, online banking, the list goes on.

Fun, but only for a while, then you might well go mad with overloading.

So whats all this Google Wave about then ?

Google Wave Fiction… funny stuff… but will it be helpful ?

I am genuinely hoping that Wave is a lot more than some over-hyped geek-babble..  but im being realistic… even if it is, my life will stay pretty complicated.

Ok, its not like doing the London Marathon, or a parachute jump, but it is an easy and accessible way for people to take part in a charity event, raise some cash and have some fun doing it. The charity the money goes to is The Prostate Cancer Charity.

The Movember promo video;

There really is no-more to explain, its about raising money for a good cause, and growing some facial hair. Shave clean on 31st October and choose a stlye to grow into… (see below for style guide…)

Do one of two things now;

1) commit to growing a Mo, and get some people to sponsor you, or,

2) put your hand in your pocket and hand over some cash for the cause.

Im going to be taking part along with a number of other friends, and im going to document it with daily mug-shots on the web.

Click here to join my team – http://uk.movember.com/register/17780

Click here to send some cash to the cause by sponsoring me. – https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/your-details/member_id/62974

Dig-deep people !!!

Movember Style-guide…

Movember Styles

Since then a couple of things have popped onto the radar to further reinforce the fact that social media is a game changer.

In no particular order;

Brands in Public appeared late last week -  launched by Seth Godin,  a joint-founder of squidoo.com – and is well respected in the social media world. The site lets you take a look at how the online social media world views your brand via Tweets, blogs Youtube video and more. This is a more focused version of what Squidoo offers as a ‘lens’, but for brands.

Brands – big ones – are starting to care about how people talk about them online, and solutions and tools for addressing this are sprouting-up.

However, Lisa Barone, herself a well respected social media professional, doesn’t think its such a great idea as her blog-post – Seth Godin tries out brandjackin – sets-out.

Whichever side your on here, the fact is – there is a dialogue going on about how brands are managed in the social sphere.

Then, on friday, I was lucky to catch Owen Stevens, (via Altitude Recruitment – @lauramaddison), for a short talk about branding. Everything was going as it should untill he referenced the Erik Qualman Youtube video about social media (yes the one on the front of this site) in his presentation. It was great to hear someone standing in front of you say that ‘yes, you were doing the right thing’, and that it is worth persevering with trying to get clients and brands to adopt the platform/technology.

And then this morning, Dan Thornton of 140Char posted about Pistachio Consulting, and the Twitter ‘app’ guide they have produced. The thing here is that Pistachio consulting specialise in social media and micro-blogging platforms – good enough for me, that’s a bona-fide business…  and just to make sure, it has its own conferences – Social Media in Business Conference, London and Media140 – reaching right around the world.

So, just to clarify, brands are all over the social media web world, they have tools, are manged, businesses are run solely for this purpose, they have conferences – all around the world – and its gaining more and more momentum and exposure.

*nudge*

Time to talk to someone who knows about this sort of stuff ?

Another social media explanation video via Youtube.

A mere two years later, and I can barely go online without video being an intrinsic part of the daily web experience.

Despite the web being flooded with video content these days, its still easy carve it all up into different kinds. I’ll give that a go below.

First of all, there’s the copyrighted stuff that has been ported to the web -Hulu (which we cant get in the UK, but is like the iPlayer for the US networks), BBC iPlayer and 4OD.

Then you can get live TV and freeview channels on Zattoo.

After the copyrighted stuff we move into a whole new realm, and this is where it gets fun. These are all the sites that allow the syndication and placing of content, a selection of example can be seen below. They come in different shapes and sizes, and mean different things to different people.

Joost

Joost pushes all sorts of content through its site – mostly i dont get a lot out of the selection, but there is some licensed stuff.

Current

Current is a real digital TV channel, and its web content is blended between the TV stuff and the web-only bits. Its mostly news, movies, music and culture, but there is a good selection, including the Viewer Created stuff.

Youtube

What can we say – the original ‘broadcast yourself channel’ the good the bad and the ugly.

Vimeo

Vimeo is the Youtube for designers and creatives… slightly less popular, but nicely done and with good content generally.

Retrocycling Robot from Challenge Your World on Vimeo.

TED

The variety of informative content here is unsurpassed. All videos are talks given to live audiences and relayed to the web. Science, technology, art, culture and more. Superb stuff.

The Onion

Nobody beats The Onion. I think they invented satire. Even before the web-video period these guys rocked. Now its all in moving images.

Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment Of Women

http://www.purepwnage.com

Projects like Pure Pwnage are sprouting up everywhere. The web-based sit-com/reality/weirdness is now being pushed to network TV. Can you say chicken and egg ?

Google video

The home of serious chunks of info. A huge selection and typical Google freedom. I love it solely as it hosts Zeitgeist.

Now, along with all these sites are the application based platforms. Enter Boxee, AppleTv etc… These apps do a selection of extra functions that appeal to users – connect to Online sites such as Youtube, Flickr NetFlix, Pandora, even the Apple movie trailer collection. They also allow you to browse your local machine and load content that you have lying around, and you can do all of this from your armchair, using a remote control.

These are just a selection of the video/content sites that offer a landscape of content, if you look hard there are hundreds more in the vein of comedy, movies, gaming, technology etc…  and we didnt even talk about Vodcasting…  and did i mention live event streams like the ASP World tour events ?.

In a nutshell, along with torrent’s, this is why I dont watch TV anymore. You can pick and choose whatever you want to view, and for the most part totally avoid advertising.

I never really fitted the artist mold, but I loved the various methods and technologies I encountered whilst learning about media and the creation of various forms of art.

That is why I took to the web so quickly and easily. It was instantly rewarding, accessible and relatively cost-free (more-so now).

For many long years a war has been waged against the common internet user. But you might not know anything about it. Let me help.

Be a Pirate !!!

The internet used to be a place of freedom, expression and ideas – all being exchanged and improved-upon. This was the ideas behind the original Hyper Text Mark-up Language as invented by Tim Berners-Lee – a web where users could add, edit and remove the content of any document they were browsing.

The internet Mr Berners-Lee conceived and built was based upon the first international network of computers (inter-net) called the Arpanet, where information was king – the very idea being that you could readily exchange, copy and swap information freely and easily, anywhere on the network.

As things have progressed, things have obviously changed, a world wide web where everyone has the power to edit is problematic when your not solely involved in a research project with other scientists, thus the web as we know it today with sites and pages we ‘view’ exists. And this is what many know to the be whole truth.

Rarely do we question the authorities that regulate and organise the systems and structures within which with exist. And therein lies the problem.

Simply because something is put on the internet does not make it a crime – we all free to share and distribute any and all information we deem fit. But there are people working for lobby organisations and legal departments that are drawing rings around what is and is not legal in the online world. And this has never happened before, so how do we know what is right and wrong ?

Steal this film

‘Steal this film‘ is an important piece of public-domain media that aims to demystify the culture of Peer-to-peer file sharing and to a lesser extent tells the story fo the famous torrent search engine The Pirate Bay.

Get the Part 1 torrent file

Get the Part 2 torrent file

The Green Party have also joined the foray of debate by putting this site together to let their policies be known – http://iwouldntsteal.net/

as well as this short video;

There is also a superb documentary piece called Good Copy Bad Copy – that is worth watching.

It is fairly large and long, but highly worth while. See the full-size version on the website here – http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/.

Facebook

Facebook, is by-far the most prominent of all the social networking sites, with the largest saturation and user-base for non-geeky internet types. The site is used by many for as wide a set of uses as you can imagine, with third-party apps, groups and causes flooding your home screen daily.

I personally use Facebook as a reference point for friends and family to keep me in touch with and available to people I might not email or call regularly.

Facebook as been constantly in the public eye for a host of reasons regarding security, privacy and even human rights, but this week I had a entirely new Facebook experience.

Its not uncommon for people to use online networking communities to gather research on individuals, but this is usually limited to the privacy rules set by the individual along with the relevant site, i.e. – you could use Facebook to research somebody, but only if they have privacy set so low that they want the outsied world to get a view of what they are doing.

Rarely, if ever, would you expect to have your details and information surveyed if you believe you have set all the correct measures in place to secure yourself.

Unless someone you know hands over THEIR login details to a third-party to allow them to profile and research you….  which is what happened to me.

Now, all joking aside, I dont have any dirt to be gleamed by hacking my Facebook account, and I wasn’t being hacked maliciously, nor where the perpetrators seeking to base a highly important career decision based on what they found. But they did circumvent one of the most basic privacy protection measures we all have – our own individual login details, and that blew a hole in my personal privacy the size of the Grand Canyon.

What im saying here is;

Dont under-estimate the control you have of your own privacy, and dont EVER give out your login and password details to ANYONE !

Between media scare-mongering and the onslaught of malicious hackers, its ever-more important to keep yourself secure online. Use each part of the internet for its intended purpose, research and find out about how the site or application works and then configure your own settings to meet your needs.

Dont let the technology get the better of you – its a tool there to aid in the achievement of something and used the correct way will provide huge benefits.

But use it safely and confidently.

Im going to start and get to grips with the best system for us with WordPress.

Seesmic

Seesmic allows you to post longer than clips than 12 Seconds. Integrates well with WordPress, allowing you to record and post from within the WP interface, this is then published in WP and posted to your Seesmic account and Twitter should you want it to.

12Seconds

Testing more vloging tools and methods on 12seconds.tv

This uses the 12seconds plugin and shortcode to grab my feed, but its not ;
[12suser username="swinhoe" size="fat"]

Youtube

As-yet no WP plugin to record direct from the admin UI.

Vimeo – does not allow recording and posting from webcam direct to the platform.

To summarise, and i may review this at any point, I think Seesmic is going to win here. Its built right into the WordPress UI, so you can blog from the admin of your site, and its pushed to the Seesmic site and Twitter automatically, and its not forced to be a mere 12 seconds.

Youtube is cool, and will have a greater level of exposure for the larger audience, but you can work with that to get them to your site or blog are negate the issue. But I’ll prefer to keep Youtube for edits and films.

12Seconds. Well, its ok, but its not very long, and the audio compression is awful as you’ll hear below…

NOOOOOO on 12seconds.tv

Addendum

The other way….
Test video blog – via the iSight and uploaded to WordPress.
This page http://support.wordpress.com/videos/, indicates that you can upload your own video into WordPress, these could easily be recorded from an iSight and posted straight to the server. However, this appears not to be working currently, if I find out more this post will be updated. (There is the drawback with this method that the video is only posted to the WP install and not to other social media platforms…).

One of my pet-projects at the moment is the information site for Beadnell Bay – http://www.beadnellbay.info.

On it Ive created a page specifically for the surf report that im providing for the area (http://www.beadnellbay.info/surf-check/), and Ive been looking for an efficient way of running the content.

Its really not that hard, you go to the beach, take a photo, go back to the office, upload the image to the web server, and hey-presto, you have a surf report. But, doing this every day will take up more tim than is ideal, and is very repetitive.

So how can we make the process more streamlined ? how can it be easier ?

I had tried a few ideas, and had searched for the best solution online, and the best I had come=up with was to use Yahoo Pipes to push the latest image from a Flickr group into the page. The pipe is here if you want a look -

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=tgsFay003hGYXDqQBR50VA.

However this is not really what I wanted. The images do not display large enough, and whilst its nice running it through Flickr, linking out to the set is not ideal.

Enter technology and the perfect solution.

Apple iPhone

Im already using my iPhone to take the photograph and push it to the Flickr group, so ideally I wanted was something as easy to use but with a btter web presentation.

Enter the right application, and a little bit of AJAX.

FTP Picture upload provides a simple and easy way to FTP any picture from your iPhone to the web server of your choice. With a little tweaking, it was up and running in 10 minutes and i had the right image on the server.

On the page I could now print the latest image as uploaded form my iPhone. Fantastic.

However the image being displayed could not be identified as recent. How where users to know that the shot was taken today ? or even this week ?

What I wanted was a script that could find out when the shot was taken and print that to the page, telling the users the image was recently updated.

JavaScript alone can not do this, but the helpful people at http://twitter.com/javascripthelp quickly pointed out that the XML Http Request can grab the Last Modified date from the header of any file on your server.

With that, I searched, found the right piece of JavaScript and then set it all in motion. (code is below).

The surf report image now displays, is enlargeable, and has the upload date and time printed next to it. And all automated via the iPhone.

Along with this, I post a text update via Twitter and you get a pretty decent surf report.

******************  Example Code ******************

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var xmlhttp=false;
try
{
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject(“Msxml2.XMLHTTP”); /* for IE < 5 */
}
catch (e)
{
try
{
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject(“Microsoft.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (E)
{
xmlhttp = false;
}
}

/* mozilla & opera */
if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!=’undefined’)
{
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
}

var upDated

function getUpdated(){

xmlhttp.open(“HEAD”, “MyPic.JPG”,true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
upDated = xmlhttp.getResponseHeader(“Last-Modified”);
document.getElementById(“theDate”).innerHTML = upDated;
}
}
xmlhttp.send(null)
}

</script>

</head>
<body onload=”getUpdated();return false;”>
<img src=”MyPic.JPG” alt=”MBP_box” width=”500″ />
<br/>Picture updated on – <p id=”theDate”>Updating…</p>

Well, he’s damn funny.  And hes recently caught the attention of the web via his comedy shorts featureing Pearl, his collaborator, Adam McKay’s 2 year old daughter.

3 million views in a week tells us so.

Go check his shorts here at Funny or die, McKays site to showcase his comedy shorts.

The Landlord

Good cop, Baby cop

rockin…

Ok, so the thumbnail is crap.. but the toon is worth it…

hehe