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.

Everyone will have their own take on this, but I see, Tv, internet and mobile as the three core platforms.
And in the last few years, we’ve seen the rise social media.

Social Media

I guess you could say that gaming presents a significant platform (XBox, Playstation Wii), but I wont, not today.

Its been happening for a while, Sky Tv will provide your internet, Orange will also give you a web connection, at home and mobile. Things have been converging for a while. Now it’s happening in the experience too – TV, web and mobile all share the same content, you decide what to consume and how.

Now, one of my current projects actively address’s the old ‘core’ three, mobile, tv and web, but im having issues convincing them that we need to place as much, if not more, focus on social media.

I wasnt sure myself, but ive found a couple of resources that have helped build a picture for me;

Socialnomics. This book was sent to me by one of my followers on twitter, there is a story and an idea, but thats another post. The book lays-bare the facts that we need to know to understand the power of social media. After-all if they can make someone President of the United States, it might have some power.

Next, I found this site. The slide and video below are from that site. They allude to this – we can measure the impact of social media, and therefore it is valid as a channel/platform.
(The slides are in-depth and not necessarily good for everyone, but they are correct. )

Social Media ROI by @brandbuilder from Kipp Bodnar on Vimeo.

Whats happening is new. Brands are communicating with customers in an entirely new way. And that’s all that matters.

The communication drives the change or solution that you need, be it greater revenues, smaller costs, better CRM or launching a new business.

The way you interact with customers through social media provides them with a personal service unlike anything they have had before.

And, importantly, the best thing about social media is – it finds the user/customer.

That’s why its as much of a channel as the long established TV, or the emerging mobile world. And to those who say social media and the internet are the same, let me make that assumption. They will be left behind.

Social media find its own users, by referral, by commenting, by subscribing, by becoming a fan, and much more. But you still have to get into the game, its not the same as having a website, or even a blog.

Video via the Socialnomics website.

Understand the power of social media before you write it off. It’s responsible the for USA having the first non-caucasian president. ever.

Like a good tech-geek, you struggle-on and make the most from what you have, and dutifully, I’ve found some good advantages to having a camera in my pocket that’s connected to the web.

Recently, with a little inspiration, ive been taking more photos that i like with the camera and getting to know it better.

Work area - Swinhoe Industries - Taken with the iPhone

As you will read if you visit his site, Chase Jarvis is a photog. of the most epic proportions, shooting for the biggest names in the sports, leisure and tech world. He is especially well known for his use of his iPhone to post daily pictures that come under the category “Chase Jarvis takes better shots with an iPhone than I do with a Hasselblad“.

And as he says, “the best camera is the one that’s with you”.

But there are a few other tips, supplied by Chase, to make the photos coming off your iPhone that bit better, and I too have enjoyed the benefits of them.

Camerabag is a truly great app, having received huge accolade from a number of places, and ive used it on the shots in this post.

The doggie being shy.. (there is extra 'grey' on the base of this from the filter)

Hanging about - taken with iPhone - tweaked with Camerabag

I like them. The filters come out well generally and make the photos taken much more usable and distributable.

Chase Jarvis is a savvy guy, follow his blog if you take photos regularly, but he’s not only about photos. He has mastered the world of  Social Media, using it to connect with his audience and web users in a full-frontal attack.

He’s on twitter, he blogs – regularly, he posts RAW video posts to Youtube, he’s on Facebook, he podcasts (iTunes link)…

The guy has been posting from New Zealand for the last week whilst he’s been shooting a job. Its great to follow him and the crew and get the insights to how things happen.

Im still in the iPhone, alot, and with a selection of decent shots coming from the camera, im not hating using it anymore.

Go shoot something…

I picked-up the camera and walked out to take a few shots.

My setup was the Nikon D70 (yes, in know,its VERY old now) and a lovely 12-24 Tokina Wide-angle that ive had for a year or two, along with the obligatory tripod.

Im not going to go into the How’s, What’s and Why’s of HDR as Stammy does a way better job.

I took shots at different locations, but im going to focus on one composition to illustrate the process as an example of what HDR looks like for me

Here’s the three brackets shots and the final HDR version.

Under

On exposure

Over

The HDR

Now in reality, these shots dont do a very good job exploiting what HDR has to offer, they lack foreground detail and the natural landscape looks more hyper-real than a cityscape or urban setting.

But you ge the idea.

Once you have the thee exposures, you can sit and tweak away for hours and create a widely varied set of results.

What I’ve come to realise is – I’m not that big a fan of HDR. The over produced look of it is useful for a few occasions, but its not my cup of tea for most jobs. For example the subtle tonal variations of the sunset on the ‘On exposure’ shot are lost when the balance of the light in the rest fo the frame is changed – I know you could tweak away with this for hours, but I like the dark, moody feeling it brings to the table.

You need to figure these things out for yourself… go take it for a spin.

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/.

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>

If you ever needed a better reason to go out there and download a major studio release or production,let this be it.

Viacom in all their wisdom, have ordered a take-down notice to Youtube for a clip they themselves had not right to publish or distribute..  this should surely be added to Wikipedia under ‘irony’.

The Mashable article

The BBC reports a story of a dutch development to balance the loads on P2P networks, this may even reach a wider market, as services like Joost become more popular.

One to watch for sure…  bye-bye leechers