I was reading a blog post last night, about why your blog doesn’t get read, most of which i agreed with. Therefore with a spurt of energy, im going to throw myself at writing more frequently and openly. Apparently its the best way.

Whats been taking-up all my time ? well, Agent Lynch has a shiny new website, powered by WordPress, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. We had fun making that happen. It was the first Facebook Connect integration I’ve done and was nice to see it implemented and working. Ms Lynch is a good friend of a couple of friends – if that’s even a sentence – one of whom is Roxy Velvet. It was great to get her a sit up and running that she not only liked visually, but could attack from a content point of view and really enjoy working with.

AgentLynch.com

The Facebook Connect integration was done with relative ease, using a WordPress plugin that needed only a small amount of kicking and hacking to get working as I needed. I did in-fact use two plugins, one for the on-page login, and one for the admin/user prompt login. All the other Twitter/Flickr/Youtube bits and pieces are the standard ones ive used elsewhere.

If 6 Was 9 – its back ! – Randall has got new designs and a new movie. After filming on his trip to the Mentawai’s, he posted the video on the We are If 6 Was 9 blog. The flash site was produced by him, i just helped get the pre-loader, hosting and analytics sorted.

Slatehall Riding Centre

I did a superb little shoot last week to get some shots for a local tourism brochure and book. Slatehall Riding Centre met me on the beach along with Claire from Imapct PR and we had some fun in the shallows. Nice looking shots we all thought. The full Flickr set is here.

Bamburgh Castle

Holy Island Castle

Beach gallop

Farne Island Divers

Finally, over the bank holiday I spent the weekend with the Farne Island Divers crew diving with the seals around the Longstone. A great few days that I recorded with my little Canon compact, and the result was this small but fun video chopped together fro the video clips..

Farne Islands Divers – Diving with Seals – August 2009 from swinhoe on Vimeo.

More once Ive got something to say…

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.

Working with Ben Southall on his new site has forced me to source answers to issues that I have left un-addressed on my own site.

With Ben leaving to Hamilton Island in 4 days, we had to get his whole new media platform up and running in advance allowing him to fly away, happy and content that he could post text blogs, audio blogs, video blogs and images all to his site and have them all aggregated and drawn together.

BestJobBen.com

So far we’ve been pretty successful, and have only a couple of small outstanding issues, but the run-down looks like this.

WordPress for publishing and standard blogging – you just cant beat it.

Twitter for micro-blogging – not really another alternative with the widespread usage and app development for all platforms.

Flickr for anything image based, utilising some handy hacks and plug-ins to get what we need.

Seesmic – for video-blogging and publishing via some more handy hacks and plug-ins.

Youtube for edited video content.

AudioBoo for audio-blogging and pod-casting.

With all this going on, we’ve had a lot to consider and its no surprise that Google and web searches are pretty intrinsic to the way things panned out. Also, of worthy mention are the rougish fellas I follow online who keep us all in the picture regarding Social Media and digital publishing, and they are (in no particular order…) Christian Payne (@Documentally) , Phil Campbell (@philcampbell) and Dan Thornton (@badgergravling).

Having done a lot of work with elearning material over the years, it was fun to get back into it for a small job via the agency. SCORM wrappers needed to be added to nice looking html site to get it working in a Blackboard LMS.
All pretty straight forward really. Except it had been a while. So I got Google out and began a quick scout-around for new developments.

I was very happy to find Pipwerks.com, and its very useful collection of scripts and API hacks. Kudos there for making the API interactions a lot easier than 3 years ago.

Diversity in the Workplace

Today im getting a chance to do some exciting SEO stuff…. *yawn*

Im also busy trying to get http://www.beadnellbay.info up and running as fast as I can… its getting there.

So, to make it all a bit more fun, here’s a lovely song/video from Boards of Canda to brighten the day (linked via Charlie…thanks !)

In other news, I contacted the Magicseaweed guys and they kindly added Beadnell Bay, so we now have a forecast for the village !

http://magicseaweed.com/Beadnell-Bay-Surf-Report/992/

Also, this is awesome !!

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/

Well, ive been very busy, as you can imagine. Lost of things to tell you about, but lets start with something fun.

My Day -

My Day 28 October 2008 from swinhoe on Vimeo.

This was a short one-day project shot and edited in 24 hours.

So, apart from that, im currently very busy down at BDP Media, and have been for some time.

Im also still working closely with Leon/C6/Dotmasters crew on the work and site/pubishing of the art theyre producing.

Keeping a hand in with Mad Dog as we love them so much, and they have a new book out, Whistler – its number ten !.

Also, been running around a fair bit, Amsterdam, Prague, Beadnell, Exeter… all good. Even a day out with Steve in London.

My last post being May, its only fair to tell you about the summer – Dads 60th went-off well, and a spent most of July catching decent size wave on the north-east coast. Nothing stupid, but we had it head-high for a week or so…  following that it was back to the grind in the smoke.

Ok, more from me later, i really am going to try and keep this more up-to-date.. should be easier once i pick-up my new toy later today..

Oh yeah, and this happened….

The world became a slightly better place with the election of Barack Obama..

Is set to roll again this year, so get your ass out to Mayrhofen for three days of riding, filming and editing in the snow park.

Its a simple format, ride, film it, edit it together, all in three days and then let the best video be voted to win by the teams involved.

Should be a blast, go check it at  http://www.jib-vid.com/

See you there…

Ah, how we love stats.

Its the time of the year again for Google to drop the years most interesting* search related data on us.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

* replace with pointless/useless/trashy/fun as needed