Joke of the day
Apologies if the site has been slow or intermittently available. We were having an issue with a new database, but it’s been fixed.
So they’re going to start apologizing for the site being up now?
I got a job and I’m moving back to Geneva next week
The week is almost over and I’ve got a job. Spent the past week being trained in certain softwares I’ll need to use, as well as hardware. I’m looking forward to that.
In the meantime I have a little roadtrip to London and back to get out of the way.
More details to come tomorrow night
Twitter – Forget individuals, follow their community instead
For you to understand what people are talking about on twitter there is one thing you should know. When you follow Dacort, Loudmouthman, loic Lemeur, Jeff Pulver or many other people including me you’ve got to follow those that they are talking to as well as those that are listening. By this I mean that twitter is not about individuals so much as community.
If I spend the morning speaking to the English community then there are many names that will appear again and again. In so doin you’re going to be curious to see who’s on the other end. As a result of this you may decide to follow one person, then another and it continues. Over a period of days you may start following a dozen or more, people, maybe even hundreds.
As two people follow two others so the six degrees of seperation comes into force. I have links into the London, Geneva and Paris community for example (in terms of face to face meetings) and many more people via online conversations. What this means is simple. If you follow the right core f people you’ve got easy access to some influential people. In fact you may be one of them without realising it.
If twitter is simply about what you’re up to then that’s quite a restricted way of using twitter. To get the most out of twitter you have to find a good community and add it’s members. In so doing you can participate in some really interesting conversations. I’m within the social media conversation at the moment but over time as more groups participate so the conversation should be tailored to your needs. If you see someone @ another member see whether you can add that person too. Twitter is about the community, not individuals.
facebook | seesmic | social media | twitter
The twitter back channels
Twitter is one of those places that takes some time to get the hang of but once you do it’s going to suck you in and won’t spit you out till you’re exhausted. It’s a little bit like seesmic except that in this case you don’t look like you’re so in love with your computer that you’re talking to it.
In reality twitter is just the surface of our interaction with the groups of friends we have met and made through this network. Twitter is first and foremost about short messages to say what you’re doing right now. Over time though it’s become much more. As more and more people started to use it so the want to comment on what people are doing increased. Overtime as more and more comments were made so conversations occured. These conversations are a little more complex than you may think. Initially conversations via instant messaging services like ICQ, Skype, Yahoo and others are about one to one communication. Twitter is about the overheard conversation. In other words as I’m talking to one person another person overhears what I’m saying and they want to join. Over time a community forms. Some call it the twitterverse, others the twittosphere, and some call us the twitterati. The result is the same.
It’s a community of people based around twitter. They are for the most part involved in the social media although a growing number of people are “tourists”, in other words they’re looking at this social networking system or tool and seeing how they can apply it to their own lives and business practices.
There’s another dimension. The invisible conversations that are taking place. With some people I have exchanged hundreds of messages in private, via direct messages. With other people it’s via google talk and in other cases via the skype chatrooms. In other words it’s a dynamic conversation across a number of instant messaging services. There are a number of uses. In some cases some conversations are too personal to have out in the open, with others the conversations are very focused and the community is a community through a skype chatroom or conference call. As a result there is a strong feel of belonging within certain communities.
Seesmic is one website and over time a community that has profited greatly from twitter, and I mean in terms of the members of the community rather than the wealth generated. As people created videos so a link with the video title would appear. As the “Seesmic” tag appeared more and more so a buzz was generated to create interest. As more people were invited through friends using twitter so more interest grew. It was also a two channel conversation. One channel being twitter where short messages could be exchanged easily and the second channel video where opinions could be exchanged through visual means. Quite a few parties took place then.
Many questions are also asked by those that use twitter. Some of these questions are easy to answer within 140 characters and a list of responses is left as a blog entry. It’s a quick method of getting a number of points of view efficiently. Occasionaly entire conversations come to life about a number of topics and multiple people talk to multiple people and after three or four hours results and conclusions are drawn up and a comprehensive blog post covering a range of issues can be written up.
Twitter is a simple way of keeping in touch with what friends are doing but it also creates links with people we would find very hard to get hold of using more contemporary methods such as facebook, e-mails and other. This is a glimpse of what the future of communication will hold. Skype, seesmic, gtalk, facebook are all there to add depth to the twitter conversations.
Twitterpod – archiving your tweets
Over the past three days I’ve been testing twitterpod and so far I’m quite happy with it. It’s an efficient way of keeping track of twitter conversation. What makes this application different from others is the way it archives all tweets you’ve received. 
Over the past three days I’ve received over 8400 tweets and i can search through them to see my conversation history with all those I follow.
Another feature I like is the drawer feature that comes out when I browse over a tweet that has a hyperlink. 
The Drawer is great because you don’t need to go from one application to another in order to view the hyperlinks. Simly scroll down the list of tweets and find the relevant links. If the link is worth visiting properly then you can view it in another browser window. It’s effortless and that’s why I love the feature.
Another feature that’s useful is the way you can choose to see all tweets, only those tweets that are related to you(me) and all tweets with URLs, in other words hyperlinks.
There are some keyboard shortcuts like apple 2 to send an @message and apple 3 to open the person’s profile page in browser.
The final thing is more of a gimmik. if you’re just watching twitter without contributing many comments or adding to the conversation then the visualisation tool allows you to have twitter running as a screensaver of sorts. I don’t see the appeal but some people might.
Overall it’s a nice little package and so far it’s been able to cope with my tweeting style which is always an advantage. I’ll continue using this for the moment.
Valentine’s – a social media perspective
Valentine’s day is a day both dreaded and feared by most for two reasons, as a couple because of the pressure you’re under and as a single because you’re single. In the social media though it can be one of the most amusing times. My social media valentine consisted in two parts. The first on twitter and the second a net2meet (From online to offline meeting) with a fellow seesmicer.
The first one was fun thanks to it’s simplictiy. When you write @ username <3 it takes this to mean that you heart the other user. With maggie a fellow seesmicer we filled each other’s timelines as well as that of many others with this electronic sign of affection. It was amusing to see what a good mood it put both Maggie and I in as a result. The pressure Valentine’s day usually puts on people dissipated entirely.
I reached my 17,000th tweet yesterday and I dedicated it to all the girls I have frequently tweeted with. They’re what made valentine’s day so much fun. I love the idea that I have so many conversations on a daily basis. We’re a community based around twitter and our love of new methods of communication. It’s a good community and I’ll spend many more ours there.
I flew back to Switzerland and that’s where I met Pioupiounette a fellow seesmicer and within a few seconds we already felt comfortable with each other. That’s because in the social media we spend so much time chatting with and seeing people that when we meet in real life we’ve already got a collective experience. In french it’s “Un vécu commun”. As a little bonus I got to see the projection room of the cinema and the reels there. It was fun to hear the whirring away of the machine, seeing two arc lights, the cinema from another angle and such. In other words it was an adventure.
The socia media are a fun place to spend some time and this year was one of the most relaxed valentine’s days because technology meant that I had some good friends to have an enjoyable time with. Keep in mind that Valentine’s day is the day I got my driving license so whilst others celebrate love and relationships I celebrate mobility and frienships. Yesterday was a pleasure and I hope next year will be just as good.
The Francofous yahoo Live wall
The Francofous are a good group of people and last night we spent a few hours playing with Yahoo Live and skype. Skype provided the audio whilst yahoo live provided the video platform. Yahoo live is limited in the way we can watch and follow video so I created a simple video wall. The principle is simple. i get all the videos embedded into one page and we can watch everyone chat with everyone else. It’s a really nice experience and I’m going to improve the layout for future games.
fun | reviews | social media | tech related | warzabidul
Yahoo live
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.
the tapeless workflow – Videoforum
The tapeless workflow is a term used to describe video production without the use of tapes. That is to say that from the point the material is recorded in camera to the point it is distributed it never changes from being data. In other words television production has become a profession of data managment as some would say.
A few production companies came to give demonstrations of their tapeless workflow system, at least in broad terms. Red Bee and Virgin Media showed how they have collaboratively brought the post production process to being a tapeless one. In order to do this good networking capability is needed and so is storage. They had to digitise over 40,000 tapes as well as face many more challenges.
Some of these challenges have to do with meta data. Everyone is used to dealing with tapes. you shoot your material, you label it for post production and then store them for later use. When dealing with data though the mentality is different. Some productions have shot straight to P2 cards, backed up the day’s shoots to external P2 hard drives before sending them from China to London for example. Of course when doing this everyhting must be planned ahead.
Part of this planning has to do with the compatibility between recording format and editing. If you get this wrong then you either don’t get the quality you were looking for or you slow down the process. That was part of a case study between Panasonic and two of it’s camera’s during a shoot in China.
The second example was between Red Bee Media and Virgin Media in relation to the creative Village. The idea is that when the material is ingested by Red Bee media it’s saved to a central server from which it can be accessed by a number of workstations, from transcribing to tapelogging, editing and producer’s work stations. it also has to be available in two buildings.
There are a number of advantages to this workflow. The first is that the work is available to the producers when they have the time to check the material rather than when everyone has ten free minutes. As a result the editor can edit a rough cut and a number of producers at up to two hundred workstations may check the edit and say whether they like it. If they don’t then it’s quick to make any changes that are required. It also means that there’s far less mess and expensive equipment is not tied up.
When you’re working on post production dubbing to tape used to take a lot of time, real time and with DVD it’s quickly a messy affair. Files in an edit folder are far easier to deal with.
I really like the idea o the tapeless workflow and i’m going to work on that for my own work, first with affordable equipment and then work my way towards more fun alternatives. It’s what we expect. No more ingestion time, no more dubbing time, just straight editing, agreement and finally output to a number of formats. Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds but post production companies are working on making this a smoother process.
playing with the new macbook air
As I write this I’m playing with the new macbook air and already i-ve twittered and seesmiced from it. The keyboard is fine and the user interface is good. The only idiotic thing is the mouse button is far too small. I don-t see the point of such a thin slither of a mouse.  Now how many people are envious of me testing a macbook air? Now to test the multicontrols :-) update: Can’t test the multicontrols. Haven’t put any pics on so can’t test that feature. What a shame. update 2: The multifinger image manipulation is really fun. Everyone should try it. Turn it. Flip it. zoom in, edit, move over a little, more manipulation. I like it. Wait for the tech on some of the higher spec machines though. It’s got some nice technology.Â