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Apple Airpods
Airpods are the most comfortable bluetooth headphones I have tried. Over the winter months I tried earphones by Sony and other brands. After months of experimenting I came back to the airpods.
With the Sony WHR 1000 earpods there are a number of issues. The first is that noise cancelling changes noticeably. Several times I felt as if I had changed altitude because it switched from one sound environment to the next.
With all brands I found that I don’t like earphones that are made from rubber in-ear. They feel uncomfortable almost immediately and I did not get used to this discomfort over time. With the airpods it’s easy to wear them for hours without worrying.
Seasonal considerations should be an important aspect of earphone design. Almost all earphones are designed with warm summer weather in mind. They stick out from the ear. This means that you can’t wear hats, rain hoods or other head covers without the chance of either ripping out the earpieces or having the rubber part pressed against your eardrum.
I use my airpods to listen to podcasts via the phone and watch video content on my laptop from Youtube and Netflix. I recently edited a 30 second video using airpods rather normal headphones and it was acceptable.
I need to the noise cancelling features of the Sony earphones on a longer train journey, a car journey where I am not driving or a flight if and when I fly next.
The Francofous Show 2
Et voila que PiouPiou nous donne la deuxième version de la version Française du “Seesmix Français”
Francofous Show 2
Blog : http://francofousshow.wordpress.com
Twitter : francofousshow
Mail : francofousshow@gmail.com
Everyone is familiar with his work but how many people have seen a picture of Ansel Adams at work? Today on Retronaut they shared just such a picture. Who hasn’t been on a road trip to the US, stopped the car and taken pictures. Of course he is unique in that he stood on the roof with a tripod. Conversely for Timescapes his car became his home so the tradition continues.
A seesmic morning to you
Big Red Nose
Just one of many seesmic videos to come.
Google Latitude and Automatic stalking for only your closest friends
Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work.
Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all.
That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on.
Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations.
That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it.
Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that.
Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar.
By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this?
I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.
Google’s shift from narrow casting to broadcasting.
Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring “broadcasters”. This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers.
A few years ago when you browsed Youtube you would easily browse through hundreds of videos before finding content worth watching. You would then browse and find more content. It was organic.
In recent months I have noticed a shift towards the sensationalist and tabloid. Most headlines are now clickbait. As an experiment log out of Google and look at the top youtube content.
Instead of seeing 16-30 videos you see ten videos. The content that they want you to see has been whittled down. This means that unless you have a big audience, clickbait titles and are already authoritative you will be invisible. The amateur aspect of Youtube is gone. It is being replaced by the authoritarianism of mass appeal.
The Upside
There are hundreds of thousands of content creators that had accepted to have adverts as pre-roll, as banners or at the end of the videos. Google and Youtube no longer take advantage of the long tail. Most of us create content that is seen a few hundred times and the revenue is minimal. Marketers still paid youtube for the visibility and youtube still made money off our backs. We were never going to see that money. It would have taken years for us to earn enough for an electronic transfer to be made. Youtube was the clear winner until they decided to stop making free money from us
The second upside is that we’re going to be able to browse videos and find acceptable content more easily until recently we were forced to watch from 5 seconds to two minutes of advert before watching five seconds and clicking away. Without adverts, we will see the video is mediocre and move on sooner.
The opportunity
When youtube was young it provided a unique opportunity because it gave us “unlimited” space and bandwidth for the sharing videos. Neither of these is scarce anymore. The barriers to sharing videos on our websites have decreased. HTML5 and above, h.265 and H.264 make it lighter for us to upload and share video content from our own websites.
Conclusion
Youtube was a great place for browsing and finding interesting content to watch but as algorithms and populism took over the website so the ease with which we could find random interesting content has decreased. From 30 videos to choose