Piclens is a plugin for Firefox and it’s great fun to use to look through hundreds to thousands of pictures and videos on youtube, facebook, flickr and many other sites. It’s worth playing with.
Other than that the threaded seesmic player is quite fun. You can follow full conversations and get a taste of how discussions progress through the tweets.
Being in Paris to meet Seesmic friends once more today. we went to Dune, cafe/bar where we spent many hours eating various types of meat, drinking wine and seesmicing from laptops and mobile phones. Many photographs were taking. We could see each other without the intermediary of the webcam. It was good. 🙂
I’ve met a few new people and made more friends. Vinvin was there, Fred2baro, xtelle, Beatrice,
The event started when i met fred2baro at paris Gare de Lyon. He told me Keziah Jones was playing at one of the metro stations. He’s one of the artists i saw at the Caribana a few months ago. Djamel wasin the crowd for a short moment 🙂 Once i get to a proper laptop it will be easier to find the relevant videos and upload my own.
Re: @seesmictable : Le Bar est ouvert! …. et pendant ce temps la…
As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.
Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.
In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.
I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.
Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.
Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.
Yesterday afternoon I dropped by Nik’s house, (Loudmouthman) for what would be the first Social Media Living room event. The idea is simple. Participants of Social Media, whether through Twitter, Seesmic and other networks meet in the physical world to have nice conversations.
Quite a few people turned up including Fred2baro, Danacea, Mark Harrison, Jason Jarrett and one or two other individuals. we talked about tech and about life. The point is that to create a podcamp takes too much time and there is a need for more frequent smaller events. This was a perfect opportunity.
Among the amusing features of last night was the recording of a seesmic post via three laptops, three accounts and three webcams. We joked about which camera to look into and it was yet another example of taking Social Media friendships into the physical world.
No more complaining that spending time online means meeting fewer people. It doesn’t. I’m looking forward to more such events.
Whilst the connection is unstable and slow I decided to take the phone and Qik some landscapes from La Dole in Switzerland. Here are a few streams. As more people enjoy streaming live video from interesting locations so this will become a more common site.
What I hope to do next is go to some of the higher peaks and stream from there too. Overtime we could have a nice collection of footage.
This weekend I’ll be in Paris for another seesmeetup, an opportunity for French speakers to meet in person after getting to know each other online. They’re good fun.
Disclaimer: These are thoughts, rather than a well structured post.
Ridley Scott wants your user generated videos for a film “A Day on Earth” and whilst people are hyping this idea as something new the concept is an old one. Dziga Vertov had an idea that he would capture Life Unawares. Eventually he would end up with an experiment in six reels called “The Man with the Movie camera”. It’s aim was to show Soviet Russia as it was. It was an experiment in editing and in story telling.
Today everyone has a video camera. Everyone has one on their phone as well as their photo camera. Life is constantly being documented in video form. 24hrs of video are uploaded a minute to youtube. video recording is an everyday part of life. I’m sure we will see a great diversity of moments, some births, some sailing, some rock climbing, some sporting event and more.I haven’t taken a look at how long they want the finished result to be.
Seesmicers have had fun with this idea already. We had hat days, we had other events, we would go out with the cameras and film. With Qik too we did this. There is nothing new about the process. There is only a far greater ease to share the material internationally and collaborate.
As a side note we still remember Pangea day, another event with the same line of thought, but where people presented finished products rather than moments.
Like this:
LikeLoading...
One Comment
Hi Richard,
Thank you for posting about PicLens! We truly appreciate it.
We’re delighted to hear that you are enjoying PicLens 1.7 with the three new additions: Discover, Shop Amazon, and Return to PicLens.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Hi Richard,
Thank you for posting about PicLens! We truly appreciate it.
We’re delighted to hear that you are enjoying PicLens 1.7 with the three new additions: Discover, Shop Amazon, and Return to PicLens.
For interested readers, please see our demo at http://piclens.com/demo and learn more at http://blog.cooliris.com.
Thanks again,
Luna and The Cooliris Team