Social Media

Streaming video from mopile devices is the future and I burned through 90 megabytes of data in just two nights of music festival. As a result of this the third night required a different approach. I used Flixwagon. Flixwagon is in the same family as Qik and Bambuser but with many additional features. You can select the category of content, add a title and keywords to the stream before recording. The advantage of this service in contrast to the two other examples is that this one buffers the data stream in such a way that if you lose the connection you can still continue streaming once you find the data stream. In this particular situation I added the concert access point and went to film a number of concerts like Mademosielle K and Maroon 5. In both these cases I recorded the concert and during the break from one to the other I could let the software automatically push the content to the server.As a result I saved 2CHF per megabyte and uploaded about thirty megabytes within a short amount of time. Arrivals to the Caribana As people arrive ONEFM presenters Waiting for Mademoiselle K Mademoiselle K, first two songs Two more songs

mousewords - Jun 5, 2008

Cool! Looks like it was fun! :-)

Hey, of course, was fun being at the events. Glad you liked them.

Because every day is not the same this one has been quite normal. At eleven in the morning I found out that the motherboard for the macbook pro needed replacing and this should be accomplished by Tuesday. In second the day of work was a good one so I was energetic enough to drop by the caribana for a second night, meeting a few friends. It was also an opportunity to do some live streaming of concerts by Alanis Morisette, Stereophonics and last but not least (so far at the festival) Manic Street preachers. Here is a collection of the streams. If you tolerate this your children will be next Something to do with Autumn You all know this one: Your love is not enough. Stereophonics, Dakota Stereophonics, crowd having fun. Alanis Morisette, broke but happy

Corvida - May 2, 2008

I can definitely sympathize. Even though I’m in the US, the city that I stay in is pretty non-technological, let alone social. Getting people to use social networks is a tough thing. Even though they have their benefits, it’s not for everyone and everyone isn’t particularly fascinated with the web in the same way that we are unfortunately.

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.

Once more twitter has shown it’s value. An earthquake occured earlier this morning and people started to twitter about it within half an hour. people like Robert Scoble started linking to the story. It took at least an hour for most of the major networks to start speaking about this news. There’s a lag of course, as journalists have to do some research, get some reports and distribute them. I did a search on the twitter search engine flaptor and here is a little taste of the content of those tweets. Here is another source of tweets.

A few weeks ago I was in Paris and when someone pulled out the iphone I commented that it’s a bureaucratic tool but wasn’t sure why. The n95 is a flexible fun phone to play with especially when looking at Sportstracker. It’s an application I use every time I walk around. I’m not alone. Over a million people downloaded the application. Eventually more than 1 million people downloaded the program and used it for sports the developers never dreamed of, such as paragliding, hot-air ballooning, and motorcycle riding. As a result, Nokia developers are realizing that aiming the application at amateur athletes was too narrow. They are thinking of rebranding the application as a kind of life-tracker. Based on the response to the software on Beta Labs, that may well help drive users to Nokia’s Ovi Web portal [also in beta testing], which is the basis of Nokia’s attempt to carve out a big piece of the evolving, mobile Internet. “It shows people they can do much more [with their handsets] than just make phone calls,” says researcher Kaasinen. source If i start a trip from work or home there’s a good chance I won’t let sportstracker report where I am live because I don’t want people to know certain details of my life. When I’m on holiday however this is a different matter. If I’m walking in St Moritz and I want my twitter or social media friends to see where I am then the sports tracker tells them where I am. With Flixwagon, Qik or Bambuser they can watch video of what I’m seeing as I’m seeing it. That’s because you bring your friends with you with these new technologies. The digital lifestyle is more inmportant in how we relate to people and whilst in a place like Switzerland it may help to isolate people in high adoption areas of such technologies it has the reverse effect. Look at the Social media scene in London as just one example. It’s just a matter of time before other manufacturers catch up and these toys become mainstream.

If this isn’t a hoax then this is pretty fun. A guy claims to have hacked into the video display at a train station and is streaming live.

Looking through the feedreader today I spotted two friends, Phil Campell and Chrisian Payne here

Maybe in a year or two I can travel to a number of these events and enjoy a little more travel once again.

Laura Whitehead - Apr 1, 2008

Nicely summed up Richard!