01.31.07
Posted in Social Media, tools at 2:24 am by Matthew Reinbold
Yes, the title is sensationalistic. But when the product is as sensational as ZoHo’s notebook (to be released for public consumption in March) it could very well be true. From Social Media Today:
In a nutshell, Zoho Notebook is a place where you can aggregate any kind of content, share it with your colleagues and friends, and publish it onto the Web. You can create as many books as you want, and add any number of pages to any book. On a page, you can add some text, images, audio or video recordings, HTML code, links to external resources, RSS feeds, files, spreadsheets, documents developed with Zoho Writer, tasks, planners, contacts, calendars, anything&
But what makes Zoho Notebook truly remarkable is the ability to get access control and versioning at the object level, rather than just at the page or book level. What this means is that when you add an object to a page—say a piece of text, you can share it with whoever you want, either with read/write access or read only, while not sharing any other object on the page. And when modifications are made to this piece of text, a new version is created, independently of any modification that could have been made to the rest of the page. To be fair, this feature can also be found with some sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS), but never has it been implemented with such an easy to user interface, which also happens to be totally free to use.
Having worked for a document control company for several years I understand just how important those versioning features are in a corporate environment; now that I have a Subversion server set up at home much of my writing gets tossed straight over. But combining all major office tasks with hosted backup, universal access, and automatic versioning is hot. Google can’t be far behind (although Google only supports spreadsheets and written documents – ZoHo has a few extra apps like ZoHo show, a Powerpoint replacement).
This will significantly affect MS Office sales in 2008. I also think its about time to uninstall Open Office.
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01.30.07
Posted in video at 3:45 pm by Matthew Reinbold
There is a very interesting blog entry by Tom Sherman about Venacular Video. In it Tom defines Venacular video as:
video is the vernacular form of the era–it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity.
In other words, site’s like YouTube are just beginning to show us how powerful amateur video can be for self expression. So what are some common attributes – both now and the near future – of venacular video?
Displayed recordings will continue to be shorter and shorter in duration, as television time, compressed by the demands of advertising, has socially engineered shorter and shorter attention spans. Video-phone transmissions, initially limited by bandwidth, will radically shorten video clips.
The use of canned music will prevail. Look at advertising. Short, efficient messages, post-conceptual campaigns, are sold on the back of hit music.
Recombinant work will be more and more common. Sampling and the repeat structures of pop music will be emulated in the repetitive deconstruction of popular culture. Collage, montage and the quick-and-dirty efficiency of recombinant forms are driven by the romantic, Robin Hood-like efforts of the copyleft movement.
Real-time, on-the-fly voiceovers will replace scripted narratives . Personal, on-site journalism and video diaries will proliferate.
Just curious – is anyone here working with video? Online webcam journals? YouTube clips?
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01.29.07
Posted in business, mashups at 2:47 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Much of the discussion at the recent third mashup camp centered around the monetization of mashups, or the software applications cobbled together from various publicly accessible APIs. Making money with only a mashup can be hard; because it’s assembled from common pieces there’s nothing to stop others from doing what you do. The conclusion of the panel? Provide the tools to enable the building, not the end result. From the piece by Anne Zelenka:
But the vast majority of websites don’t turn a profit for their creators, and this may hold true for most mashups too. Looks like if you want to make money on mashups, you might want to become what the Mashup Camp folks call a “mashup enabler�–the service and tool providers that make mashups possible.
Without a true economic driver are mashups destined to be nothing more than playthings? Something to dabble with on the weekend?
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01.28.07
Posted in site news at 10:30 pm by libel_vox
While I didn’t entirely get everything done this weekend that I had hoped there have been changes. Mainly, if you’re reading this, I have successfully avoided nuking five years of posts to high heaven and this hair brained scheme to haul mutednoise into the ‘Web 2.0 era’ (*shudder) might actually work.
Some quick things I’ve noticed:
- For some reason the posts aren’t saying who the topics are by – they just lead up to white space and fail. I need to look into that
- While the form categories are correctly marked on the posts they aren’t showing up in the sidebar to the right – I’ll also have to look into that.
- Most of the laggards from the old db have been deleted. However, if I remotely recognized your name from the last year you will be able to log in and post using the same user id and password as before. Of course, one of the big reasons for moving to Wordpress (or a blog at all) was so that you didn’t have to log in if you wanted to post.
- The ’special articles’ (if special is code word for infrequent) still need to be imported.
- mutednoise has gone through several corrections in focus. I’ll graudually be going through and weeding out the less relevant posts while improving the tagging. That may take some time, however.
- Image links seem to have ported only the url over without putting the <image …> syntax around them. Since we really didn’t have that many I’ll probably just modify them over time as I come across them.
- Some of the old [bbcode] references for lists also seem to have slipped through the regular expressions that I cooked up. Again, they were pretty rarely used and I’ll deal with them as I find them.
- The old phpbb forums and bookmarks to them will work for a little while longer; or at least until I can create pages to reroute visitors to the newly transfered pages. They are currently locked down so that only administrators can post anyway. Since everything has been pulled over here this the phpbb portion can be considered expendible at any time.
- ?
If you see anything else that looks out of place let me know. Moving to the new web host will probably be next weekend. I’ll post something quick with more info as it comes up.
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01.26.07
Posted in site news at 2:56 am by Matthew Reinbold
Having a deadline, even if it is self imposed, is a wonderful tool for prying even the most stationary object into motion. This weekend I will be tempting not one, but two fates as mutednoise not only jumps from PHPBB to Wordpress but from Uplinkearth to CrystalTech.
There is no guarantee that the harming of innocent bits may not occur. While the forum is all packed up in shiny bubblewrap moderators can still post; posts made after this Friday are not promised to survive the rigors of moving at the high speeds required on the information superhighway.
Please remain browsing with your laptops in the upright and locked position for the duration of this weekend. With any luck we’ll have touchdown Monday morning.
In the case of emergency your laptop makes a piss poor flotation device. If mutednoise should crack under pressure oxygen will be required to revive its author.
We know you have a number of options for your entertainment purposes and we’d like to thank you for choosing mutednoise.
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01.25.07
Posted in remix culture, terminology at 2:08 pm by Matthew Reinbold
While reading the SpreadShirt Blog I came across a brand new term: content jockey, which leads to another term called ‘Reahmicks’. What is a content jockey?
Reahmicks.us is a pacific movement of people also known to be content jockeys (CJs), meaning they remix anything that needs to be remixed to fit their needs: existing content, situations, words, images, music, jobs, projects, disciplines, homes, lifestyles, clothes, timezones, languages, definitions, and whatelseÂ… of course, themselves – in their personal as well as professional life. The word “reahmicks” is a remixed variant of the word “remix”.
Personally, I think ‘Reahmicks’ is a little to close to ‘Rednecks’ for me to comfortably use it myself but its an interesting movement. But is there something better than Reahmicks?
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01.23.07
Posted in blogs, business, site news at 2:07 am by Matthew Reinbold
I am libel_vox, and non-rumors of my un-demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Rather than take the trite path of profusely apologizing for the lack of posts and making hollow promises to do better lets take a different tack. For now, I’d like to outline a grander vision at which I will have no time for.
mutednoise has been an entity of various focuses since 1999. At that time it was an electronic act. Since then it has been a private forum, a tech new bb, and most recently a slapdash series of posts on social media.
Back in December I almost managed to successfully transfer five years of posts over to a WordPress blogging platform. The reason was that modern blogging platforms have significantly reduced barriers to participation; in effect, they are a graceful refinement of what I was trying to do with the phpbb software here. There are still errors, however, and then vanity projects had to take a back seat to things like ‘making the mortgage’ and ‘personal hygiene’.
Well, that’s not entirely true. http://MilitantGeek.com, an experiment in barbed tech humor and feigned ambivalence in clothing, is going swimmingly. Whereas mutednoise has always been a concept that I’ve tried to build a site around MilitantGeek was/is a pure e-commerce play and the numbers reflect it.
A rock that I tried tackling at one of the first CodeAway’s collaborative idea sessions was what to do with mutednoise. The small panel that evening was about as stumped as I had been to that point. With further reflection it seems that mutednoise has always, in some way or another, gravitated around changes in culture brought on by technology. Whether it was “gear, games, and music” from a few years ago or “The Sound-Off on Social Media” I’ve always been deeply interested in the ripple affects across our collective well being that all these gadgets and gewgaws have.
Its because of this thinking that I know I need to subtly shift mutednoise’s focus again. mutednoise is about Code Changing Culture. I hope to find time (eventually) for a site redesign and a change of hosting companies to help renew the vigor.
But just slapping a new moniker on old product is not enough. mutednoise really needs the support of a like minded network. I’ve been sitting on the domain name ‘Opinuendo’ for awhile. It is not only a perfect wrapper for the sublime and silly, the pity and the profane; it is a great name for a new media company. Opinuendo will become the parent for a host of online efforts.
Hmmm…. it is late and this post has been far too self indulgent already. As always, more as I have time.
For now the tentative Opinuendo properties:
* Militant Geek, Tech Culture Criticism Amok
* mutednoise, Code Creating Culture
* BloomBurst, Growing Software with Pop
* CodeAway.org, Tech Co-Working Events and Commentary
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01.17.07
Posted in terminology, video at 12:26 pm by Matthew Reinbold
That’s what the producers of ‘Elephant’s Dream’ claim it to be. But what the heck is Open Source Cinema?
Elephants Dream is the worldÂ’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.
The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world.
So how does a movie that is created entirely in the open look? An overview of the project can be found on Google Video.
From the DIY Media Weblog.
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01.12.07
Posted in Social Media at 2:01 pm by Matthew Reinbold
I don’t know if I can think of something more appropriate: The Pirate Party is trying to Buy Sealand. Sealand, you may remember, is a quirky little WWII relic/platform in the ocean that was declared a sovereign nation. During the first bubble the owners tried to make the isolated station a data center or any and all. That plan didn’t work and now they’re looking for new ownership.
Enter the Pirate Party, a group that has transcended their P2P roots and has become an entire political movement throughout Europe. They’re trying to purchase Sealand (or some other island) and are offering ‘citizenship’ to those who help.
More information is available on BuySealand.com. Also worth noting is apparently one can get their own island for as little as $50,000.
Abso-frequin’ incredible. The enjoyable third of Stephenson’s ‘Cryptomonicon’ (sp? too lazy to look that up right now) talks about a group and their efforts to set up rouge data centers. It’ll be incredible to watch what happens if the Pirate Party does indeed buys an Island (sealand or not). Is this the activism of convenience for our generation?
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01.11.07
Posted in microformats, semantic web at 12:17 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Microformats are machine and human readable ways of marking up web syntax. The idea is to present an incredibly clean way of presenting information for human consumption but still have the ‘hooks’ present that machines are able to comprehend what they’re processing.
Until now there’s been a lot of theoretical talk on their usefulness but not much progress on their use. Finally, a new FireFox plugin, Operator, changes this. From the Mozilla blog:
Here are some examples of things you can do with this release of Operator, and with the Web as it exists today.
Yahoo! Local Plus Your Address Book
With Operator you can send the phone number of your favorite pizza place from Yahoo! Local to your address book, without having to type anything.
…
Upcoming.org Plus Calendar Plus Maps
If you view an event at Upcoming.org you can easily add the event to your calendar to see if you are free, or map the location of the event to see where it will take place.
…
Blog Post Tag Plus Flickr
Let’s say you are viewing Fred’s post about the Mozilla lanyards given out at the Firefox Summit, and you decide you want to view more photos of the Firefox Summit. With Operator, you can easily navigate from Fred’s post to the “Firefox Summit” tag on Flickr.
…
Flickr Plus Maps
Now letÂ’s say you want to know where the above picture was taken. Because the photograph is geotagged, you can use Operator to quickly push itsÂ’ coordinates to Google maps.
That all sounds fantastic but they really don’t allude how FireFox/Operator knows where to export the semantic markup it finds. I’ll install and use the plugin and report back when I’ve got a better idea of its usefulness.
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