Sometimes I feel that I'm spread a bit too thin online, but I can't seem to stop myself for signing up to new things because it's just so much fun. So in an attempt to widen the web and to break out of the patterns that I've been in with lots of newer tools, sites and communities, it's time to step back, get a bit of perspective and write on the site which really should be my home base.
Over the past few years my posting and surfing habits have changed a bit, but there are two communities that hold on to me after joining and participating continuously over several years. The oldest is Flickr, where I first joined and posted my first photo on August 26, 2004. Now I have 6,333 photos uploaded with 112,536 views of my photostream. On 43 Things I made my first entry on December 31, 2004 and since then I've written 317 more. On both sites I love sharing photos and goals, but the critical reason for sticking around so long are the comments. It's the sign of a community that the connections you make with people are the glue that keep you coming back. When you start getting comments on many of the things that you share, it keeps you coming back because you know that someone is there and you start looking for and commenting on things that other people share.
At first with both 43 Things and Flickr I didn't really know that many people, but it grew. The first people that I became friends with are people who I may never meet as they are in faraway places and I only knew about parts of their life. It wasn't until the last year or two that some of my real world and Flickr friends started to overlap. So now I'm able to keep in touch with friends and family through photos and comments. Now I share at least one photo every day, since it's habit and I also know that people are watching. It's not about the numbers, but that there are real people who I care about who are watching.
With 43 Things the collection of friends has shifted and grown over the past few years, but the most significant shift happened last October when I adopted the goal of Daily: Reflect on 5 things for which I'm grateful and now it's accounted for about half (and probably more soon) of the entries that I've made on the 43T site. I came to that goal via the Data Janitors group (which I've not been that active on) on 43 Places and primarily thanks to my online pal David, who is known as NYCinephile.
While much of my online activity now revolves around the 43 Things cluster of sites from the Robot Coop (43 Places, 43 People, All Consuming, Lists of Bests, and the Morale-O-Meter), the newest blogging that I'm doing is with newer tools such as Vox which is easy to use and has a great community that is supportive and fun. My other fun blogging is happening in my tumblelog thanks to the fine folks from Tumblr. In thinking about the 43 Things and Vox and Tumblr sites, the very significant link between them is how they allow me to combine my presence together through the way that I can cross-post or import from one to the other. So I post Flickr photos and I can use them on the other sites very easily. I'm also now starting to have friends that overlap with 43 Things, Flickr, and Vox, which hasn't really happened before.
But the latest thing are the social networking sites and (should I even say this?) Facebook and Twitter (but I started using it when it was still Twittr). With Facebook I find my usual online world inverted where I only have friends who I know in the real world and it's a way to stay in touch with what they're up to. I still find Facebook strangely intimate in that I know all of my friends, so in an odd way I seem to share a bit less there than I do publicly, since the people there already know more about me from me than from what I've shared online.
So now we're at the level of microblogging with Twitter and status messages in Gmail. The sign that the whole microblogging thing would stick came to me when I realized that my Mom and Dad were able to keep track of what was happening around me with the status messages in Gmail. So now I'm writing against the current with a longer post and I have to say that while I like microblogging, I hope that it doesn't take me away from longer things like this. But the best part of all of this is that while everything has become easier, the simple core of everything is connecting to people that I care about whether they are next to me in the same room or are around the world. That's reassuring and it's why I'm still here.
tags: community, blogging, 43things, flickr, tumblr, vox, facebook, twitter
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There are many places to upload and share video now and it's very easy to view and create it too. But a while ago I found blip.tv and liked it right away because of the people, the technology and how they do things. What was surprising to me was how everything that I wanted to do was in blip.tv when I started using it. I could cross-post to a blog, I could cross-post to the Internet Archive, and I could set the licensing and add a Creative Commons license to video. They also transcode video to Flash to let you view it just about anywhere. It's made me shoot and upload more video, which I'm enjoying a lot.
Those are reasons to use blip.tv to upload video, but what makes them rock is that they're a small and committed group of cool people who are doing this. You can have the best technology in the world, but without the people you've got a big, empty machine. I sent a note to them when I mentioned blip.tv on commandN and 2 of the 5 founders emailed me back right away thanking me. The support from blip.tv is amazing and fast with apparently a very small core group of people. I had a small problem when I was uploading some video and sent an email. Within an hour I had a response, and from the time that Jared (one of the cofounders) had started writing the email to me to when he sent it, the problem was fixed. Now that's remarkable service for something that is free.
So now I've been trying to make and share more things on my blip.tv blog and it's a great tool that encourages you to create more. Thanks blip.tv, you guys rock!
tags: blip.tv, video, sharing
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The web is an amazing way to share things, connect and find information. But the unlimited freedom of expression is threatened when technology and politics collide. Amnesty International along with The Observer have launched the irrepressible.info campaign to raise awareness of web censorship to lead up to a November 2006 United Nations conference on the future of the internet. It's important that freedom online is preserved and by signing the pledge you can help defend internet freedom and add your voice to those who fight repression.
tags: irrepressible.info, amnestyinternational, humanrights, freedom
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Today I received my first shipment from Valleyschwag. It's a fascinating idea of subscribing and have a random package that includes at least one t-shirt and a range of other promotional material from Silicon Valley companies in the mail. I signed up as soon as I heard about five weeks ago it and a lot of other people did too which seemed to slow things down a bit. I was also billed for my second month before the first month arrived, but now that I have a new t-shirt, it's ok and next month should be much better. For me it's a great way to get some more t-shirts and other promotional stuff that I collect like a pack rat. I documented my opening of Valleyschwag Issue 2 and in my first package I got a Rubyred Labs (the people who created and run Valleyshwag) t-shirt, a couple of stickers (including a FeedBurner one!), a temporary tatoo, a Livejournal pencil and Movable Type keychain, as well as some neat-looking puzzle cards from Perplex City. The whole project is being written about and documented through the Chronicles of Valleyschwag as well as all over the web. The team that has pulled this together seems like a great group of people and it's neat to watch how the popularity exploded so quickly and how they are responding to it.
tags: valleyschwag, schwag
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I've been listening to podcasts since last Fall and now that I have an iPod Shuffle, I'm listening to podcasts in a pod-like way instead of via burned CDs in the car or through the computer speakers. While I've been telling people about podcasting for a while, my less technologically experimental friends haven't taken the time to download beta software and dig around to find things to listen to. With the introduction of podcast support in iTunes, things have changed dramatically.
Podcasting makes a lot more sense to more people all of a sudden. The podcasts that I love are personal and are done by people who care. Passion is the key ingredient. Many of the podcasts that I listen to I found through blogs or from mentions somewhere, and not through a guide. In the iTunes guide to podcasting there doesn't seem to be a lot of independent stuff. In fact, there is a lot of Disney there with ABC or ESPN (both Disney properties) in all of the news slots. One of my favourite podcasts - Vu d'ici - Seen From Here by M-C Turgeon - is classified as an "Audio Blog", but if I had to narrow it down, I'd probably put it under "Music". M-C is annoyed at the iTunes thing and doesn't want those commercial, slick and boring podcasts.
A really interesting thing that I noticed is that after listening to podcasts via the iTunes guide, a friend of mine asked where he could find the real indie podcasts made by people in their basements. I think that people will want to wander outside of the slick guides and find things that really connect with them. The iTunes guide is a good place to start and I hope that more people go outside of it (or even realize that they can add whatever feeds they want).
A very encouraging development is Odeo, which just opened up a bit more today. At first they're providing a guide and a way to subscribe to podcasts. Later they'll be providing podcasting tools to let you create your own podcasts. I'm testing the beta subscription thing now and I like it. You can listen to podcasts on pages on the site and add comments about podcasts which can help you figure out whether you'll like the podcast or not. I didn't use it for a while after the new version of iTunes came out, but now I'm back to use it. A very good sign is that they're changing things quickly at Odeo and it's very easy to add your Odeo subscriptions into iTunes through an RSS feed that is generated. So now I have the best of both worlds.
What makes me more excited about Odeo are the possibilities of community and more feedback that it provides. The other thing that will help people find podcasts that they like is the support of tagging in Odeo. Tagging and folksonomies are what allow many connections to be made in systems like del.icio.us and Flickr, and it will help a lot with podcasting. Instead of a gatekeeper coming up with a way to categorize podcasts (hmmm... "music" or "audio blog"...) the people who produce and listen to the podcasts add tags to categorize it themselves. That's the way to do it. Down the road another feature for Odeo that I can see is people subscribing to certain tags via RSS feeds to be able to find new and interesting things.
We're moving out of the first stages of podcasting much as independent film did a few years ago. While now there are films with massive, multimillion dollar budgets that are called "independent", there still is a difference between a film with a marketing budget of several millions and a film made by people with a passion to tell a story and little or no money. That's not to say that people can't do good work for money in either podocasts or filmmaking, but the key is striking a balance and telling a story or creating something that connects with people on a personal level. Without passion you don't have much and that's what interests me in anything I consume.
technorati tags: podcasting, music, itunes, odeo
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One of the signs that things are maturing with information on the Web is that things are becoming much more closely linked together. A few days ago I was thinking that Technorati's watchlists were cool and today they unleashed their tags. I'm very impressed. One of the things that I've been wanting for a little while is a way to tag blog entries. Categories are good, but after using del.icio.us and Flickr I've started to realize that having more than one way to classify is a good thing. But having multiple tags doesn't really do a lot for you unless you can do something with it and now you can. I'm sure that blogging systems will quickly evolve and you'll choose tags and categories (there are already plugins), but it's fascinating to watch the development of folksonomy happen so rapidly. It was neat when I was able to see my Flickr photos show up beside my things on 43 things. But that's nothing compared to looking at Flickr photos, blog entries and del.icio.us links all together on the same page. I really fell in love with tags when I looked at the view of tags on Flickr where the font size of the tags reflect their popularity. Technorati has the same thing and as more people tag stuff it will be a great way to visualize what people are talking about. It's developing so rapidly that Technorati Tags have rolled out before it was completely done, so there aren't RSS feeds yet.
Another example of how fast things happen now: from the time the first notice I saw in my feeds (on Joho) to the afternoon, Matt from Oddiophile whipped up a bookmarklet to create tags (and I have to change my stylesheet to incorporate this new class). I used it for my first tagged post over at bitdepth digest and I'll use it to paste the code in this entry as well (which I'm writing in BBEdit). Tags and Technorati - this rocks so hard.
technorati: tags, folksonomy, web, blog, technorati
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The online world was very exciting for me in 2004. Blogging kept plugging away and I rediscovered Blogger which Google purchased. The great thing with the evolution of the Web is that finally CSS started to be embraced. With Blogger there was some great Javascript that made blogging even easier and faster. They also removed the ads on the Blogspot hosting, but opened the possibility of revenue from Google ads if you want.
The other cool Google-related discovery for me was Gmail, which has changed the way that I look at email. I try to keep everything organized and I've been using email for a long time and I don't easily switch email programs. While I use Apple's Mail a lot, I find that I'm using and loving Gmail a lot now and I think that I'm starting to use Gmail more than Apple's Mail program. The Gmail beta is fascinating as it is viral. You can't really sign up, you have to be invited by someone who has it. It's an interesting way to beta test something like a mail service as you want to have people who use it and the alpha geeks who are testing it will tell other alpha geeks about how cool it is.
The biggest chunk of my time online recently has been spent in the completely addictive Flickr. When I started it was just to share a few pictures with family and friends, but when some of the public photos that I posted received comments I started to get more of a sense of the community that was there. I didn't think that I would like the social component of it, but I started to realize that I shared a lot in common with the people who were looking at my photos. It's a great way to communicate visually and I notice that the community is more international than many communities that depend on language as the primary means of communication. The response to the photos that I post shape what I now choose as a subject. While I only joined Flickr in August, I posted 1424 pictures last year. My posting (and photography) increased dramatically as the year went on to the point where I posted 700 photos in December. I don't think that I'll continue at that rate, but I will probably post over 2000 images in 2005 I gladly paid for a Pro account which gives me a gigabyte of uploads every month (and my 700 photos last month got close to 50% of the capacity). I just realized some of how Flickr works thanks to the antenna blog which points out the Flickr is based on online gaming code. It's like a game where the object is the share your photos. You have quests with fellow group members and share your triumphs. It's great to be part of the community.
The tags on Flickr enable lots of connections between the images that you have uploaded and the images that others have classified in the same way. The tagging on Flickr is based on the tagging that takes place on del.icio.us where you create your own tags to classify links. It's been called a folksonomy and now I store a lot of my bookmarks in my del.icio.us space to keep track of things. The next step for me is to use my del.icio.us bookmarks with some of the other stuff I'm doing on my blog.
Viewing the web and keeping track of what's happening on sites and especially blogs has been made much easier with NetNewsWire, which continues to evolve and is the other program other than Mail that I constantly run. Now if I site doesn't have an RSS feed, it isn't as interesting to me. While there are many options for RSS readers, I love how NetNewsWire works and as MarsEdit (a weblog editor) evolves I think that I'll use it more and more as well.
The combination of RSS with audio enclosures caused podcasting to burst out onto the world. It's an exciting development that is really only months old, but is evolving incredibly rapidly with Adam Curry at the forefront with his Daily Source Code podcast setting the pace for what a podcast is, as well as highlighting what is happening in the podcasting world which is a close cousin to the blogging world. It's changed things so fast that the latest beta of NetNewsWire supports podcasting and now I'm using it to download podcasts. Podcasting will be very big in 2005.
Yesterday I began to explore 43things, which I looked at before, but now it really clicked as I became a member. 43things is like Flickr for to-do lists. You share your list of things to-do and things you have done as well as leave messages and comments about what you want to do and what others have done. With gentle prompting and an understated interface, I realized right away that I'd be spending a lot of time there. It connects you with people through tasks and tags and collaboration seems to be built into the DNA of the site. While I just started yesterday, I've already connected with strangers and realized that the whole thing is a way that people who may not blog or want to blog will be blogging without knowing it. I'll write more about 43things later, but I think it will be another big thing in 2005. Exciting times ahead online as we focus less on the technology and more on the people and community.
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I just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That's a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It's actually changed the way that I think about photos and I'm taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn't make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn't want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn't until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an "attribution-NonCommercial" license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.
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Hugh MacLeod draws cartoons on the back of business cards and he's been sharing those cards as well as his great insights into the creative process through gapingvoid. I'm keen to follow the conversation and to point others at him. He gets it and it's fascinating to watch the shape of how things are working now emerge. A lot is changing and Hugh is starting to trace around the edges of it. How is he different from others pronouncing on trends and how to be successful? He listens, he's generous and he's got a wicked, cynical sense of humour. He doesn't have to do the blog or draw the cartoons, he wants to. That makes a big difference. I'm glad that he's doing it. I wish more people would.
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A couple of nights ago I sat down to watch the U.S. Presidential Debate and decided to join in the second IRC chat that David Weinberger set up. I hadn't used IRC in years and I was surprised at how much I forgot... I had to get a client and get connected, but then it was a lot of fun. I sat down on the couch with the debate on the tv and made snide remarks as the debate went on. At the peak there were something like 50 people there. What was neat was that it wasn't that big a room and while there were some big name bloggers there, it was refreshingly flat. It made me nostalgic for the old days of the WWW where you could know most of the people there.
Then when I saw Weinberger's entry Annotated Debate, where he points to how Kevin Marks took Dave Winer's MP3 of the debate and combined it with the transcript to make a QuickTime that he calls "audioblogging with comments". I opened up the johodebate movie and saw that I got the first comment, which was about Kerry's tie. In David Weinberger's post he's a bit nervous about the "semiprivateness of chat being exposed in the full public of the Web" and I was wondering the same thing. Then I saw my (rather literal) nickname show up and felt a strange, internal, "yikes" as I quickly tried to remember what I said. Would I have said anything different if I knew where it would end up? Probably not, but it was interesting to go through the thought process of semiprivate and public speech.
I've been thinking a lot about how people speak and look when they are being recorded. The record changes the way you respond. With chat there is a text record, with video and film there is an additional dimension. Documentary filmmaking makes you (or should make you) think about what you see, what you say, what you show and how you establish context with editing. It's fascinating and demanding and it's why people get sucked in to making documentaries as you see how you can change the life of someone or cause them to act by just showing them something.
What started off as something that was fun and snarky has turned in to something that is more dynamic, but also managed to tie in to other stuff that I've been thinking about too. Thanks, Kevin for the value-added and thanks David for setting up the chat!
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I like to think that I'm an alpha geek. I try as much stuff out as I can and I like to be able to see things that are coming or things that I want to see develop. There were some rumblings about Flickr and I noticed it and looked at the site and the photos there a few times and read about it, but never signed up. Finally I did and I was hooked fairly quickly. Flickr is a way to share photos which isn't really that revolutionary, but it's how they do it that is remarkable. There are a bunch of ways to put galleries together to share images, but they can be a bit of a pain. If you want to have more personal photos you can set up rules and passwords, but that's not a lot of fun. Flickr really clicked for me when I realized that I was emailing the same photos to different people. It would make more sense to have the photos in one place and let them go there. Then it clicked even more when I made the connection between RSS and Flickr. In the same way that I don't need to go to a different site to see if it has been updated, it's easier to check the feed. With Flickr you have an imagestream, which consists of the photos that you upload. You can also view streams by how they are tagged or who uploads them. When this is combined with the ability to share certain images with contacts or friends or family or everyone it moves into the killer app territory. It's in beta now and all of the details aren't worked out, but I'm hooked. It's easier to understand once you use it though. The interesting thing is not that you have a limited amount of space, but it is how the space is limited. You have limits on how much you upload each month. So the bias of the system is to post stuff every month (or day or hour if you start to use it a lot). If you have a cell phone with a camera you can send images directly to Flickr. If you have a blog you can blog directly from Flickr. Technologically it's great, but the social component is what will make it stick... that and the well-documented Flickr API that lets you make other cool new things out of it and of course they have a blog. They also have Creative Commons licensing built-in as well! Hopefully as it develops and the pricing scheme is worked out it will take off. This is going to be very big I think. In some ways I think that Flickr and the RSS and Atom feeds that it generates will also help a lot of people understand why they would want to use feeds. Outside of the more tech-savvy blogging world there are a lot of people who use the Web and don't use feeds. NetNewsWire has changed the way that I view the Web because of how it lets me use the feeds and I think that Flickr is dramatically changing the way that I see sharing images. You can go to my Flickr page and you'll only see the photos that you're allowed to see... if you're a contact you'll see more, if you're not you'll only see the public photos. It's simple, functional and addictive!
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I've been using Blogger to create a new Screen Arts blog and I really like it. I tried out Blogger when it first started and had a bit of the usual, "that's too simple for a geek like me" attitude, but it was an important step in the development of the blogosphere. I found In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History by Alberto Gonzales that takes us back to 1999 when Pyra was making Blogger and other cool stuff. Google bought Pyra last year and they've been revamping and developing Blogger. I was looking for an alternative to Movable Type since the pricing structure changed and I wasn't sure if I could get all of the pieces in place to continue having the site hosted at work. So I tried out Blogger again and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's simple and it works well. But the neat thing is how it is evolving. I can audioblog or blog by mail (which I haven't done yet) and you can also work with Flickr to add photos to the free Blogspot hosting. They also removed the ads from Blogspot and added a toolbar at the top. It's a good thing to be with Google and I'm hoping that somehow I'll be able to get a Gmail account soon as well to play with that too. It's all part of the evolution of a lot of this stuff where it doesn't really matter where you are or what particular device you are using. Tim O'Reilly talks about it in the IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye called The Software Paradigm Shift.
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Doc Searls points to a great bit of writing on Britt Blaser's blog Escapable Logic. He writes about blogs as conversations (which is not new) and puts things in a great way. The theme he explores is: "Memorable conversation is the foundation of civilization." That quote hit me and it's one of those moments where the time and place and state of mind where I am all click.
Right now I'm in Truro taking a course with another amazing group of NSCC people. We talk a lot and share experiences of teaching and the rewards of working together to change the world through changing people's lives. It's important that we talk with each other and maybe the popularity of blogs and blogging is due to this inherent need to speak and be heard. Blaser hits the nail on the head in saying that blogs "contain a huge body of thoughtful conversations" and then he connects the conversations with actions to make the world a better place with the Spirit of America project. It's amazing how quickly things can happen when people work together and engage in conversation which leads to action. People are working to make the world a better place. It reminds me of the amazing outpouring of support and random flowers to same-sex couples who were getting married in San Francisco in February that was made possible through conversations on the Web.
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Wikis are very neat. They are Web sites that are easily editable by anyone. It's kind of like a public binder where anyone can add pages and anyone can edit the pages. A wiki provides a fairly intuitive way to start creating pages and links between the pages. It's the ultimate user-supported community. The first Wiki was created by Ward Cunningham at the Portland Pattern Repository. There are many wikis and many implementations of wikis around the Web. One simple and fast one that I really like is Brian Ingerson's Kwiki, which is actually a Perl module. I've got Kwiki running at home to play with. I just haven't figured out what to do with it out in the wild yet.
An amazing project that has figured out what to do with a wiki is Wikipedia which is an incredible resource that is filled with user-contributed information about just about everything. It's a massive (hundreds of thousands of entries) encyclopedia that can let you quickly find out about things that have happened and even current events. A wiki is a leap of faith and a vote of confidence in the goodness of humanity. In a world and a time when there are many large corporations trying to restrict freedom through copyright it's amazing and encouraging to see something like Wikipedia work so well. Online pioneer and documentor Howard Rheingold recently spoke about the Wikipedia in a speech to graduates of Stanford's Communication Department that David Weinberger pointed at today. One thing that caught my mind in Rheingold's speech was that the mean time to fix some vandalism on Wikipedia is 4 minutes! The argument made against setting up a wiki almost reflexively is that you can't let anyone edit a site as it will be vandalized. With a community people will take care of it. You just need to have faith.
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I've been a member of ZeD for while and have been watching and lurking without uploading anything. In the past the only thing that I've uploaded has been a tiny thumbnail image for my profile page which is called bitdepth. ZeD is a great project initiated by the CBC who have some talented, creative people working on digital media stuff. ZeD is a tv show on the CBC and a web site that shows and collects content as well as discussions. It's a community of creators and viewers and they give you a space to upload and share your work. They also broadcast uploaded work on tv and tv work on the Web. The name of the community is phonetically how the last letter of the English alphabet should be pronounced, which is a point of pride for some Canadians.
Today I uploaded video that I made last summer. It's called Truro Loop and it is only 3 1/2 seconds long, but it loops so it can be just about however long you want it to be. I'll be uploading more stuff soon.
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