Hummingbird Mentality

For subscribers of this blog (and it does get one or two hits), who’ve been wondering why I haven’t been updating with greater frequently, I’d like offer an explanation.

There’s a profound fragmentation going on right now in online identity. The change from isolated web sites (with technical, and in the early days, financial barriers to entry) to readily updatable, easily subscribable, often free blogs, acted to more tightly integrate the public web. An unfortunate side-effect of newer forms of blogging, more sophisticated social networks, and the surfeit of emerging web services, has been to splinter identity across multiple platforms. Ultimately this problem may be solved by more open and intercommunicative social networks using something like Open ID, by an ur-MySpace aggregating all the disparate services, or by next generation life stream scrapping utilities. Until then here’s where where I am..

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As Twitter leaves the realms of ‘joiner geek’ social network, and (partly due to it’s integration with platforms like Facebook), becomes a more popular and diverse service, its utility is being more rigorously critiqued. What is Twitter for? Its a cogent question. In a world of blogs, microblogs, and social networks, what’s the use of twitter? Is it merely a loose knit social network, or a (nano) blogging platform? Is it just the latest fad? Lets look at some real world uses of Twitter, how its utility differs from more traditional blogging platforms, and some scenarios in which it could be more effectively used.

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Social Network ‘Facebook’, has made an enormous splash this week with the release of the ‘Facebook Platform‘, an opening up of the mature Facebook API to internal widgets with access to Facebook’s ‘core functions’. Whilst this move has been criticised by some influential members of the syndication community, it places Facebook at the forefront of mashup’s and the read-write web. In one fell swoop, Facebook has become a socially enabled aggregation platform.

‘Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a “social graph,” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service’.
- Dan Farber on ZDNet

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I spent about eight hours yesterday working out how to do this. A working method was surprisingly hard to come by, so hopefully this will be of use to someone. Luckily it’s really easy once you know how. This technique should work not just for YouTube, but any other flash video site, like Google Video, DailyMotion etc.

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An article by Mike Elgan in Computer World Magazine, laying the boot into e-books, has sparked a surprisingly intelligent discussion on Digg. According to Elgan, e-books are bound to fail because..

1. They aren’t cheaper - both the hardware and content are more expensive
2. Content is available on other platforms (e.g.: PC)
3. People love paper books

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Just back from Barcamp Ireland 3. What a day, so packed I couldn’t possibly get to half the talks (which ran concurrently), but I managed three lectures and the panel discussion. The event was held in the beautiful Digital Hub, off Thomas St in Dublin. The building is fantastic, with bare brick walls and natural lighting throughout, and would make a fantastic billionaires studio apartment.

I’ve posted some wikified notes. I grabbed several mini interviews, on TFM’s sweet but pricey Roland wav recorder (check out the uber cheesy website), not enough material for a full blown podcast, but I’ve thrown them up, below. Also attempted to moblog throughout the day, with mixed results.

Mini Interviews

Sean O Sullivan of Rococo.
Robin Blandford creator of Comment Casting.
Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications.

Update: Fixed the wiki link!

Apologies for the performance of this site over the past week, my host Dreamhost seem to be going through one of their periodic screw ups (always of greater length and severity than admitted to on their status page). This has meant that all of the sites I host, including Trinity FM and Technolotics, have been reacting slowly or not at all. Hopefully the situation will resolve itself over the next few days.

In other news, my wonderfully creative friend Andrew and I were having so much fun producing astoundingly erudite and informed reviews for TFM, that we decided to break out a site dedicated to our own elitist brand of music criticism. Check out the new site, Gil-Martin Writes.

The Venice project, a mysterious beta application from Kazaa and Skype creators Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has being variously hailed as the future of television, and the application which may finally bring to its knees the aging last mile bandwidth of the internet itself.

Retitled in mid January to ‘Joost’, TVP is an IPTV application. That is, a program designed to carry high resolution video direct to consumers via the internet, rather than through satellite, cable or terrestrial broadcasts.

On the technical end, Joost uses both the UDP (to stream video direct to viewers) and TCP/IP (to share shows between users) protocols to create a hybrid Peer-to-Peer and Streaming, MPEG 4 H.264, (currently) free, on-demand TV network.

While Joost does live up to its promise to deliver full screen, uninterrupted streaming video at a watchable quality, a variety of potentially insurmountable challenges stand between the company and its goal of subverting broadcast television.

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I try to stay in touch with the quirky world of American indie music via the excellent Brooklyn Vegan blog, normally it’s dishes of Alt Country, New American Weird, Post Punk and other musical gumbo are served just the way I like them. However, a recent post has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Brooklyn Vegan links to an article on Axehole (another music blog) entitled “Why Bloggers Don’t Run Record Companies“. The article is itself a response to the excitement surrounding the announcement that eMusic (a DRM free digital music store) have reached 100 million songs sold; and suggests that this figure is irrelevant next to the awe and majesty of music sales through the iTunes music store.

I feel it’s important to tackle many of the points made in this article, because they represent the same misconceptions that are held around online music by the mainstream media. Before I begin, I’d like to point out that I have no affiliation with eMusic.

Axehole’s main points (and my rebuttals) are as follows..

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Google have just begun rolling out a terrific feature, which allows users to grab email from other accounts (work, yahoo etc) via POP3. This could be a godsend for users glued to horrible proprietary corporate email accounts with ineffective spam filters, or anyone tired of multiple simultaneous email logins, who for whatever reason (multiple desktops, mobile access etc) need to use web email rather than a stand alone client. Combining this feature with Gmail’s existing ‘Send mail as’, allows your Gmail to now be used as your central email.

To access the feature, log into your Gmail, click ‘Settings’, and open the ‘Accounts’ tab. This feature is not yet available on my account, so don’t be too surprised if you don’t currently have it enabled.

Via: Techcrunch.

Addendum: Normally I wouldn’t repost a story from such a widely read source, but I actually received news of this in an email and had the post written before I did a citation search, so what the hey!

TCD email users may still forward their email, ridding themselves of the horrible kludge of Trinity email altogether.