Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Project description: “RAW is a set of tools and processes for capturing, in an unconventional way, everyday subjective experience of a place, a culture, a people.” Sounds, almost, like videoblogging to me :)

VideoBlogging: “Things are happening in the videoblogging community in 2004! We have an active mailing list, during Video Blogging Week a bunch of us posted 1 videoblog entry a day, we’re discussing creating a Desk Top Tool, and soon we hope our first 70 year old videoblogger online!”

This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day 2004

PHP class library for generating quicktime reference movies on the fly. supports nearly all reference movie features.

Steve Minutillo :: messy-78 » PHP, XML, and Character Encodings: a tale of sadness, rage, and (data-)loss: a must read if you’re wrestling with PHP, XML and character encodings!

Yahoo! Groups : videoblogging Messages : Message 180 of 183: “My Mom is 78 and I asked her what she thought about Videoblogging week. She loved it. She liked it better than text blogs because it gave her a great idea of what I was doing.”

I’m looking for pointers to server side video optimizing products, as in, you upload a not-so-compressed video, and the script can compress it further for you for showing on the web.

VideoBlogging : Deep Linking To Video Etiquette

Freevo is like an open-source Tivo. There is a LOT going on in the video/tv/open source world. Videoblogging is just one little part of the whole ecology. Maybe I’ll write an overview article one of these days. I’m quitting my job so I’m looking for interesting projects.

CreativeCommons SMIL Module

getID3() - The PHP media file parser: extracts metadata from Quicktime files, MP3’s and such.

I mae a videoblog compilation, showing all the videos we made this week. It’s an experiment with SMIL, let me know how it works. It pulls in movies from all the relevant serves (talk about deep linking!), so some may be slow. It’s a SMIL file saved as a .mov file (with the word SMILtext before the first smil tag so Quicktime knows what it’s looking at). It took 2 hours to put together, and still has some (many) rough edges…
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Ok so one more for the road. I visited Jay at MNN, the Manhattan community TV station. This one’s edited a bit too random, really…

My final entry for videoblogging week consists of me watching Roger and Me. It was an interesting experience, I’ll report more on it later.
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Lucas from Webjay told us that users are using it to do videoblogging as well. Here’s an example. Today, I filmed myself checking out that example. I only took 1 simple video, otpimized and uploaded it. No editing, not even selecting. Overall under 10 minutes. Size is less than 300K, my kind of videosize. Videoblogging week rocks.
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Today, a short movie called sunset. Less than 200K. Jay’s entry for today is poetic, ųmund Garfors is a new guy with his first videoblogging entry, and Steve Garfield posts the hilarious the Office Monster Dance Party. Who have I missed? My entry inside.
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The blogging will continue until morale improves…: “Expression Engine stores posts by title, so entries with duplicate titles pose a problem.” What a fucking stupid beginners mistake? How can they make the title the unique ID/URL? Damn. I was going to try out expression engine but now I’m not so sure…

BW Online | June 28, 2004 | The Digital Village: “Among the grand gothic columns of Bangalore’s colonial-era urban administration office, a couple dozen village dwellers neatly dressed in cotton shirts, sarongs, and turbans wait their turn at what looks like an automatic teller machine. But this machine isn’t dispensing cash. Instead, farmers from nearby villages can use the terminal to see computerized copies of the deeds to the tiny patches of wheat, rice, and vegetables they till for a living. Once they’ve checked their information, they can get a printed copy of their records at a neighboring window for just 30 cents.”

Day 4 already! I followed yesterdays approach again, but with a little bit of editing. I’m giving in to the dark force! Movie inside.
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(Dutch) hullabaloo.be is een toffe (ja niemand zegt nog “of”, kweet het. Ik ben al 5 jaar niet meer in Belgie geweest.) blog. Zinnen splitsen kan ik nog als de beste. Na enkele jaren rond de wereld te hoppen kan ik Vlaams echt wel apprecieren. Het grootste voordeel is dat niemand het verstaat buiten Vlaanderen (en zelfs dan). Bijvoorbeeld: als ik zeg dat ik het wel erg beu ben van op mijn buro een sandwich te eten terwijl ik werk (die Amerikanen hebben echt geen kultuur!) dan gaat men werkgever dat niet lezen. Niet dat het iets uitmaakt want ik heb men job opgezecht anyway. Vlaanderen boven zegt de Raymond. (Hoe ist daarmee feitelijk?) (En: gaat iemand dit lezen?)

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | What impact will new BBC guidelines make?: “The BBC is making changes to the way its journalists gather and report news, including establishing a journalism training college.
The new guidelines place emphasis on accurate note-taking and suggest that serious allegations should not be broken in live broadcasts.
The guidelines were revised former BBC News chief Ron Neil in response to the Hutton report into the death of Doctor David Kelly.” Includes comments.

Language Log: The most untranslatable word: “The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.”

I was going to do this as a SMIL presentation that plays the different movies in sequence, mixed with some text, but no time. It’s going to take a day or so for me to figure this SMIL stuff out… I’ll have to do it when I find some time. So here’s today entry for videoblogging week. Filmed during my commute home in small bits. I put together a bunch of the scenes I filmed (no editing). It’s my longest film so far, it’s 2.25 Megs, too large to upload through the browser upload of my MT installation so I had to FTP it.

Because it’s so large, it’s inside this entry. Yes I know I should use a “coverpage”, but no time to figure that one out today…
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Boxes and Arrows is looking for a visual redesign. Designers, show those snarky information architects how it’s done!

Videoblogging week Day 2: another movie from sunday in central park. There is a red hawk nesting on one of the buildings, quite a rare sight.
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Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools: what a great idea: “A decade ago some community librarians in California initiated a great idea: why not lend tools as well as books? The idea slowly spread to a couple of dozen other US towns, but the most active and well-stocked tool libraries are still in the Bay Area — one in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. The typical tool lending library offers basic hand tools, and a selection of garden, landscaping and construction tools. The hot items with waiting lists at the San Francisco Tool Lending Library (now in the middle of a move to a new location on Howard Street) are heavy duty power tools.”

On the videoblogging mailing list, we decided to do a video blogging week. This page collects all videoblog posts from the participants.

You can join us in videoblogging week, just let us know and start posting!

Jay’s post for today is edited in iMovie and is a movie about MNN, a Manhattan public TV station where he works. Ordinary people making TV, just like videoblogging.

Steve Garfield’s first entry for the week is about a family tree.

I did a bunch of little movies this afternoon in central park, and decided to use the best ones, uncut and unedited. They’re inside this post.
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I have decided to quit my job, and start my own company. I’ve learnt a lot working on information architectures for enterprise portals here in the US, but the time has come to move on.

I have many plans, I’ll talk about those later. But first, this summer, I am going to spend a few months traveling. I love to travel, but being in the rat race for the past 5 years has meant I haven’t seen as much of the world as I wanted to. So that’s gonna change. India’s first on the list. I only have two months this summer, but it’s better than nothing.

Meanwhile, if you want to discuss a project you think I might be interested in, or are looking for an information architecture consultant, get in touch.

I plan to mix consulting with creating my own projects. Exciting times!

Nice: Dynamically underlining accesskeys.

I was having problems creating virtual hosts on my local Apache server (on Windows XP). Turns out I was editing the wrong hosts file. The correct one was at C:/Windows/System 32/drivers/etc. Instead, I was editing another one. Strangely, a windows search didn’t find the real hosts file. Also, I use Spybot - Search & Destroy, and it had inserted a set of anti-ad domains in the hosts file (it stops ads from showing). But at the same time it seems that it had write-protected the hosts file, so I had to delete it and resave it. Hopefully this helps some other poor soul having the same problem.

Mmmmm…. I’m still having the same problem with Google search on my site. Searches don’t return any results. If I use the Google toolbar to search my site it works though.

Ah, I found the problem. I entered a directory within my domain as my site. Turns out that doesn’t work. When I changed it to just te plain domain name (on the Google page that generates the HTML code to put on my site), searches started workin. Seems like a bug to me.

I was trying out Google’s new sitesearch+ads yesterday and it didn’t really work. Today they sent an email saying there was something wrong with their code, and it’s been fixed. Good, so it wasn’t me :)

unmediated: Making wikivideo in a videowiki

Google AdSense now lets you provide search to your site and make money on the ads shown in the search results. Nice. I tried to implement it on a site of mine but all searches returned no results. I’ll try again in a few days.

Jay needs help. Can you guess with what?

Other ingredients include noodles, some leftover beef and some old spinach leaves.
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I have some free time coming up, and I hope to do some research about a few things:

- the Everything Else category (example at Half.com)

- the co-construction of users and technology. I’m ordered 5 books, mostly out of the anthropology field, about how users and technology are constructed. Fascinating stuff, with definite repurcussions for how we construct taxonomies. Don’t be surprised if I write about the co-construction of users and taxonomies soon ;)

- international information architecture

- the properties of classification systems. I’d like to expand our understanding of classification systems a bit with information from not just the library sciences and IT sciences, but to include cognitive science and the social sciences. What are the cognitive relevant aspects of certain types of classification systems? What can we learn from the research on cognitive basic-levelness of categories? How exactly do power relations in a social system influence the creation of classification systems? How about identity? How do users co-construct classification systems?

Lotta stuff, I probably will only get to some of that this year… Sometimes I wish I was a student still, but most of the time I don’t. Couldn’t afford it anyways.

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War: :I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.”

New Scientist | New Technology: “A pair of sunglasses that can detect when someone is making eye contact with the wearer has been developed by Canadian researchers.

Besides being useful in singles bars, its inventors say the system could play a key role in video blogging, a hi-tech form of diary keeping.”

interesting videoblog!