Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Mica’s latest video is a great lesson in communication technology. Check it out!

I met up in downtown Manhattan (Soho) with Jay and Drazen Pantic, a serb who helped create B-92, the radio station that was in sarejavo during the war and was the only independent voice out there, and former Yugoslavia’s first internet provider.

In the video (inside) he’s explaining how they had to log in remotely in their internet service and erase all user data to protect people. We talked about videoblogging and his new project dv.open4all.info which is like a bittorrent host where people can upload video (torrent files). Share the media - be the media.

One of his quotes I really liked: “Politics happens on the couch.”. Which is why we need Freevo - so people can watch real-people TV from the internet on the couch, not huddled behind a monitor. He also told me about FFMPEG, an open source product that can be used to optimize video serverside.

The video is inside.
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Tornadowatch! Movie inside.
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Mica is videoblogging *every* day!

ųmund Garfors is working on server side video optimizing.

Eric Rice is doing some interesting things with videoblogging.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Islamophone: “When it comes to information technology, the United States is something of an outlier. For a variety of reasons, Americans are far more likely than residents of much of the rest of the world to rely on computers as their primary information devices. In most other places, the mobile phone is the main platform for info services. While this has both advantages (mobility) and disadvantages (editing documents), the ubiquity of the mobile telephone as information appliance has led to some novel regional variants.”

Google Acquires Picasa and Yahoo acquired Oddpost recently. The next wave is starting: advanced browser-based functionality in various apps with feelers into the desktop space.

PHP 5 is finally out. I am starting a new service these days, and I’m still using PHP 4. I’ll probably switch to PHP5 in 2005, once some of the classes & libraries I like to use have been updated. (The services I start only need to run on my machines so I can control the environment.)