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Posted by dan at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Phishing is out of control. Each month it gets worse and worse it seems like. Right when my local Bank One began to switch over to its new name of Chase, phisher's we're there in my email box. "set up that new account... attention needed!! your login will be lost!! hurry now!!" Phisher's are good at playing on peoples emotions. Right away i think of generation after generation of medical marketing firms that have mastered that art. Now I get to battle psychological warfare every time i open up my inbox.

We've started to see phishing in the global sense impact in our customers as well lately. Big business isn't completely clued into the fact just yet, at least from the user experience stand point. Basically if its not on the menu you don't probe it, however more often then not, we get to wander into that communication space and when we do I'm always interested in the email question.

Simply put, if I didn't ask for it, I better not see it. That's the customer mentality - just about everything is un-trustworthy.

Thats a sad state of net communication between brand identities and the customers that want too inspire and acquire.

In my head i picture a CEO saying "i got customers.. i just can't talk to them... they don't trust me." Thats the real skinny though.

Right off the bat, a strategy based on any form of email reliance is a bad idea in this phishing age. That sounds drastic but it'd do you more good to support email, yet really push a human or other communication offer instead. Secured RSS feeding maybe? I'm not sure. But the data is there and email is not to be trusted.

Most companies use email not to communicate as much as cross-sell and educate. In fact I'd love to do a study on just what percentage of communication a company wants to make with a user is really valid, worthy communication vs the sell. Everyone wants to "tell ya more" about the offers they have, however that kind of communication is just rampant for abuse in a phishing world. Companies need to rewind and focus on the customer, and what kind of world the customer is in. If my customer is under attack every day odds are I'd be better off to help get that customer some cover vs using the same delivery system the enemy is using.

Customers are forced to fend for themselves and have begun all kinds of counter-gurrellia tactics to fight back, most of which are paranoid, overcomplicated measures, but these are customers, everyday people - how do i protect myself in the physical world? I wear body armor, maybe get a clone of me, drive a hummer, drive a hummer than can go thru water, drive a hummer than can go thru water and is invisible, never leave the house, hire an army.. i mean thats crazy sure, but users are doing the exact same thing in terms of their usage of internet. They are making new ways to protect themselves in ways creators of the said systems probably never factored in.

Some customers start creating new identities online, new email accounts and start using them as trusted repositories. They are buckets, new, fresh, un-spammed to all hell areas where "for the moment" trust is ok. And everything is temporary online yet we lose sight of that fleeting notion cause we're so connected.

Phishing is just gonna get worse sadly. Heck anything I suspect I basically go to source, View, Source. Thats the only true thing i can use to see what's happening. And then it dawns on me, I'm spending 20 minutes to figure out if this email is real or not, am I that paranoid? Right away I think I should be doing something else, but the fact remains, i can't trust that email. The first thing i wanna do is call a human. We all know that drill these days.

The more intertwined the system gets the more I want to be free of the wires, I want to be able to switch off, connect on my terms whatever they may be, and business should support my freedom in that regard. Good companies will, and do just that.

Technorati Tags: experience, phishing, spam

Posted by dan at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I keep designing things lately. In the past four days I've...

designed a educational classroom technology that basically removes the need for phyiscal furniture and allows the teacher to create a kind of sandcastle like structure to resemble seating in various ways, it was sparked by a gal that we interviewed recently and she was talking about this study she did on furniture for classrooms, and from there, it was pretty basic, ya know, build a better desk kinda thing. I started thinking, why desk, why any furniture, the floor is where its at. The floor is sectioned off in panels and each panel has some kind of bead+material+taphograpical interface thing, so you can come in and basically design the room any way you want, the tech side of communication is wireless so no fuss with wires, i dunno, but what i do know is that i poured a ton of detail into for what seemed like hours and was really about 45 mins...

then I had a massive brainstorm idea, actually a mock idea around this whole notion of second life as the next OS of the computer word, which i think is laughable really, but then i also explored the world of warcraft and the credit card thing thats been going around, i whipped up about six improv sketches poking holes at the concept, even story-boarded about 50% of it. too funny...

and then, I wrote another episode piece all covering nation digg, that has been surfacing lately, everyone or everything seems to push toward this idea of being digg worthy, digg enabled and i just took that to the next, next, level.. and its hilarious really, hilarious and possible...

and then, today was going over a request for proposal thing on where a certain company should be positioned in the social network space, and that got me into thinking about a retail/lounge bar concept that is enabled for you to do what you wanna do and still document the moment, last night we had a happy hour and it was fun, but it was poorly and not at all documented, seems odd for me to say i wished i documented that moment eh? but i usually do document moments i think will be memorable, but that causes me to preplan, sure'd be nice if i didnt have to do that, so what about document+enabled structures or lounges, so here i go again, sketching out the concept, how itd work, how itd enable me, and who i am, along with retaining my privacy, end goals and above all, take the work out of it, and make it a fun and interactive thing, featuring functional furniture that allows me to view the documentation in progress, add my own material thru wireless media exchange and more.. before i know it i've got pages of content...

and then... I read a piece from razorfish, who i thought was dead but apparently still alive, and its a pdf of digital media now and to come sorta thing, basic observations and more, some yeahness, some not, and one of the things they have in there is that loyalty is rare in this age, and so that stuck in my head.. and i started thinking.. rare.. is it really rare or is it just something else now? cause i dont think its rare, in fact, it sounds like a fun study, where is loyalty today? in a word converging at the speed of light, in this attention all now how brown cow kinda existance, thats where loyal brands really shine, they bring balance to the force, a force torn apart in the mayhem of the moment..., so there i go start writing about loyalty...

and then... it just keeps going.. content stream after content stream... its on.. i cant turn it off.. sad, cause its distracting me from my main objective.. must write a plan and discussion guide for this project im on!!

Technorati Tags: lbm, secondlife, thought, worldofwarcraft

Posted by dan at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By now most of you have heard, seen, read, gotten the vibe that Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake have landed on the cover of Newsweek with a byline of "We put "we" back in web.". I find it funny that while the magazine reads The new wisdom of the web... Caterina rambled off last week a list ofreasons NOT to start a company in this new line of business. Which of course was then countered by 37 Signals.

Ok so does Caternia have a point? Yes and No. Part of me think she's just gotten too close to really making it, in fact, she's made it, maybe the buzz or danger of not making it is gone. That buzz or whatever ya want to call it is often what drives a biz to really succeed. So now she's part of Yahoo. Done. I also think on the west coast, yer being ambushed by every ajax, unconference, mashup, api, golden ticket idea/gathering/place on the planet right now. Yer right Caterina, its not Vancouver. You can still be obscure if you really want too though.

Caterina's viewpoint is her own and its based off alot of experience, so I gotta respect that. But I also get the vibe that its a bit like fashionable trends - the cat is outa the bag on social networks, tagging, api's and mashups, and now they're not cool or something. Its funny just when corporate culture discovers it.. and of course wants to cash in, suddenly its not a good idea. See thats what kills web ideas. When big biz wants to cash in. The minute an influx of cash arrives on the scene to create the next myspace or flickr, the audience sniffs this obvious ploy out and boom the disappear, the market crashes, 2.0 dies, and from the ashes 3.0 rises up.

That could very well be the future right there. The players are making the scene now. Its almost like a quest to buy or attain that which should survive. Yahoo has deemed that flickr, delicious.. should survive... NewsCorp says myspace should survive... heh, and google? Google is its own long haul of a game really. They don't want microsoft, they want to reinvent how people interact, communicate, depend on the internet, and they got a pretty good darn lead on that.

Now 37 signals disagrees with Caterina. And of course they would, they've gone from being a design firm, to designing web applications, to making money telling people how to design, make and sell web applications. They're whole biz is optimism, its the sell, you can't diss the sell, so i'd expect them to totally disagree with Caterina, otherwise their book I bought just a few weeks ago would be null and void.

Personally I think its a good time to start a company anytime you have sufficient passion to go the distance. While everyone is scrambling to define what web 2.0 is, even its coin master oreiliey and all, I think the key aspect of web2.0 is the synergy of ideas unbounded in creativity, sheer ability, business sense and more. Simply put, people are exploring the possibility of anything and everything in one massive persistently engaging every expanding network. 2.0 is about what's happening right now on the scene that creates. Sheer creativity is at the core not business sense, there is no real business sense. That is factored in after the core need is built. This is great for people who want to think out-loud and explore the possibilities, and its great for the entrepreneurs that will comb thru the thousands of ideas to find what they think could be, and it'll crash on the beaches of common day corporations that expect them be more that what they are.

So i see the caution in Caterina's words, the chance in 37signals words, but in the end it's my own gut feeling that will lead me, and hope to god that anyone out there with a idea right now is not reading either one of them. (though 37signals does kinda give ya the golden key to do it, and believe.. but dont expect mondo riches)

...

In other news, another favorite subject of mine is location based anything, and here we have it - a firefox plugin that allows you to find the closest location of whatever you are looking for. Cool idea. Probably most useful when traveling.

Posted by dan at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok so I across this tidbit via digdotus, one of my favorite sites of the day that I visit seemingly every 3-4 hours it seems like. Anyways its a story of a 12 year girl taking the ultra mobile pc for a test drive. Now to me the UMPC is a small beefy tablet, running windows tablet os, and it has a few bonus features. Essentially its a tablet pc really, and so what about that i guess is the first thing that comes to mind to me.

Sure its more portable but after going thru and experiencing the 1st & 2nd gen tablet experiences not much has really changed here. 2nd gen tablets are taking on more characteristics of their laptop brotheren in the sense that I see less sheer slates in play these days and far more 2nd gen convertibles (the screen flips around). In fact all the tablet pcs I know of, rarely ever use them as tablets. I'll get more into that later.

Back to Kim's experience article. See her experience here.

Ponder.

Ok my beef. Again this is a tablet pc on a small screen. My biggest beef here, or problem I have with this box is that basically the hardware aspects have changed but the OS and UI haven't. Alias Sketchbook and Art Rage are about the only apps out there in tablet land that really take a radically different approach to the UI.

Watching the youtube piece just makes me think about the various hand gestures that we are forcing upon ourselves to meet the UI's interaction requirement. Just watch the hand move and from position to position and think to yourself, is that natural?

The UI is made for a mouse, not for a hand. Thats my beef. So sure here's yet another product designed for mouse + keyboard interaction slammed into a seemingly small friendly supposedly better more mobile design that has a touch screen yet the end user is still crippled by a OS + UI designed for a mouse and keyboard.

Its destined to fail, upset and frustrate the hell outa people. Maybe Kim's small hands and fingers can get to that File / Open / X document window better than my fat fingers can. Just watching the youtube video alone makes you just wonder did anyone at microsoft really consider the fact that all these gestures to write "hello all" were worth it?

This is the part that irks me about microsoft, they haven't revealed any major changes to the UI since the tablet has appeared 2-3 years ago. Sure they've made minor changes to stylus interaction, or keyboard input access, but the gist of the UI is still primarly based in a world of using a physical mouse and keyboard, and it reflects that. I would love to see the Art Rage people do their take on the whole entire OS look and feel and see what a real tablet / hand interaction UI might look like.

So to me, no real changes, same OS, same UI, smashed into a construct that cant really deliver properly.

Sure a brand new UI would be really really risky, I agree, I mean yer talking about non-mouse interaction. Mice interaction is sooo fine tuned and my finger interaction is a helluva lot more messy. But helllo if thats the reality of usage, well umm lets design for that. There's been little strides i see on microsofts part to truly innovate the concept.

So its neat, i give them that. Its another extension of the laptop, congrats. Thats about it. Until the UI can really support the interaction of a physical hand, fingers, gestures, provide the proper feedback and so on, only then can you really truly make the leap into something new and really grab that seamless interaction aka "it belongs" like elements.

Ok now looking at another youtube clip I do see they have some skinned elements on top of the OS. The PSP like movie center UI is better, but the touchpad, the interesting alignment of using the two far corners to show off their startrek like UI interaction areas... interesting, and i'd have to see them in play more before I'd really talk about them. I would wager that is about the most advanced idea i've seen them come up, but it only effect the UMPC, doesnt seem to play into the overall tablet design.

I think its safe to say that apple is making some strides in the tablet arena as well. They are considering it, and they are debating all the various aspects, and you can bet full well that they will be addressing these issues and either developing a finger gesture layer to go top of it the OS or better. Or if anything the may simply release their version of a tablet mac generation 1. But I hope they've learned a bit from the short comings of the tablet pc series.

I'm not a tablet pc bashed by stretch. I've used them extensively in the field on research probjects. We've first gen HP slates in play, and four toshiba's. We apply them in instances they fit. But they still have a long ways to go. I would even forsee using something like the UMPC in research testing and analysis, especially as a kind of field recorder device, that i could see, but I'd design my own apps to sit on top of it to work with hand better thats for sure.

Technorati Tags: ecto, microsoft, tablet pc, UMPC

Posted by dan at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Experimenting with the ecto + kml + google earth goodness. Let's see if this worked.

meta-longitude=-82.99750124184956
meta-latitude=39.97452422857913
meta-altitude=0
meta-range=266.5082175024137
meta-tilt=49.97150273713007
meta-heading=-31.94593050680841
meta-coordinates=-82.99749631632565,39.97479392661569,0

Technorati Tags: ecto, google earth

Posted by dan at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok trying this again from work.. testing ala testing.

Technorati Tags: ecto, stupid

Posted by dan at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wooooosh, seems my youtube video goodness has been gettin a wee bit of traffic off the Windows XP on an Intel Mac story lately. Someone did it, they actually got Windows XP to boot on the intel Imac. Their video was posted to youtube and well my imac switch video action was up there as well, so i caught a wee bit of traffic off that interest. Not bad for just screwin around really. I'll be putting together another bit feature this weekend about the mac experience thus far.

Goin the way back machine I picked up this story on boingboing.net talking about 70's computer promo photographs. I actually remember my father giving me tons of punch cards from OSU. We had them all over the house. My father would use them as ToDo lists on saturday mornings. The punch cards were always in Moms kitchen drawer for quick and easy access to jot down notes. We had shoe boxes of these things. Funny.. memories...

I tried last weekend to find a bookstore in town that had Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things book. I keep seeing that referenced in various web 2.0 blog postings. I feel compelled to read it.

I'm reading bloglines right now.. reading...? glancing? grazing.... whatever you wanna call it, yes I have alot to catch up on.

I just wrapped up a bit of research work yesterday.. soo happy to do be done with it. I hate "extensive yet small topline" reports. A true topline is six bullet points on a page. My topline "report"... was 31 pages long. But thats what you get when you wanna ask a thousand questions. No matter what you WANT to do, you still have to DO what yer client wants you to do, despite yer eagerness for them not to do what you think they'll do, odds are in the end, you have to adapt to their needs. So I did that, and then i got a groovy idea on how to get even more goodness out of the topline and then, as bearer of the neat idea, thoust be the doer of such activity.

In the end it was good. I presented it well I think although a glass of water would of been darn handy. I'm rather animated when it comes to presenting. I used to get beat red too, thats kinda gone, though i still attempt to read people and talk at the same time, always checking to see if what im saying is actually impacting people. But I deliver my presentations in a real upbeat honest kind of way and I think that translates well.

The best thing about research is that you are projecting the customers voice, you didnt make this shit up. People didnt like it, they told you, you analyzed it, and now yer passin the vibe along to the client. Sure they could get mad at you.. but hey, umm these are people that either bought yer dealio or didnt. I always feel bullet proof when it comes to that. People matter, simple as that. They are always in the researchers pocket.

Barcamp Delhi pics and video are up and out there... yet another barcamp, unconference, type event i didnt attend.... er phyisically....

Blogbits...

skinny themes, good stuff!

will it be a doorstop?

SeeMeTV tops 4 million downloads... and may be I need a new phone?

I probably need to give secondlife another chance.. at well.. a second.. ha!

awww ya breakin it down.. the real biz of the mashup

Posted by dan at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Geeze the web is a zoo lately. Ya look away a few days and ya come back to the he said she said they said they do of the web.

What's up the all these R's

First up, the tech crunch zooomr story. First of all, do we really need yet another web2.0 beta app that ends in r. I mean really people, i thought web2.0 was a tad bit more original than that. But apparently not. What we got flagr, zoomr, otherr, themr, wer, tacor, etc.. Aside from that, ok so the kid made a nice clone, he had good material to start with. But should flickr be sweatin? Come on tech crunch, what do you got some stock in this project or anything. The whole point of web2.0 is to open, share and learn from each other. I dont see flickr in fear of this app any more than this app needs to be a clone of flickr to make it out there. And the 16 languages thing, come on, thats not a massive feature if you think about, probably some built in ajax magic'io library setup. Weak reporting.

Microsofts Oragami

I wasn't really impressed with ultra-tablet-pc unit microsoft announced last week.

It's basically a tablet pc with a 2hr battery life, touch screen, camera, mic, pen, optional keyboard, wifi, and optional gps (i think). So what. Is it another possible field research device? Maybe, could be good for medical folks too. They love that wifi portability of things. It's a bit like a newtons beefy brother from the future though, and not that much different.

Adventures in YouTube

Been on YouTube lately? They have a new and nifty notice when you upload stuff now. It's a big disclaimer that you of course agree to which is basically what yer uploading is all you, all original, nothing from any one else kind of agreement. I mean come on. Wired's told us, Apple's enabled us, Napster and Bit Torrent set us free, Delicious let us share and tag it, and now, yer saying WOOAH to the whole remix theme? Ummm isnt that a bit late YouTube? I mean, its what put yer site on the planet, you wouldn't be where yer at right now if it wasnt for people uploading whatever they wanted, whatever they deemed clippable, shareable, remixable. Yet now.. of course, after yer established, buzz-a-generated, deals imminent.. the warning appears. Lame YouTube.. lame.

Posted by dan at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Posted by dan at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its a bit windy out.. i just about wrote that as "wendy...". I've had a rough week. Yesterday I endured a long 12 hour day talking to consumers about insurance. Its hard to get excited about insurance really. Being in the midwest we seem to have a lot of insurance companies and they spend oooodles attempting to get inside the minds of their consumers.

ya, so not the the sexist thing to research really, but it is primal in many ways. Ya got money on one side the room, protection on the other, honesty in the middle and then the deal and lastly.. the red tape. So ya, its an endurance test at times.

Tablet PC Education...

Aside from the mayhem of research I still make time to chase down bit projects. Today I attended a presentation at Bishop Harley High School here in columbus. In the past 5 years BHS has been on the edge of technology implementing its tablet pc education program to junior and senior high school students. They were the first school in the country to arm 300 students with tablet pcs, construct a system to teach all classes with them and more. Ken Collura the tech head behind the project is amazing guy.

I arrived on the scene about 2 years ago when I met Ken at a local tech conference. I was immediate intrigued with his program. To me its like the grand experiment unfolding. In the past I've done some early adopter studies, and BHS is a prime piece of material for that kind of work. 300 students are given, yes thats given, a tablet pc. They use them in tablet pc enabled classes, take them home, lug them around instead of books. Is it the future? Well from what I've seen its damn near close. Collaborative software has come a long way, and it still has plenty of room to grow.

What really amazes me about the BHS project is the absence of major player interest on the part of Apple and Microsoft. I'm seeing mass adoption to a handful of applications that these kids will no doubt take with them into college and beyond and none of the major players are in the scene, aside from an OS stand point for Microsoft. I mean they're in the biz of tablet software with onenote, and all their efforts yet in the classroom its not being used. I suppose k12 isn't their audience but regardless of that, adoption to other apps that blow onenote outa the way is on. And thats just one application, what about the innovations, the bootstrapping happening in the background with server apps, administrative back-end programs and more. Its really odd to see this huge experiment go down and nada interest from the big MS.

Apple on the other hand could learn alot about what BHS has done in the 4 years to kick this kind project off the ground.

Today I watched student interaction with the tablets in 4 classes. The first two classes we're italian and french. Just a few students had tablets and were taking notes. After the Sopranos lesson we checked out a social studies class where the students we're engaged in a global game. Several high schools around the country and even a few overseas we're all part of one massive simulation- Arab Israeli Conflict. Students split up into teams, each team represents a country and they all have to get along. Everyone had their tablet pc out and was working a way, connecting online, interacting with students from afar etc. Pretty slick. We saw alot of smart board technology being implemented and used as well, especially handy in some classes.

After the class walkthroughs we had lunch with a select group of students. I quickly proceeded to put my researcher cap on and started asking questions drilling down into user habits on campus and at home. It was fun to poke around things like social networks, mobile phones, digital cameras, wifi access and more. A few of these kids we're up on ajax as well. I asked all the standard research questions but my style quickly broke into more progressive interests once i started seeing that glazed over participant look. Then we got into some fun conversations about their behaviors and patterns they themselves saw in their adoption of the tablet.

Kids are great subjects when you tap into them. The minute you start to get their space, they just let go and the faucet is on. Sure these the occasional ego trip but in general I feel once you get them to see you as someone that keep up with their world, the gloves are off and they really spill it. Throw some jokes in there too, that always help. One girl had 500+ buddies in her instant messagener, that led to a conversation about MySpace and from there we got where mobile phones, tablet pcs, the home pc and more all either worked together or didn't.

One thing I thought was interesting was that the students really didn't want the tablets to evolve into superior hardware pcs like their home pcs. Enabling tech like GPS, wifi, etc, thats all good, but please whatever you do, dont improve the core graphics abilities. It's like pimping out yer notebook.. hey i use that to learn man, my pc is for pimping. Heh. Good stuff. I hope to do more studies with the kids someday. Again just an incredible scene unfolding there, soooo much to learned.

And the winner is...

The results for Project Runway 2 are in... and its Chloe! Surprise win and probably not picked for her line as much as she carried herself thru the challenges. That and I think she got the win for her biz sense. Daniel V was my favorite, I think his designs were excellent, but I also think he had an amazing model to display them. Rebecca wasn't hot, she just had the look, the right look for Daniel V's clothes and the two made an unstoppable pair there for awhile. Santino, well I loved his in yer face energy, but the broke him, the pounced on his spirit and threw Tim in there to basically tell him to calm it down.. so he did, he still cranked out an amazing collection but it was tame Santino and not the same Santino we all got to know thru the episodes. I bet her returns next season. Either him, Nick, or Andre will return for season 3.

In all a great show, totally hooked me, love it. I love the design process, the challenges and the sheer innovation you get to witness as crazy challenges get tossed at designers. I even p2p'd the english version of the show. :P

Books

Reading Getting Real from 37 signals...considering Lifetime Growth, looks very cool... keep hearing about Shaping Things from Bruce Sterling, so i need to read that. Another excellent PDF...

Sexy Beast

I've been working on a new video blog idea...

Want to see!!

Scanner Darkly.. must see.. Google's open source innovation... and this thing... hmmm, this is cool too, hmm need to translate. I keep finding videos. Maybe a listen or two as well.

Blogwatch...

Some good bits on Solution Watch on 2.0 vibes on gettin back to business.

Technorati Tags: floozyspeak, tablet pc, projectrunway, scanner darkly, youtube

Posted by dan at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well I think ecto is it. This is a very polished blogging tool, and I've only really messed with it for about an hour now. It seems to have all the perks I like - does tags very well, categories are there, image placement is working, itunes and amazon inserts are a bonus, clean and tasteful UI. I dig it.

Tune of the week: >> Motion of Commotion from the album "You Should Be Like This More Often" by PTYLTD

State of the Flooz

So carrying on let's talk about the state of the flooz here. We're coming up on 30 days in on the intel imac dual core experience. So far its been a slick transition.. except no gaming, just hasn't come into play yet. (pun!), Anyways ya no games. In fact the gaming/pc/xp box is off. And ya know.. that box was dying.. lol. With it off, the room is much quieter.

So far I've just been truckin along on this planet mac. I like it. I've done downloaded a handful of apps and started playing around with new things:

• cmaps - to create concept maps
• ecto - looks like the new blogging tool for me
• handbrake - makes rippin dvds fun and easy
• flysketch - love the onion skinning feature
• voodoo pad - nice little note taker

...and now a word about STATS!

As some of you may know I recently began video blogging my intel imac experience via youtube. At first i did them just to test youtube.. and well, after a combined total of 3000+ views across several different video posts.. i guess you can say they're official, thats a video blog that will be ongoing.

The intel imac series will be mirrored on the floozyspeak podcast as well, best place to grab that is in itunes. So two good places to find that videoblogpodcast whatever the heck people are calling that now.

YouTube has been interesting. Some of the videos ive done only have a few dozen views while others, mainly the video blog entry kind and the anime video kind have really taken off in views. One of the Neon Genesis Evangelion music videos I put together almost 10 years ago is slowly climbing up the charts.. very slowly, but hey i'll take 800+ views!

In other news, semi related to stats, the newly created Seriously Curious podcast for my job here at lextant has 61 subscribers on itunes, hey.. now thats excellent considering only a handful of folks really knew about the podcast internally at work.

On the Production Wire...

...two new websites in the works, GatorDave revisited and a new vodpodcast show with my first iWeb website launch coming soon. Probably see some interesting works coming from my darling gal Mary as well, gonna try for some fun improv on camera action here soon.

Blogwatch

...the blogosphere scene is full of noise lately. CNet talkin trash about apple, Microsoft gettin viral hype over a tablet gizmo with gps and wifi, MaBell on the loose and gettin hungry, players getting on the scene to try and tax your emails and more...

however.. with the strange and bad.. come a bit of good..

getting real from 37 signals makes a splash with a tasty well received read, rubyonrails gets a big plug from apple, seth cranks out an excellent video, steve goes education, ajax galleries of usage hit the web, and much much more...

Technorati Tags: ecto, floozyspeak, imac, mac, youtube, puppy

Posted by dan at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok so here we are in ecto testing... testing... and.. let's see what can I do...

I can do this

and that

"The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" (John Battelle)

amazon placement.. neat...even with modifications

and this other thing

Angels (Santos "Come With" Mix) from the album "Angels - EP" by Ils

itunes track placement.. thats spiffy...

I can say it like this

or say it like that, and then restate what i said only this way and not that way...

interesting.. not bad ok how bout this.. i want

• cookies
• candles
• and shakes

groovy... thats pretty

1. wow
2. zamobo
3. franken

what about this

though?

Technorati Tags: ecto, mac, test, floozyspeak

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My personal DNA test.

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Yummy PDF goodness, Groups in Social Software, Girls in Education, Online Learning, Storytellers REsearch Guide, DigitalCenter, GTD, TheBigPayOff, CraftyPoliticans…

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Ok after three attempts to get the last post right in MarsEdit, I officially would like to get BlogJet ported to OSX please.

MarsEdit, is probably my best option on the mac currently yet it leaves me questioning everything. In the app this post looks right, that whole WYSIWYG thing working or is it.. maybe its not a WYSIWYG editor.. and i assumed it was... dang now that i think about it, i dont really know for sure. I think it could actually look like this, but then i need to tweak, add codes, do this, do that, repost, see, modify, repost, see, ok not that, repost see, ok there we go.

What I do here just doesn't translate over to what i get. Maybe its a moveable type thing, but I dislike the experience, makes me think I cant blog on a mac, wtf is that about.

Can someone recommend some alternate apps that blog?

Technorati Tags: apple, blogging, mac, blogjet, marsedit

Posted by dan at 06:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ok so the apple event has come and gone, and yes there was a bit of goodness in there but already the event has not lived up to the hype and buzz it generated on the net... so as usual we're drowning in the all the "is apple gonna make it" type entries over the past 1 day since the event.

The web works differently than our notion of time. A day on the web is like a week, and a week is like a month. Already people are dissecting the "what went wrong" with the apple announcement saying things like "oh the let down" or "apple's new gizmo is off the mark.." when in reality, hello people, its been one frickin day.

Thats how scary it is on the web really. Ya gotta keep it all in perspective but when you leap from blog to blog or briskly run thru the diggs you can too easily get consumed by the tide of the net no matter how purely fanatical, wrong, presumptuous, naggy, outright idiotic the net can sometimes be.

"Sometimes" is far too nice really, considering that lately the tide of the web has gone under massive investigation. Lots of players on the web are trying to tap into the tide, cash in on the tide, dissect the tide and so on. Perhaps tide isn't the best word for it, maybe its more about the undertow, ya thats it.. thats the thing my father always warned me about..."be careful of the undertow..." well the nets undertow is freakish these days.

So back to apple. Ok, so they didn't announce the UltraCoolAssGizmo#5 we all wanted to hear. They did in fact announce something new thought, a hi-fi ipod boom-box and a new intel mac mini.

We all saw the intel mac mini coming, the whole line will go intel, we see that, we should realize what that means. What we didn't see is the dvr aspects of the mac mini coming into play. There is some goodness happening there, very cool. I'm soooo very glad i didn't buy a $499 mac mini a month ago at micro center, even with its crazy deal of lcd monitor and printer included at that price. Thats always a big warning sign - the mass dumping of hardware to prepare for something new coming.

The mac mini does feature some nice new add-ons. The idea of a solo intel core seems odd, i guess if they wanted to make it cheap thats one way to do it. It also seems like selling a car with three wheels, sure it still rolls, but... umm ok lets get that 4th wheel ok. Right away, within hours of the announcement the new intel mini has been dissected, torn apart, examined, photographed, documented in various ways on the net. Of course rather than considering the good things, lets all jump on the band wagon of the bad - the integrated intel graphics card.

Bad apple! People are screaming, the undertow tells me its a big deal, and I'm wondering is it really? Anything integrated when it comes to graphic cards is like a big FU to geeks in general. The idea that your graphics card is trapped in the motherboard assumes it just sucks. And maybe it does for certain things, like games, which is the primary point the undertow seems to be getting at, but that point quickly gets lost in all the chatter and soon all you get is the residual vibe that apple has done something horrible to all of us.. man, dog, cat... history.

Chalk it up to the great plan I say. Sure its not ideal but we are talking about form factor that is the size of a modern day bible, not huge, just the basics. Sadly the graphics card issue overshadows some of the coolness added to the intel mini, like the gigabit ethernet...audio in/out.. ok so maybe not alot there, hey its alot faster!!!

So far very few real reviews of substance have arrived on the hi-fi boom-box. In fact the reviews that have arrived do everything but tell you what it sounds like. Why is it that the intel mac mini can be ripped apart and dissected in complete detail just hours after the event and the hi-fi boom-box.. well sure we have one, we tell all its bits.. but we dare not report about how it sounds. All these reviews i read about it give me that feeling as if ive been told about this awesome new band, and they tell me everything about the band other than what they sound like. Plainly put, wtf is with these reviews on the boom-box, are people under some sort of order not to report on what it actually sounds like? Don't judge it on how it sounds!! Just get one.. or better yet, judge it based on its on switch location or, this connector thing or that other thing.

The lack of real info now going into day 3 after the event on the hi-fi boom-box is upsetting to me. Not one blip of info on the net can be found as to tell me how it actually sounds. That is hilarious to me. Everyone can tell me its white, show me a picture, yes they were there, but no idea, no notion of what it may sound like, as if i must experience it myself, and surely i will, but until then.. can someone gimme a frickin clue? Otherwise, just don't report it. Its a news bullet with no specifics, something happened, cant tell you want, but it did, cant tell you the magnitude, but it happened, it was big, probably, cant say, was it political, maybe, global impacting, probably... look it was big, you should definitely read up on it, yet i have no details, but get one... nice webosphere... nice.

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Posted by dan at 05:53 AM | Permalink