Floozy Speak!

Glance Nation is sprouting due to app fatigue or oh my god I belong to 20+ social media type sites how can I consolidate all of my "doings" into one feed for all to see, and for me to see from others.  The social networking scene has evolved from a handful of staple places to go and be to a few dozen places to go, be, create, remix, infuse, learn, revive, holler, shout, scream, hang and so on.  Its a minefield out there. 

Glance Nation is the calling to bring all of that together.  I want to get it all, all the status of my being in a glance, in one stable sexy feed. 

First real player on the scene that I noticed was a simple site called FriendFeed and it does the basic idea very well in one nice consolidating output.  Soon it added bit levels of control, viewing options, and comments which sorta propelled it into a social network in itself. 

Today I saw Six Apart adding "activity streams" into its platform of tools and networks.  It's the same basic idea as FriendFeed though with Six Apart sauce no doubt.

Where to next?  Well this basic idea is following along side of what folks in the Data Portability thing are doing.  Open ID is another subset idea thats part of this overall concept too.  All roads lead to figuring out how to manage all the crap we do, that's the basic idea.

I have 10+ login id's, a dozen or so passwords, a few hundred friends in that network, a few hundred in that one, a bunch of media over here, there and that other plac.  Then I wanna tell people a story about me, my right now, my just happened, my moments ago.  I wanna tell you about the books I like, songs I dig, fashion stuff that I'm wearin and more.  But I want to do it in a way that makes sense.  I don't want to burden you with having to go everywhere I exist, here, glance at my existance in 3 mins.  If you wanna drill down, drill, if not, sok.  And the same goes for you, show me your feed, and maybe I'll drill down on you.

That is the next wave of social media, which means that in about 12-38 months it'll infect big business, and soon your online banking, insurance, or company intranet site will wanna give you glancable features too.

Tags: friendfeed, sixapart, glancenation

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Posted by dan at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

DEMO

Today is DEMO 08 day.  Demo is one of the more interesting micro events that occurs every year, I think it actually occurs twice a year now.  Its mini conference where new technology, applications and ideas are presented.  DEMO always has something interesting to watch.  Lots of great 2.0 web companies and other ideas have spawned outa DEMO days.

ReadWiteWeb has a good primer for getting in tune with what's gonna roll out over the next few days from DEMO.  If you want to bypass all that junk, go right to their RSS feed covering the event.

Playing with Options

My brother Tom and I have been playing the options game in the stock market lately.  My knowledge of how the market works has been lack luster over the years.  I've just recently dived back into and this time I'm taking it seriously.  I've always had a knack for picking out decent stocks I think.  Maybe more of trends that were going to mature and deliver, that I think I've always been pretty good with, but turning that into cash, that's never been good.  Tom likes playing the options game, betting on chance that a stock will rise or fall on a given hour, day, week.  He's pretty good at it. 

The Workout

Saturday I worked out for the first time in about a year.  Yep, that fateful first workout.  I had to do it.  I had to get my ass back to the gym.  It was hard.  I had been listening to Ender's Game on CD in my car, and I was on disc 8, I had a hard time leaving Ender in the car as I walked into McConnell drudgingly. I've read Ender's Game before, but the other day I saw it at the library on CD and thought what the heck.

I like audiobooks.  I also picked up the Google Story and I think mentioned this before, parts of it were ok but too much of it painted Larry and Sergay as pioneers of the ultimatie society, some grand place the narrator must keep pounding into that you will never attain.  Also I find it interesting that much of what Google is, in terms of sheer wealth is based on ads I never click on in my 10+ years using their service.  So much for not being evil.  But every biz is a bit I guess.

Weight Progress

I've weighed myself on saturday- 21 pounds gone so far.  I'm officially back in the 60's, 369 that is.  I'm disappointed in my influence over myself though.  I keep doing things that I think will motivate me but they don't.  Like Joining Jillian Michaels website, an impluse move i had to kick my own ass like Jillian would yet, the minute I joined I lost interest.  So typical for me I think, its another danism in a long line of danism's I need to fight off and undo or do right.  I'll probably discontinue the service due to budget constraints and go all natural dan, just like I've been doing with my lifestyle eating which I don't call a diet cause the word diet implies short term fix, and I'm here for the long haul.

Tags: weightloss, workout, jillian, demo08, readwriteweb, endersgame

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Posted by dan at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I cranked out three new videos for my brother's religious effort this week.  He's been involved with Life Teen for awhile now.  He needed three commericals to inform and get kids to wanna come and participate in a high school retreat. 

The first commerical was a spoof on a Budwieser Dude commerical, that edit worked pretty good.  Fairly simple.  They did a good job getting "dudes" on tape.

Second one involved them spoofing the Budwieser Wave commerical, that one didn't work so well, but with the aid of sound effects and simple titles, it came out great.

Third a parody on MTV's Real World auditions.  That one was a lot of fun and the most involved edit.

I put these videos together with imovie 06 HD.  I still haven't made my way to really use imovie 08, its just too freaky for me still.  Plus its a massive storage waster I think. I dunno.  I should be editing in Final Cut, but its so freakin different than the Avid, I think I miss the Avid big time.

Anyways you can see the videos here.

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Posted by dan at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lately at home my GF and I have been suffering.  Suffering through the lack of acceptable content on TV.  We have a handful of shows, and the History/Discovery channels are trying desperately to appease us with content as well but in general, my GF has been taken.... taken to the dark side of reality based low budget Ghost Hunter like shows. 

You know what I'm talking about, Paranomal this, Ghost that, Haunted house explorer no.9 and so on. Between the ghost shows and 100 bad x y and z on E or VH1, i don't know what to do other than to watch/download as much BBC content as I can find to take me way from the ghosts.

Its a sad scene of TV gone wrong.  And you wonder why you read countless articles about how the masses are flocking to the net for something to watch.  With the writers on strike and networks killing off shows like the 4400 or pushing back battlestar, I dunno what i'm supposed to do.  Screw TV, I'll find my entertainment elsewhere. 

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Posted by dan at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

YouTube analytics always amuse me.  I'm continually impressed with where my videos end up via youtube embedding or simple link posting.  Its like the art of traffic, where does it come from, who liked it, and what did they do with it? 

I've been a part of YouTube for 2 years now.  I've watched 3,230 videos and have 107 subscribers who daily to see yet another FloozySpeak video to appear.  I've got 95 videos on the site, some with over 35,000 views.  Overall I enjoy YouTube, it can be crazy, filled with haters but it offers me what I feel is good for the moment. 

Now I've messed with Kyte, Operator11, Vimeo and other type sites but I tend to end up at YouTube because its the ground layer for most sites online. 

So what do the basic analytics of who linked to you tell me about my videos??  Stuff like this..

And I hope that worked...

If not.. go here and you'll see what I mean.  Now i don't know who took the clip and why its on that page, but someone needed it, wanted it, and thus it worked out.  But I find it interesting to see where yer content goes on the web.  Its a great way to track yer affect in the system, its huge for people that do this seriously, for me, its fun, its an outlet.

Tags: youtube, analytics

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Posted by dan at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ok first things first.  I'm gonna work out today, I know it, I will be the fit monkey, I will embrace its presence in me.

Second, I watched Growing Up Online on PBS this morning via the TIVO.  Decent but kinda ya no duh etc.  Much of it wasn't fresh enough, it felt dated like 2004 dated. 

Third lots of bit talks about social media apps fighting for what I call ritual cred or presence in your daily routine.  Obtaining ritual cred is essential, it means yer a staple in that users kit to get things do, you've made it, your in the gravy stream now. 

Pownce announced it was out beta but so many twitters out there are like pffft yet another app thats like twitter but not.  Pownce is having a hard time obtaining a piece of that valuable ritual cred.  Right now, its probably headed for the deadpool despite its new annoucements and enhanced features.  Its good, but its too much alike twitter and not different enough to cause a new behavior so its doomed to basically force a user to choose and thats never fun.  Users that attempt to juggle both are kidding themselves and will eventually burn out all together favoring real life and freedom for ritual cred vs micro-conversational away messages. 

The technology that powers these apps is always interesting, there could be some learnings there, but its a do or die scene on the web, you either use or you don't and I get the notion from the web that pownce is not in that gonna use pool.

Course you can trace it back to whether or not yer a user in the first place.  I'm more of a blogger and bookmarker than I a twitter or powncer. 

Tags: pownce, twitter, pbs, growing up online

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Posted by dan at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well there's a good chance I have sleep apena.  Hello, so does every other american on the planet, or anybody that snores in their sleep no doubt.  I found it funny going to see the sleep doctor this morning cause it wasn't like other visits where ya go in and theres a discussion about what you may or may not have, you go in and YER SICK!  Thats it, you got it, the moment you consider yerself as a canidate for sleep apena, well ya got it, welcome aboard, no real ifs or buts about it.  Its welcome to the sleep people!

So what's this mean?  First I get a mask, I wear a darth vadar mask to bed, actually I first get to go to sleep with a hundred electrodes on me, yeah that will be fun.  Next I get to see shocking results readout, then I get to sleep again this time with darth vader mask on, and then I feel frickin amazing (supposedly) and then, and only then, do I get to accessorize my disoder and pick the mask and color etc I like best.  Then I get to go home, put it in my house, and listen to it go ZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRGAAAAAAAAHHHH ZOOOOOOOOO BAAAAAAU etc.

So thats my story with sleep.  I hope I can avoid the mask with weight loss, thats the plan.  Lately I've been struggling with my own self realizations.  My own little quirks.  I've caught them red handed and attempting to shine the light on my own bit traits like, I'm a planner extrodinare all the way up to the point where i've planned everything but actually doing what the plans are for.  Weight loss journey is a bit like that, I've done everything, read the articles, joined the services, kept a food log, eat the right eats, drink the right liquids, take the right vitamins and pills and all that stuf in between.. BUT I still havent dragged myself to the gym yet.  I've got 4 different tools at home that say "use me and we will sweat together" and everyday I come home, take my coat off, and relax, then eat dinner, and then relax some more and then sleep.  I haven't made the time or dragged my ass which is the last frickin obsticle in my plan to lose this frickin weight.  I think its funny cause my brain is struggling to come up with legit excuses now, I think of something that I think I need and then right then I'm hit the with awe inspiring note that HEY YOU BASTARD YOU CANT WEASLE YER WAY OUTA THIS! 

Which is nice really, its like two halves of your mind, one is the obsessive complusive planner to the nth degree and the other is the umm put up or shutup. 

Just typing all of that is nice too.  Serves as a nice reminder you dumbass!  See I even flog myself in a blog. 

In other news, I'm playing with friendfeed, readburner, yahoopipes, and my tumblr site every now and then.  I enjoyed makin the lolcat pics. 

So ya know I got a new cat for xmas, bob, the bobtailed cat, he's actually just a normal cat that got his tail chopped off, but the folks at the cat shelter called him bob so do we i guess.  Anyways, he terroizes our other cat every frickin day.  She screams, oinks and hollers and freaks out big time as he attempts to play with her 24/7.  I kinda feel bad for oti, she is a mean ass cat but so cute to look at. 

Some books I'm reading.  So I i've been looking over some various books lately like Sythetic Worlds, Life on the Screen, Cult of the Amateur, Cat Behavior!, Ender's Game, The Story of Google, Dream Society and Snow Crash.  Yeahness thats alot.  Its all good.  Ender's Game I've read before just felt like reading it again.  Same with SnowCrash, its just been awhile.  The Story of Google is kinda nuff said, some interesting things but kinda lame.  Cat Behavior is always fun to read up on. The Cult of the Amateur is a really negative way to look at web, I didn't like it.  It takes a stance that I feel is "hater" like.  Dream Society is the best read in that whole set so far. 

I'm strangely absent from the World of Warcraft lately.  I sorta miss it but I also don't.  I kinda feel free from the chains of questing, raiding, and pvping, though I did enjoy pvping the most. PVP is the single best use of time in that game next to leveling up a character or grouping in five mans to achieve an objective.  This morning I thought a bit about a comic wanted to make that would all be from the mob's point of view.  Mobs are entities in games, they are the monsters we fight against.  There's plenty of comcis from the player perspective, but what about the mobs?  I came up with some hilarious renditions, I'll have to get back to that. 

Gaming wise I'm baked on WoW.  My old guild went heavy raiding and I just couldn't keep up.  I had to work, live, life, but geeze I see that WoW's up to 10 million users now, that's alot of addicted folks, that VR baby, strapped into yer avatar.

The culture, analysis, and machinma of WoW is still very interesting to me though.  The dynamics of humans playing with WoW beyond it just being a game.  We're analyzing behaviors, making videos to express our observations or love of game itself or writing wildly about the affects of the game on the population and more.  

Well thats about all I got here.  I keep going back to work then coming back to this with bit details on what's happening with the flooz here. 

Now I'm working on an SEO plan for lextant.com the place I work at.  So back to work I guess.

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Posted by dan at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So.. I saw Cloverfield this weekend.  It was about what I expected, actually a bit better, overall not a bad flick.  It's got scary moments, freaky sci-fi alien bits, good golly its godzilla moments etc.  Decent flick, go see it. 

We'll probably see more flicks like this, all shot up in a youtube amature camcorder feel way.  Not so much because hollywood wants to but because of sites like youtube and their increasing popularity.  People are being trained to see and accept bad quality shakey cam video, they tolertate it, accept it, they don't steer clear of it, so why not step it up a notch and add special effects and take it a film like level.  Makes sense, and it works for the most part. 

I have no idea what it cost to make Cloverfield.  Someone said they spent 20 million in effects, even still, I bet they make a mint on that picture. 

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Posted by dan at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Every so often I meet up with Matt Lewis a professor at OSU's ACCAD department.  We get together at the north market, snag some lunch and dive into a conversation that never seems to end, in a good way. 

Today's meet up was no different than the ones before.  We covered a vast array of subjects from augmented reality, data mining, data visualization, art, location based services, books, how to improvement ideas, GTD ideals, software, hardware, community collectives, theories on crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, managing presence online, and the how the future you is really here today just juggling it all. 

In a typical meetup, the conversation starts in hi, how ya doing to current what's up and ends in rethinking man's potential existance in this new ubiquitous reality we're all living in. 

Needless to say my brain is alive and on fire with ideas.  I love these simple lunches.  My fried tofu was yummy and the Tom Kai Yum soup was amazing as usual there at Nina's Sushi there in the north market. 

Matt talked a bit about how with the iphone its hard to imagine a life without instant access to google and wikipedia.  I think about that now, and in some ways I can agree, though I don't have the insta-access via the iphone with me, that will soon be remedied I think.  We messed around testing a new link where you can turn any thing you want to from wikipedia into a quicktime podcast.  It worked well on the iphone, now instead of you glancing in that data of whatever, it can speak right in your ear, thats cool!

We also talked in great detail different ideas and needs around manging ones presence online.  For me, I want more tools to come to me to ask what I'm doing.  I'm tried of always drilling in to new betas, new social networks, and participating at such a "i gotta go right to yer doorstop" kind of way.  I want smart tools to come to me, to say "got an opinion on augmented reality for such and such group that you follow via RSS?, and i say ya.. and give my two cents in a generic input window, and off it goes to manifest my interaction with that service, and then later, i can catch up with the output of all that via RSS feed.  That's still not really here yet.  There's no active bot to engage me, again I always have to engage it.  I want a smarter tool to know me, know my preferences, lifestyle, routine, and sense when best to interact with me, obtain my bit of data, and pass it along. 

We also talked about sign-posting, this idea that many of us beta-junkies who play in the 2.0 space get burned out quickly and that we almost need to get into a potential network not so much that we really need it, but we feel compelled to be a part of it, at the mimimalist level in the sense of a sign-post.  Facebook for me is exactaly that.  I was here.  My profile is a sign-post in Facebook, I don't interact with it daily, its merely an outpost for a potential person that may either know me or wanna know me to SEE me, I exist in that network soley due to the sign-post, but then, in reality, I've moved on to something else.  I think other beta kids do the same thing, we all leave traces of who we are throughout the various networks, and then like frogs leap from lilly pad to lilly pad on to what we feel is next or home, but you can always retrace us back through the various pads we've been in before. 

We talked a bit about data visualization and the fun and potential I saw in Yahoo Pipes.  He mentioned Many Eyes, a site I checked out awhile ago, but like most of research data here, I dunno how well it could serve up some visualization for me.  What's cool about alot of Matt's work is that it plays in the purely expressive play space.  Its uber creative to the sense that there's no agenda other than fullfil a need to do something, see anything, visualize something new.  Sure theres objectives but the pipe is wide open, take it all in, do whatever ya gotta do with whatever toolset, play, go and impress me, play.  Prehaps thats the academic freedom you get with a school like ACCAD, you have to go boundless and open minded into the fringe if you hope to walk away with something really powerful. 

In all I can't explain the mental high I've got at the moment.  I wish I could have those kinds of conversations all day.  I can't wait for the next lunch.

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Posted by dan at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My sidekick 2 is nearly dead.  It's been a good phone.  Its lasted a long time, and it helped me hold out for the iphone.  After MacWorld this week, it appears a gen2 iphone may not be arriving this year till very late, like xmas 08 or something.  So I'm prepping my brain to soon accept an iphone experience.

Now no doubt its a huge upgrade in technological ability.  Plus it opens the door to creative development in that I can start messing with custom apps, experiment in making my own as well.  However it does pose a new use model on me.  I'm going from a full keyboard experience to the one letter touch. 

Thats the only part I sorta dread.  I was concerned about what email account to use on it cause my mac account gets alot of spam, my outlook account NO HELL NO is not happening due to its spam count, plus I dont even want to think about a cripple outlook asthetic on my beloved iphone device.  Google's GMAIL for the win!  Especially with their new release of gmail on the iphone its a perfect match. 

With Gmail on the scene and the sidekick finally dying, I don't really have any reason to stay with tmobile.  My time is up there, time to jump. 

I guess I do think about the Edge network issues with the iphone but still semi minor really.  I was holding out for a 3G experience with a full GPS.  But at MacWorld they announced mock GPS via celltower triangulation, which hell, that will work for me. 

So the plunge is ahead. 

In other news.  Last night I wanted to play with Google Gears since I've been loving Yahoo Pipes and sorta disliked Popfly from Microsoft so I figued I should look at GG as well.. and of course it didn't work in Safari.  :(  SO I booted up Firefox and then... Google thought I was spanish. 

Somehow, somewhere, google thinks I'm spanish and thus it was stuck in a forever spanish encoding mode.  Now Safari was fine, thank god, but firefox no matter what I did locked me away in spanish. 

From a user experience point a view it was damn annoying.  Especially since there was no universal language indicator anywhere in the browser to say hey man i'm english.  And once yer stuck in a language you cant understand how do you do anything?  My google memory on where things are and what things are probably going to be throughout the interface was destroyed in a second despite it being burned into my skull after a billion or so uses.  My brain was wiped clean and trapped in spanish land. 

I think I went through all the steps a frustrated user would take.  First I went from hey to FUCK YOU in like 3 seconds.  Then I deleted Firefox, take that you bad application, serve me up spanish results, well how about I just blow you away then eh?  How ya like that!  Then once I realized it wasn't Firefox persay it was something Google was doing in conjunction with the browser and my IP address I was stuck.  I had to go back to Safari and troubleshoot the issue while it still gave me english. 

Now it was a guessing game with the Google search.  In the past I used to search in core keywords, for this example I would done a search for: google spanish firefox problem.  But in the past year or so I've switched my lame keyword searching to asking google questions that make sense to me, or to potential users that had simillar issues.  So I asked google: "google thinks im spanish" this is piece of text I would of easily blogged, it was to the point but lacking in real detail what was happening.  Of course, google gave me the best results when I asked that because it found lots of blogs and news forums with other users saying the very same thing. 

After an hour so of picking through testimonies from the web of like users experiencing the same issue I eventually found some accelerators and links to google pages that addressed the problem.  I was kinda bummed that this google specific pages that addressed the issue didn't come up first in Google's searches.  I guess thats the age old problem that yer data means X to you and Y to someone else, and you tend to index and sort out Y more so than yer own X. 

Tags: google, spanish, firefox, sidekick2, iphone, safari

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Posted by dan at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If any of you noticed, there is no longer a blog roll on this blog.  Why?  It was massive.  One hundred and twenty six blogs were represented and ya that's all good and stuff but it took up like all of the page as it scrolled the massive list down and down. 

So I removed it for the time being as I rethink in how to best visualize it.  You also see FriendFeed is up.  FriendFeed is a great service taking in all of what you do on the web and cramming it into big feed that is RSSable. So next time I post a book mark on delicious, or make a youtube clip or tweet and pownce or write a blog entry etc, it all goes there.  In fact, you could ditch this blog all together and just get the feed and go from there. 

Today was an interesting day.  I met a professor from OSU who's working on some text analysis for us at lextant.  It's yer typical problem really, ya get a ton of text and you'd for a smart program to read it all and pass back to ya major themes, big ideas, visualize it and so on. 

Ideas come in waves at work at times.  I constantly find myself like Moores law, way ahead and then I gotta dial back.  In 2006 I was nutso over data mining.  Luckily with delicious my link fest moments are captured forever, tagged and organized for me to return too, but its funny that back then I was gaga over it, and then, well I had to get back to work.  Now it returns only this time from the higher ups, gotta get back on the stick of what's happening there.

Data mining is one of those side passions of mine really, I've never really lost it.  I like exploring data sets and seeing what the computer can come up with.  Its funny though, even today, a basic computer sees nothing you see until you tell it what to look for.  I mean we use computers everyday, but they are 1 2 3 mechanisms, blank, emotionless, lifeless, meaningless until you tell it that 1 2 3 are numbers or names or whatever.  I always like to think theres some big AI bot on the net out there slowly getting smarter everyday.  Maybe Google's got it on tap.

In time I'd love to see rapid analysis, almost borderline self aware inventive of data as it occurs from the web.  I like that.  I could see some computer absorbing data, making connections based on rules and then having that data feed something interactive with me, an aim bot, a video terminal, my own maxheadroom. 

I was thinking about Max the other day.  I thought it would be cool to wire up twitter or slew of rss feeds from hot blogs and pump that into a avatar reader on the fly in flash, and then put that on the chumby.  Max Headroom belongs on the Chumby.  Gotta figure out how to make that work. 

Maybe I could do it myself and bring back the sexy beast.  I miss doing those videos, I wish they were not so labor intensive. 

I've been massively impressed with Yahoo Pipes lately.  I think I've cloned about 30 different kinds of pipes by now, so many good ideas in sucking down data and playing with it.  I attempted to pull off a csv data file into from my PRIME project, but alas, es no worky.  Maybe something with the formatting of that file I need to look at.

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Posted by dan at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I watched Mark Zuckerberg on 60 minutes this morning, not really impressed with the guy, he seems so 70's disconnected hacker like.  Ya know, the classic picture of the MIT student from ages past, smart, snobby, and isn't really sure what yer asking. 

I know Facebook is supposed to be this big boom and all but it just doesn't feel all that amazing to me.  The idea of Facebook turning into a search engine or being the first place people go to try and find out info seems laughable at best.  I just don't get the must have constant pulse of the site. 

Anyways, I thought it was interesting, cause folks are valuing FB at like 10 billion dollar company or something and I'm like gah, but what is it?  I mean they haven't figured out how to make money yet, its just weighted that way via connected population, thats it, theres no money there.  Beacon crashed and burned, can they follow Google's success?  Maybe.,.. i dunno.  But in its current form, its another virtual porch, and man theres tons of them these days.

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Posted by dan at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So Mac day is here and everyone is waiting for the next leap into newness. What will it be?  A super slim notebook?  A tablet?  A new iphone?  Who knows, it'll all be good though either way.  Course looking at the NASDAQ this morning you wonder what the frick is up cause all I see is RED everything is dropping like flies. 

Mary and I have been watching Life on Mars lately, a new BBC time coma action 70's drama mystery and more, its pretty good.  I like BBC shows, they can really make some good stuff. 

I've been playing with Yahoo Pipes, getting back into Pownce to see if anything is new and messing with Voicethread and Sketchcast lately. 

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Posted by dan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been thinking alot about presence and status lately.  The idea of monitoring and tapping into one's status or presence is showing up research projects as well, its starting to appear as "differentator" for companies too.  This idea of helping the consumer overcome the info onslaught brought on by the digital age via their status, their presence.  Cool stuff.

In my experiences on the web I've joined dozens of social networks, participated in a dozen or so social-bookmarking and catalogue type services, experiemented with new search engines, and participated in the creation of media via blogs, vlogs, podcasts.  Last year saw the rise of micro-conversation tools, its not IM, its not email, its not blogging, its glorifed away messages gone wild.  Jiaku, Twitter and Pownce took the beta fiends like me by storm, and of course, we all signed up and decided to see what this idea was and where it could go.  The web pushes out a few hundred ideas everyday, some stick and when they do they go huge as they scale from a handful of folks to a few hundred thousand and more. 

Being a beta junkie has its upsides in that you see and experience new ideas at an incredible rate, however the downside is that you get the burden of being the one to manage all your feeds or betas as well.  All your bits are there for the taking, making, and absorbing but YOU have to manage it all..   

Now a new slice of the web is beginning to rear its head.  Managing, monitoring and following presence via status tools online.  Intitally spawned by the advent of anything that could be RSS'able status tools were first explored by data visualization folks.  Interactive and pretty data visualization sites spawned all over the web, showing you data flowing in real time, mostly news.  Data visualization is just one way of tapping into presence and status, as a personal beta junkie though, I still had all the weight on my shoulders.

For me its youtube, blogging, twittering, tumblring, flickring, pandoring, delicious'listing and all my some 120 blog feeds I somehow managed to download and consume daily.  Blogs got accelerators like bloglines or google reader to help us consume the newness easier.  Google gave us sharing so we could take the newness we found and inform others easily with a click.  But still we had all these services hanging off our shoulders. 

Well now there's friendfeeder.com which appears overly simple in a glance.  It takes all your feeds and creates one stream for others to consume.  All those betas you participate in, it takes them all and consolidates your newness and gives you one place to see your combined view.  Better yet, you can friend other peoples feeds and inform others on your feed status via one all inclusive snipet of code placed on a blog.

While it may not be as sexy as some widgets, it does its purpose well, take everything!! and put it into one feed, one slice of presence you can see of me.  What i posted on a blog, what video i favoried on youtube, what song i liked in pandora, what picture i just uploaded to flickr, its put everything into one feed for you to see in a glance and explore on your own. 

They've added the ability to send items on the fly, like bookmarking images or text or links to friend feeds now as well.  You can also comment right in the feed, and like or dislike items. 

Not far behind friendfeed are half a dozen other tools that will probably do the same thing as the year goes on. 

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Posted by dan at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So with Vista struggling in numbers in the wake of many a many account of folks going back to Windows XP, this got me thinking about the potentially likelyhood of Microsoft sabotaging its own fleet of XP goodness to move the masses kicking and screaming into Vista. 

Why would they do that?  Ya gotta get folks on board to keep sailing ya know.  Sure they got Vista on to 39% of the PC's out there last year, umm thats it? 

Could it make sense to taint yer own water reserves and move folks to your new projected OS?  I guess its not a new tactic really, I haven't moved to lepoard yet, tiger seems fine for the moment. 

I just started wondering about XP though, cause its seriously old, and could the darker smurf agenda be attempting to push the masses toward the light of another new agenda before say, yet another agenda arrives?

Who knows!

Tags: microsoft, xp, vista, lepoard

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Posted by dan at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every once and awhile your gut will twitch.

Take notice.

A gut twitch is a big time bomb indicator, you're on to something. 

Is it just a coincidence that I started watching Denno Coil, and then days later start seeing articles online for augmented reality type ideas?  Gesture based living?  Location based awareness oozing out of CES, and then seeing posts online about fringe devices that continue to bridge people and net bringing them closer in non-tech-traditional ways?

Then I read a BBC post about Intel talking about the next steps in interaction with the web, getting faster, not so entirely connected with the PC, getting more mobile, more transparent. 

Hours later I come across an article about how Google has signed an non-exclusive deal with Panasonic to embedd the ability to access YouTube, Google Services and Picassa into thier LCD screens.  Then of course there's a horde of nay sayers on this idea and a few that mention its a bit like the LG + Netflix deal. 

Its all very interesting.  Like any new tech idea, its got champions, followers and naysayers.  Apple and Google are killer champions, both with unique ways in how they go about it.

Either way, I find it all interesting and thus gets me twitching.  How many years is it all away before a reality I see in Denno Coil coming to pass?  10?  15? 20?  Even so 20 years is not that far away. 

Everyday lays another brick in the infrastructure of the web that will not stop growing.  Its changing everything in the background, how we participate and collaborate, absorb information and inspire us sending us higher and higher every day with possibilitiy. 

Tags: google, lg, netflix, dennocoil

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Posted by dan at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been thinking about rituals lately, things I always do no matter what.  Last year I had a consistent pattern for visiting a specifc set of web sites every morning, then again at lunch, and throughout the afternoon.  They are:

iGoogle

Last year Jess at work shined the light on IGoogle for me.  Its yer basic dashboard that you can modify to your hearts content, its good, not bad, I mainly use it to monitor my stock picks.

doggdot.us

doggdot.us is a RSS combined feeder that takes currently "hot" site picks from digg, slashdot and delicious and combines it into one thread to view.  I really like the site, its the first form of entertainment in the morning.  You can always find something new there to see.   Addicted to the new.. :)

Techmeme

Techmeme is another combined feeder type site, not sure how it all works but its by far the pulse of the tech web scene. 

GMail

I practically live in GMail, I wish all my email went through it.

Emily's Hub

Emily has a knack for showing you what's new and worthy on the 2.0 web scene.  Another good place for freshness.  Lately though I'll admit, Emily's sort of fallen out of tune, not so fresh lately, still I visit every now and then.

Guest Blog!

Every 3 months or so I visit a guest blog, one I pick out of blog log on bloglines, that massive list you see there on the right.  I visist it for a bit every morning, part of the ritual, and then I try something new etc.  Usually design, infographic, tech, research related blogs.

NewTeeVee

For a while I visited NewTeeVee a site in the GigaOM network that covers all the latest movements in online video.  You can always find the latest videos on there, usually.  Another site I visit every day is Video Viral Chart, this is a site that shows you the hottest viral vids on the web. 

That's it!  Go to work, get paid, do stuff, have fun.

Tags: techmeme, rituals, igoogle, doggdotus

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Posted by dan at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First the good news, I've lost 15 pounds since my December 3rd chest freakout meltdown.  That's awesome!  I'm kicking off big ease back into the workout sphere of life by trying a few different things. Going back to McConnell going to get a few sessions with a trainer and hook up with my old nutritionist and I'm also going to try Jillian Michaels program online and see how that goes.  I started listening to her radio show, I really like it, she seems real and down to earth.  Oh ya and I'm also doing the Yourself Fitness game on the PS2.  I like sensory bombardment of the message - feel good!  So ya..

Lately I've been hungry for anime.  I dunno, nothing to watch on TV, rented everything I want to see lately and so I stumbled online and attempting to find some new stuff.  What's great about this time a year is all the "best shows of 2007" blog listings out there.  The anime kids are in full swing jotting everything down from best mecha, to voice, to most useful counterattack sequence and more. 

So with Anime Suki, a few anime blogs, and Transmission I set out to download a few hundred gigs of anime and here's what we got.

Denno Coil

This anime had me glued after the first few minutes.  Its a tale of augmented reality where kids with special glasses can see augmented reality in the form of cyberpets, illegal viruses and of course hilarious anti-virus software called Satchii!!  I love the anime, simple but nice quality with a great story that pulls you into this world that part of me feels isn't that far away from today.  Not as dark as Serial Experiments Lain but its just as addictive.  I'm so happy to see another show like Lain hit the anime scene.  Strongly reccomended - FIVE STARS!!!

Macross Frontier

Unless yer totally cluessless about anime, you should know the name Macross.  Probably the biggest name in anime really.  A new series debuted in 2008 called Macross Frontier, and I've only seen one episode but it was pretty damn good so I'm hopeful for more.  The animation and overall mecha quality action was above top notch, I mean steller, frickin amazing doesn't do it justice.  I like shows that open up with a bad guys that are drawn and animated so well that oh yes, these are serious bad guys.  Rich colors, wonderful vocie acting, great animation, good action, umm this could be one to really watch this year.  Sadly, ya gotta wait for it to be aired and them subtitled by the subbers but still good stuff.  Strongly reccommended just CAUSE!

Engage Planet Kiss Dum

Ok I didn't get all the name but here's what I know.  Lots of mechanical bee things, kinda reminds me of the those things in halo3, attack the world and run amuck.  Earth folks have cool underwater mecha plus some "macross" like mecha and fight back.  Kids with crazy rage and loud voices keep yelling and so on and so forth.  It looks good, its edited for fast sweeping, wait a sec I gotta rewind what just happended there type action.  Looks good!

Armored Trooper Votoms

Votoms is old school mecha.  Armored tanks for one dude.  Basically old school mecha bots cranked out my the billions cover the wasteland battling for unknown reasons.  The roots of the series are in old school anime, ya know the classic 52 type episode series from like 1978 or something.  Anyways, now they got a 3D version of it out.  Now 3D movement in japan regarding anime started out going full 3d, which didnt take off, to 3d mecha action stylized + 2d character animation.  Votoms makes it work.  Funny thing about Votoms is just the sheer waste involved, I mean the army sends out 1500 of these mecha guys and they are carved up by the enemy in no time, and ya get the sense that umm, these mecha battles are seriously primitive compared to Gundam or Macross where you usually have a gifted kid in a battle suit with 600 different kinds of killer weapons and they can teleport etc, not these Votoms guys, they have bullets and a few missles and they are generally fodder for bad guys.  Even still I loved it, good action, strange plot line surrounding a kid that cannot die or supposedly is super uncanny at suriviving situtations.  The military tends to put the kid in desperately against all odds situations and of course, he lives, somehow.  Good!!

D. Gray Man

A new horror series type anime with brilliant art direction and freakish bad guys, plus expectionally cute girls, you can't go wrong really.  This looks like a well polished anime series that is yer basic evil spirit bug hunt type show.  Of course, ya got the gifted exorcist kid, the cute cop girl that loses her partner, and lots of gothic settings in an old 1920's world theme.  Top that off with a crazy jack-o-lantern meets the joker bad guy and its strangely addictive, I need to see more but it has all the basic elements. 

Gundam 00

Gundam is back with more of the same.  You really can't go too wrong with Gundam, though this is the same basic formula of 4 super powerful Gundamn's reign supreme over the masses, don't even think about attempting to get in their way.  Always a good source of mecha action.  Sometimes I look at Gundam with a "corny" lens cause its always the same, superpowerful vs the weak in large numbers.  Now series like Stardust Memories, or F91, that was good stuff.  Stil you cant go wrong with it. 

Lastly I wanna talk about the XBOX 360 which just keeps suprising me every friggin time I mess with it.  I downloaded and registered Connect 360 and quickly shared all these anime shows with my XBOX.  This spared Mary the brunt of the anime injection I experienced this weekend.  The 360 is an amazing product, but why can't I surf on it?  It does everything else and more.  I was playing games and listening to podcasts at the same time, that was fun.  Streaming content to it rocked, and then I was like, hmm it'd be nice to surf as well, why not. 

Tags: denno coil, gundam00, dgray man, macross frontier, kiss dum, connect360, xbox360, jillian michaels

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Posted by dan at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My TIVO like every year pulled through, I keep thinking the old Pioneer DVR-810 is gonna die someday. 

I've been thinking about TV lately.  A whole new year is here and surely we got new shows to TIVO and all.  But first lets list the BEST and WORST TV of 2007.

Best Reality TV Show

Winner: Biggest Loser, why?  Cause its so motivating.  I mean here is the one defacto show on the planet that has almost no gimmick in it other than just lose weight feel better motto.  The true stars of that show aren't the contestents as much as the trainers.  I mean after last season, who doesn't want to be barked at by Bob or Jillian, or even that girl in the red that looks like a barbie doll, she still kicked ass. 

Top Chef was damn good too, I love that show.  I would just love to watch back to back quickfire challenges.  Surivior was really good too and you can't beat Project Runway, but I have to say this new season is kinda lame.

Worst Reality TV Show

If they sucked, I didn't watch them.  But most annoying, anything on MTV or VH1.  Shot of Love lady show was pretty lame.  EVERYTHING on E was lame expect for Girls Next Door, you can't go wrong with Playboy models, sex sells afterall.  But man why do I care about the Kardashaians, aren't they an alien race in Star Trek?  And Kimora?  HELLO, why do I care?!

Speaking of reality TV shows, lets talk about my other nitpicks.

Most Annoying Cut to Commerical Sequences: Biggest Loser. 

I can't stand the ticking sound of scales, the glooming doom on faces and then FADE to black for yet another commerical, luckily TIVO spared me much of this pain but I still hate to see it.

Most Annoying and Pathetic use of Blatant Adversting: tie - Biggest Loser & Top Chef

Oh man I always had a knee jerk reaction of the "... you will first enter the Denny's GrandSlam tunnel and proceed to wrestle with the High Fiberous DXT90 High Hopes for High Heels snack patties, collecting 50 of them and then proceeding to the next stage.." part of the Biggest Loser show.  The stupid events named after Subway or EXTRA gum etc, gah. 

Top Chef was pretty bad at it too, but it felt so much more awkward in Biggest Loser to yell that stuff outloud. 

Most Interesting but Not All that Fun to Watch Reality TV Show: Kid Nation

I wanted to like the show but kids are bad.  Nah I guess it was ok, but I would of picked the arcade.

Most Obvious Editing Indicate Who's Most Likely to Voted off Next Show: Project Runway

I have this ongoing theory about Project Runway.  I can tell by how they edit the show who's gonna get axed next.  Its painfully obvious now after watching it happen over and over.  Its like the calculation of excessive explantions of charaeter + camera angels + overall time of Tim Gunn nodding or frowning and presto- that person goes next. 

Most Watched Network: Food, E, Bravo

I watched alot of food shows, I like to eat I guess.  I watched plenty of Bravo related reality shows too and E is like always on, I think mainly cause it meets my mental surfing the web model of brisk news in like 15mins. 

Least Watched Networks that Bum Me out a Bit: Comdey Channel, Discovery, Anything Below 29.

Not much Southpark this year, it got dumb, but I hear its good again.  Same with Simpsons and Family Guy, just didn't tune in that much.  Discovery usually has something interesting but it can't beat out History channel for overall assurances of real content.

Tags: project runway, top chef, biggest loser, kid nation, tv

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Posted by dan at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well we made it,er I made it, all of us made it to the year 2008.  Just think back in the 50's they wrote scifi novels about that fantasical year of 2008!  Now we're in it!  Fantastical indeed.  So first up, let's talk resolutions.  Every year at the start, ya gotta lay down some resolutions.  Some are whispers, others are pronounced loud and clear, what are your resolutions? 

1. 320 by July 1st! By July first I shed some pounds and get me down to 320.  Thats roughly sixty pounds.  And I know I can do it.  So I'm gonna.  Then I got half the year left to cross into the forbidden grounds of 2XX on my god!  Less than 300?  For a big kid like me, ideal weight not that far off.  Its actually about 250ish.  I don't believe those BMI bastards calling for my weight to be around 210, I need some bulk come on.  Anyways, the general idea is weight loss el pronto and its really simple.

2. Stop Rationalizing, Analyzing and Psyho-zing myself out.  At end of 2007, I just about psycho-d myself into a padded room over work and general whatever troubles.  Not this year.  Down with analyzing and get to doing and living!  I mean its ok to know the sublte ya, something's there, but its bad to analyze it into oblivion.  Instead, just act on it.  Like I know I make endless rationalization excuses in my mind to basically dance around actually doing stuff.  So stop doing that, and then analyzing that, and actually just do it.  I also know that I spend 90% of my free time on escaping either by gaming or endless surfing.  A key theme here is get out of the comfort zone.

3. Total Exposure Content Make Over. I've been blogging for six years, this blog has served me well but its time for a TECMO!  I want a new fresh face on everything.  More content in new forms and in new ways.  I'll admit my Operator11 kick didn't last, I still can't see myself stuck to that service really.  YouTube is good but the audience there can be sketchy but I do love its evidence trail of links and comments.  I dunno what 08 will be about, most likely more tumblr, and kyte.  I want a new blog look, newness all around etc.

4.  Less Networks More Social. While social networks tend to be at the heart of the 2.0 or progressive edge tech scene etc, they are really just a river of endless ideas stiched up and put together just enough to see if you can float a bit while using them.  Do they stick?  Do they socially connect and integrate you better?  I dunno, hence why I don't have a space page yet, I really don't want to be on the space.  My facebook page is more like a bookmark in a social network I'm not really all that concerned with.  My flickr presence is nice but kinda mah at times.  I say less networks yet be more social.  Be social with co-workers, friends and yer general real life networks and less in virtual places that look interesting first from a feature like perspective.  Basically out with the betas and in with the "hey there!".  This isn't a resolution really, its just a growing trend in my life lately. 

5.  Minimal Lifestyle ON and OFF. Last year I stayed true to the minimal me for the most part, ok I had an excessive outburst in late 07 with an xbox360 and like 8 games but thats it.  I want to stay minimal in living, just the basics, and off in the excess of the net.  I like simple things, moments and accents.  I don't need massive excess to make me happy.  Hell a cat and a few bottle caps makes me happy.  Stay minimal, simple.

6.  Save, Invest, Extra. An oldie but a goodie.  My 401k is building up, and next up I want to start investing.  Last year my fantasty stock protfolio did pretty well, especially the chinese stocks!  I need to take out more time to sift through all the streams of ideas, get the scent of where things are, going, and will be.  Make the sure bets and start investing and keep the money in play all the time.  My total debt is nearly gone, then I'm gonna help Mary get clear of her's and then, I'll get a house and keep savin and investin.  A few secondary streams of income wouldn't hurt either. 

8. Empower & Educate. Last year I took a drawing class for the first time ever.  It was a lot of fun.  My drawing style is well, much like my mom's but in a crazy doodle sort of way, even still I enjoyed getting taught new styles.  New information is always interesting to me.  Sometimes it becomes intoxicating I get all addicted really fast.  But as a result I stays with me longer, and empowers me to do more.  This year I want to take some more classes.  My interests are many, econimcs, money, art, flash, video, etc.. do more!

9.  Write & READ.  In november 07, I participated in the novel in 30 days ordeal.  Ok I didn't make it but it was fun.  ZOG my freeflowing storm of weirdness was interesting and addicitvive.  I'd like to get back to it, finish it, and write more.  People always tell me I should write about growing up, stories of family, friends, home etc.  Part of me wants to write about biz stuff too.  I'm a natural dabbler of stuff and ideas i think.  Sometime this year I want to decompile this entire blog, some 6 years of blogged content and distill it down into 74 hidden truths of floozyspeak.  Yes, some day this year that would rock.  I also need to catch up on reading.  Now last year I did a great job of audio booking, i listened to a ton of audio books, thats always good but i need to excersize my mind via reading as well.  I have about 12 books at home that stare at me everyday.

10.  Sort it. DeClutter it all.  Toss it all out.  Don't need, pitch it, don't use toss it, don't want give it away.  Thats everything in both worlds.

Tags: resolutions, 2008

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Posted by dan at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)