Sample the Web

You can now add FriendFeed to Your Mahalo Profile. What’s FriendFeed, you ask? It’s the place to have meaningful online conversations.

Begin side rant: The place to have meaningful online conversations used to be Twitter, but since Twitter is never up anymore and doesn’t have threaded comments, the discussion is starting to die over there. Twitter is still totally useful for microblogging and populating the sidebar of my blog, but it’s not where I’m having meaningful conversations anymore. The lack of a working reply function for close to a week broke that entirely for me and a lot of other people. ///rant off

However, the good news is that you can still follow peoples’ Twitters in FriendFeed and you can now follow both of them via your Mahalo profile page (along with a lot of other services) , should you so choose. And if you do, you can add me as a friend on Mahalo here, you can follow me on Twitter here, and you can subscribe to my FriendFeed here. Also, if you like what we’re doing at Mahalo and you use FriendFeed, make sure you join the Mahalo room.

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Big announcement coming up tomorrow as Mahalo chooses the next host of Mahalo.

Here’s what the celebrities at the Guys Choice Awards by Spike TV had to say:

Here’s the two finalists’ (Andrea Rene and Leah D’Emilio) viral videos:

Girl Trains for Guitar Hero

and

Touch My Body Parody Video

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Chris Anderson from Wired and author of The Long Tail and the upcoming Free! came by Mahalo HQ today and talked to us about the economy of free. Very interesting.

Here’s Part One of the talk:
Broadcast by Ustream.TV

And here’s part two:
Live Videos provided by Ustream.TV

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So if you’ve done all the fun stuff, like install Installer.app on your iPhone, you can now record video on it. The video tends to look and sound like this:

Bad news: the app found here isn’t freeware, so you’ll have to spend some $$$ on it if you want to keep using it. Also, the color quality isn’t that great. Neither is the sound quality (that’s not how my voice normally sounds). Also, it eats through your battery like crazy.

I think what it’s doing (and Eliot pictured above agrees) is basically recording audio while taking a bunch of pictures and then it converts those pictures into video after the fact and syncs it up with the audio (which would explain why the video of Eliot cuts off before he finishes speaking, even though I didn’t stop recording until after he did finish speaking. There weren’t enough pictures to support the rest of the audio, so it just cut it).

Good news, you can post directly to YouTube OR email straight to Flickr or a dozen other places that accept emailed videos to secret email addresses.

ps—Flickr video is pretty cool.

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Feel free to call and leave me a message. If it is interesting, I may post it here, build it into part of a podcast, or remix it with the new NIN album.

Do you use GrandCentral?

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FrameByFrame is a freeware stop-motion app for OS X. I just used it to quickly make this very small test movie:
stopmotiontest.mov
Here it is embedded. Click to play: Had to cut it b/c it was crashing people’s FF3.

The little bit of music here is from NIN’s new freely downloadable album, the slip. The entire album is licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows me to use it in this little test video. How friggin’ awesome is that?! The song is called 1,000,000.

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Valleywag had a ridiculous post called 10 Things Twitter Users Should Not Do that ended up popping up several times today on the NewsGang feeds, which I read regularly. All of the post’s advice is horribly, horribly wrong. There is no should not do.

Here’s what you should do and why:
1. Follow as many people as you can; hopefully, a decent percentage of them will follow you in return. UPDATE: Notice that I said as many as you can. For some people, that will mean just their friends, but for others it will mean a lot more. The more you can, the better.
2. Don’t try to read everything in your Twitter feed. Scan it from time to time and pay careful attention to two things:
2a. People replying to you. Be polite. Engage them in conversation.
2b. People asking questions. Answer their questions if you can.
3. When you need a good answer to a question or a recommendation, ask it on Twitter and suddenly you’ll get what 9 times out of 10 end up being helpful answers from the people following you. Thank them. Ask them more questions. Engage them in conversations.
4. Use Twitter to quickly broadcast information. For example, today, we had to take Thatcher, my pet pug pictured on this blog, to the vet. She’d been to the dog park, been tackled roughly by a bulldog, and had been acting timid and shaking (very unlike her) ever since. Kristin picked me up panicked at 6pm, I darted out of the office and several of my coworkers who know me and know Thatcher were concerned. Fortunately, they follow me on Twitter and could see the updates sent hurriedly from the vet’s office that Thatcher was okay. This seems trivial if it doesn’t have anything to do with you, but it’s a vital part of community that Twitter taps into. Are you okay? Yes you are. I can tell from your Twitter stream. I’m okay too. We’re friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers separated by distance and a thousand other things, but here’s instant communication, time-stamped to let you know I’m okay. Even if all I’m tweeting is “need coffee” in the morning, that tells my parents in Mississippi that I’m still okay. That’s an amazing thing. Much better than the smoke signals our ancestors used to use to communicate between tribes.
5. #4 is extremely powerful on a one on one personal level between me and the people I know. However, it becomes something very powerful on a larger scale when something historic happens and someone is there tweeting it for the rest of us to witness.

Twitter is a great communication tool. Use it. That’s all.

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Mahalo’s Video Game Team is going crazy covering everything Grand Theft Auto IV. Here’s everything they’re finding on the GTAIV missions:
Grand Theft Auto 4 Missions | Grand Theft Auto 4 Bull in a China Shop | Grand Theft Auto 4 Easy Fare | Grand Theft Auto 4 Easy as Can Be | Grand Theft Auto 4 Escuela of the Streets | Grand Theft Auto 4 Jamaican Heat | Grand Theft Auto 4 Michelle Dates | Grand Theft Auto 4 Roman's Sorrow | Grand Theft Auto 4 Three's A Crowd

And here’s everything we have in the Grand Theft Auto IV category (so far!; after the jump):
(more…)

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I missed this feature release, but noticed it today. Thanks to @JoeManna for pointing me to this blog post on the Flickr Blog from April 22nd announcing Share This!:

Our new “Share this” button makes it a whole lot easier to share your photos, video, sets and groups. You can click the button and start typing the screen name of one of your contacts – auto-complete will do the rest. Or, you can enter any email address.

I used the feature to grab the code to embed this:

How meta is that?

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Jason announced this yesterday and posted about it today and Sean Percival also blogged the good news, as did Mashable: Mahalo has begun adding Microformats to our pages!

You can see this in action on some of our travel pages, like Paris Hotels. If you install Operator for Firefox, you’ll see the following on that page:

Now, whenever we include addresses, contact info, etc. on Mahalo, we’re going to work on putting the data in Microformats wherever possible, so that you can take it with you, import it into your address book, or easily open it up in Google Maps. We hope you love this feature!

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I sketched this guy last night before bed. I have no idea what he’s supposed to be. I started with the wide open mouth, then the eyes, the nostrils, then drew his general shape, the bed, then the room and lastly the arms. Name him and tell me his story either by sending me a message @cksthree via twitter in reply to the blog post notification for this post in my twitter stream, by leaving a comment below, or by a video reply over at Seesmic. Here’s the video:

I’ll collect all the replies and post them in a follow up post (WARNING: trollish commenting is disqualified). If you all actually show some interest in this character and come up with a good story for him, I may make him into a regular and try to build him into some sort of web comic production that we all work on collaboratively a la what Stephan G. Bucher does over at Daily Monster.

Follow me on Twitter.
Follow me on Seesmic.

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TechCrunch pointed out that Encyclopedia Britannica Online is allowing web publishers to sign up for free one-year accounts and share the content with their readers via a new program called Britannica Webshare. Well, dear readers, I myself signed up for the service and was accepted. When I signed up, I thought that this would be another very useful resource that I could point to from time to time to add value to whatever I may be blogging about. However, in the process of writing this blog post, I started exploring their site, and quickly found that I didn’t love it. In short, Britannica Online is too similar to Britannica offline. It doesn’t link out. It’s very much a dead-end street on the information highway (albeit, perhaps, as far as dead ends go, it’s more of a nice cul de sac of well-read information). This is not to say that I won’t ever be linking to them. It’s just that I think they could be doing what they’re doing better.

Here’s a link to Britannica Online’s entry for Wikipedia and here’s a small excerpt:

Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005 the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr., discovered that his Wikipedia biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that these malicious claims had survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132 days. The author of this information could not be easily identified, since all that is known about contributors is their computers’ IP, or Internet protocol, addresses (many of which are dynamically generated each time a user goes online).

For comparison purposes, here’s Wikipedia’s entry on Wikipedia and an excerpt:

Wikipedia (pronunciation ) is a free,[4] multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,[5] it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.[6][7]

All the above bracketed numbers are references that I cannot be bothered to link directly from here, but which Wikipedia does link in the actual article. Keep them in mind.

Now, reading the Britannica entry, I’m struck with two things. First, it’s written more stoically. Something about it sounds more like a dictionary than the Wikipedia’s entry. More like I’m getting the definition of Wikipedia from a teacher who has no first-hand knowledge of what a wiki is or what it does. Secondly, they don’t have any references listed with the entry. They do have a short list of related links, but they’re all internal links and they use the following language to introduce the links:

Related Links
Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.

They’re the Encyclopedia Britannica, so I suppose their ethos counts for quite a bit and we’re supposed to trust that whoever wrote this particular entry for them spent the time to diligently fact check everything.

While Wikipedia definitely has errors, such as the one mentioned by the E.B. article on Wikipedia, that creep up in it from time to time, the facts that are there are thoroughly referenced in most cases. Wikipedia’s Wikipedia entry currently has 141 references at the bottom. If the entry is incorrect, you can double check the references rather easily and carefully weigh any information presented that is not supported by references. On Encyclopedia Britannica, you cannot do that. You must simply trust in the Encyclopedia and know that the knowledge you will gain from it is limited by the knowledge it contains. The fact that the Wikipedia links to all these other resources is what makes it an invaluable resource.

That’s one Web 2.0 lesson that I’d like to see Encyclopedia Britannica learn. It’s more important than their new widgets, their blog, or their Twitter stream (which btw has a bio that really thrusts that ethos down your throat: “Encyclopaedia Britannica Webshare: Links and news from the authoritative encyclopaedia“; emphasis mine; they even use the archaic spelling of encyclopedia to sound more authoritative), because they are treating those technologies as just another form of distribution of their “authoritative” information, rather than as a nexus for communication, discussion, and an information hub linking outward to all the other great information resources online.

Here’s my unasked for advice for Encyclopedia Britannica and any other old school media publication trying to thrive in today’s new media: It’s no longer about just being a great resource. You have to be a great resource and engage and participate with the other great resources out there. People like this because it gives them more choice while giving them a sense of community. It’s not how many followers you have; it’s how many people you follow. It’s not how many people subscribe to your RSS feed; it’s how many RSS feeds you subscribe to. It’s no longer about having all the answers succinctly stated in one spot; it’s about filtering and processing the best of the plethora of information out there and providing direction to that information without limiting that information.

Update: Just for fun, here’s one of their widgets; it is on American Literature, pre-configured of course, and there is no way that I can see for me to customize it:

I would really *love* this widget, if I could plug any E.B. entry I wanted into it and customize the look of it so that it matched my blog. I should also probably mention that I’d prefer it not to be an iframe, but that’s just me being overly picky. Also, supposedly it’s not always working for people using Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE, you really should download Firefox NOW!

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Following up on the fun that was our Best Evil Robots page, the Mahalo team has built a new page: Best Fictional Brands. I contributed the Lost brands section:

Now things get very bizarre in the current season of Lost, when we discover that the arch-rival company of the Hanso Foundation, Widmore Corporation has a boat parked offshore from the island. Widmore happens to manufacture pregnancy tests, such as the one used by Sun in the previous season. How did a Widmore Corporation pregnancy test get on a Hanso Foundation island? Perhaps Season ones Dharma Initiative-tattooed shark could tell us? I mean, what the hell is going on?

Did we miss any big ones? Feel free to suggest some missing bits and discuss on our discussion board for the page. If you love the page you can Digg it here.

And just for fun, here’s LOG:

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Andrew Keen was at Mahalo HQ today to talk about his book Cult of the Amateur and what he thinks of Mahalo and what we’re doing. It was an interesting discussion, which you can watch right here (fast forward until about 45 minutes in as we set up the video early and ended up waiting far too long for our lunch to arrive; it was very late):

As you’ll notice from my question for him (which had something to do with citizen journalism, but even more so with the human need to express what’s happened when something happens), I don’t really agree with his stance, because I think it’s too polarized, hyperbolized, and far too oversimplified. He kept mentioning that the book was intentionally polemic and that he was more interested in the discussions that it has created. Discussion is always good, and I did like that he likes what we are doing at Mahalo.

However, having read a lot of books over the years about changes in communication and media (from the transition from oral tradition to writing, the transition from scribes and scriptoriums to the printing press) and even in forms within different media (the rise of the novel and short story), his arguments sound much too much like the same resistance to change that occur throughout history. The pendulum swings and there has to be some loud counter-swing to pull it back in the middle where the balance of the next steps really lie, but that counter-swing always comes across as too far towards the way things were to be effective. Andrew kept talking about how we have to get to Web 3.0, which I agree with, but I really do take issue with calling the entire Web 2.0 movement “monkeys typing away at keyboards” (I’m paraphrasing here from his book); That’s simply not the correct approach, no matter how much discussion it creates.

Here’s Andrew’s blog, which I’ve added to my reader and will be following with interest. He had an epiphany that sent him into his current thought patterns and, normally, people who have epiphanies continue to have them whether they want to or not. I’m curious to see when his next one arrives if he ends up in some much more interesting place.

UPDATE: I realized I took a picture of Andrew’s business card. He specifically referenced it at the beginning of his talk, referencing the label “the antichrist of silicon valley” (which he put there himself and which he pointed out that he put there himself); very self-labeling, very British, and given Keen’s background in working in online music, very very Sex Pistols:

Thinking about this more, positing yourself as an antichrist assumes a christ. In a discussion of evolving cultural norms surrounding new media and online media it limits the discussion to an overly simplistic this or that, two option scenario. That’s what’s great about chaos and anarchy when they apply to invention and cultural change: black and white and even grey aren’t enough to paint an accurate picture. What’s odd about Keen’s argument is that he seems to be warning us against the anarchy, when he is actively labeling himself as an anarchist by the strong association with the Sex Pistols. Hypocrisy or a clever trick of the devil?

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This is pretty interesting. PicApp lets you embed Getty Images and other normally copyrighted (and therefore unusable by bloggers) images directly into your blog posts like the above picture of Madonna. Whoa.

[via GigaOm]

ps—What is Madonna pointing at and why? *raises eyebrow*

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I decided to do something different with my podcast this week. Since this blog has for a long time had the tag line “Samplings from the World Wide Web,” I thought I’d actually *sample* some audio from various videos I came across this week. Thanks to Veronica Yanco, Lon Harris, and Sean Percival for bringing these various clips to my attention. Check it out.

Sample The Web Podcast: 2/23/2008 Enhanced iTunes version with Chapters, links, etc.
Sample The Web Podcast: 2/23/2008 regular MP3 edition
Subscribe to the Sample The Web Podcast via iTunes.

If you enjoyed the show and would like me to do something similar again, please feel free to recommend clips for future episodes by emailing me directly: ck at sampletheweb dot com.

Related links:
MetaCafe: The Bad Girls Club - Tanisha “Get the F*** Up (Remix)”
Will Ferrell Dave Grohl Video
Chewbacca Tasered

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Steve Rubel has an interesting post about digital curation up on Micro Persuasion. I’ve been thinking something similar since I came across Kevin Kelly’s The Bottom is Not Enough earlier this week.

Rubel mentions how Mahalo is doing digital curation, and he’s right. That makes me and my entire team digital curators. Of course, I’ve been doing digital curation for a while now, I guess. At Netscape (now Propeller), we were trying to add verified information to the wave of social news flowing in with metajournalism and original reporting on top of the news.

Even before that, I’d been blogging (on my own and with other sites) since 1999. Much of deciding what’s worth blogging and what to say on a blog is digital curation. It’s riding the stream of information and gleaning the best bits, the niche bits, the odd bits that may actually be capable of communicating something meaningful.

So I’m a digital curator. It’s a label I’m willing to take on, because I’m good at it.

And now for something completely random. Here’s a picture of Kristin, me, Marian and Curt riding on the Ghost Rider at Knott’s Berry Farm today:

Note: We bought a copy of this picture, so it’s not like I’m totally stealing it by taking a picture of the monitor with my iPhone.

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If you’ve ever watched a Godard film, you’ll enjoy today’s Mahalo Daily on How To Speak French:

YouTube: How To Speak French
Related: How to Speak French, Valentine’s Day, French, Jean-Luc Godard, How to Learn Basic Phrases in Any Language

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If only the real State of the Union were limited to 60 seconds Mahalo Daily: State of the Union Address in 60 seconds:

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Did you miss night 2 of American Gladiators? Me too. Here you go:

I have to say, Hulu is pretty awesome. Full videos, ad-supported in the video itself so they don’t care if you embed it in your blog like I just did. Now the real question is: does their embed code break validation?

UPDATE: Yep, the Hulu embed code breaks validation. Fortunately, the workaround I figured out for YouTube and Google Video also works with Hulu. Also, good thing I tested this as I discovered that the updated code for the Mahalo WordPress plug-in we’re testing on this blog that was built by Chris Miller and which works great is, despite its wonderful functionality, also breaking the validation. Chris, if you see this post, remember to replace all & with & in the links generated in the plug-in code (I think that’s what’s doing it). I’ll hack at it myself some night when I’m not quite as tired as I am now. Also, your site was down when I was writing this post.

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