This is a test.
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Video: Indecision 2009 – Reindecision 2008 And Beyond | The Daily Show | Comedy Central
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Making Sense of the Data Explosion
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This morning I was at my pal Om’s What Comes Next for the Web — Om pulled together 40-50 people in San Francisco to talk about the combination of persistent, ever-present broadband networks and more powerful mobile devices that connect to those networks, and how we all make sense of the data explosion those two things have unleashed.
I sat in the back of the class and kept mum — I instinctively reprise my lame college and grad school behavior in those settings. … That said, I had a number of thoughts and reactions during the session, and thought I’d jot two of them down here to keep the conversation and thinking going:
Emotional and Qualitative Metadata
Marc Davis led a discussion about context — creating more standardized ways to put “who, what, where, when” metadata around media objects and other data that we create. There was much discussion of the use of geo-data in particular.
Thinking about this in the context of Vodpod (yes, I’m narrow-minded that way), I realized that this kind of “factual” metadata is often less important to us than “emotional” or “qualitative” metadata (some folks brought up emotional metadata in subsequent discussions, but the discussion on this was all too brief).
With video, the single most important piece of metadata is: is it any good? By “Good” I mean is it funny, or informational, or relevant, or beautiful. And of course the answer to that for any given video is highly contextual (who is asking? who is answering?). We’re thinking about this a lot at Vodpod — and of course the fact we’re a community of video curators helps us — but creating interoperable ways to share this kind of qualitative metadata is a good subject for a follow-on discussion.
Serendipity Engines: Radio as a Guide?
Kevin Marks led a discussion about serendipity, and if there are ways for us to engineer and design for serendipity using all this new data. I kept turning my thoughts to the obvious and trite — but very best — example of serendipity by design on the web that I’ve seen so far — the radio offerings from Last.fm and Pandora. As I’ve written before, I’ve long been a big last.fm fan, and the appeal for me of that service is the radio feature — I invariably discover great new music through it every time I use it.
There have got to be some lessons learned from both of those services (one is top-down, one is bottom-up in how it determines which music to “recommend) that we can use.
And it also occurred to me that radio in general is an excellent format for serendipitous discovery, and that perhaps part of Twitter’s appeal for many of us is that it is a bit like radio for short-messages. Indeed, it was explicitly designed that way.
Maybe the radio analogy — in an extremely loose way, more psychological and state-of-mind than literal — is a good one for those who seek to architect a bit of serendipity. It seems to me that when we’re explicitly receiving things — via the radio, or a Twitter stream — we’re more open to those moments of serendipity.
Interesting Graph
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I think Compete’s numbers are horses*#@. I usually prefer to look at Quantcast to compare sites when both are “quantified.”
But I thought this was interesting for the trendline. One site is written about extensively by the trade blogs, the other not at all. I’ll leave you guess which is which.
Del.icio.us for Video? Yes, We Have That
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I like Fred Wilson’s blog. Read it regularly. Also follow him on Twitter.
On Friday, Fred posted an interview with Robert Scoble where he asked for a “del.icio.us for video.” Real-time maven that I am, I would have seen Fred’s note, it would have caught my attention, and I would have tweeted him right away. For I know of such a service!
But, very happily for me, I was very off the grid for three days here:
Now I’m back, refreshed, and should update the record. Del.icio.us for video? Already done. Called Vodpod. Been around for over 2 years. And indeed already pretty popular! You can see my video bookmarks on the right. Heck, you can even watch them there!
- Provides a handy browser bookmarklet (or extension if you prefer) so you can bookmark a video from any site that offers Flash video + an embed code (9500+ sites and counting)
- Makes it easy to share the videos you bookmark in an infinite number of ways through our widgets, RSS feeds, API, hosted video sites, applications for Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed, and more
- Normalizes the video playback across thousands of different Flash player types, with consistent sizing and handling of auto-play (as best we can, anyway)
- Makes lovely thumbnails for the videos you collect
- Provides handy Flickr-like organizer, so you can order your collection as it grows
And more. The team gets an A for building an awesome service; I get a more critical mark when it comes to evangelizing the product among the technorati.
So @Fred — check it out! It’ll even work on your Boxee:-)
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Daddio
Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis, Comedy Deathray, and Bradley Cooper
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Bill O’Reilly Put Dr. Tiller in His Sights
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Is it any wonder some right-wing loon shot and killed Dr. Tiller?
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AVC on Conferences
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Fred Wilson has a good post up on conferences, here’s the key line:
… the idea of travel to get together with the same old group, the tech biz insider club, doesn’t appeal to me at all.
I think that’s completely right. Someone really ought to do a survey of the top conferences to look at the overlap in speakers and attendees. Let’s face it, there are a lot of conference whores out there in the tech world.
The notion one has to go to conferences for “biz dev” or “PR” is misplaced. I think the unspoken reason so many of the same people go to the same conferences is their purely personal need for approbation and ego-stroking. People like being recognized by their peers, and that can happen in a conference setting.
My personal experience is that I get a lot more out of meeting with people who use our service, or might use it– 1-on-1, online, in-person, or on the phone — than I get going to conferences. Much more valuable, useful insights come from those conversations.
All this said, there have been some exceptions. eTech ‘05 (O’Reilly) was good and useful for me personally – timely themes, great speakers who were still fresh presences and voices at that point (before the Web 2.0 idea had become mainstream). More specific, tailored conferences for platforms or programming languages can be interesting, too (I spent the morning at WordCamp yesterday, and it’s an interesting way to get deep into what’s happening with a particular service and community).
But the more general, better known conferences I’ve attended the past two-to-three years proved to be big wastes of time and money. Same people, saying the same stuff, with pointless schmoozing and gossip in-between.
London Mayor Nearly Killed While Cycling – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com
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Coming Soon — My Real Time Web Jeremiad
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The frothiness around the real-time web is starting to devolve into silliness, and I want to write about this in greater depth over the long weekend.
But here are three initial thoughts:
1. Twitter and FriendFeed and other real-time tools could go away tomorrow, and most of us could still use the web just fine. If Google went away tomorrow, it would be a major inconvenience and potentially a disaster. We’re just not dependent on these things the way we’re dependent on Google, and we’re not likely to ever be dependent on them.
I think that says something.
2. I think one useful analogy is the relationship between online chat and e-mail. Chat is real time, e-mail is latent.
Chat of course is important, and useful. But it didn’t kill e-mail. Not even close — read the latest Pew studies and e-mail is as critical and important as ever.
The real-time web technologies are important, and might be useful. But to claim that this is the next great wave, that it might replace search, that Google is imperiled by it in some way, is more or less horseshit.
3. The big revolution — one we’re still in — started in 2002-3 with the creation and mass-market adoption of tools and services that allow us all to publish our own content, and to share content with each other. I mean the advent of easy-to-use publishing tools (blogs, flickr, YouTube, etc), social networks, services like Digg, feed readers. Twitter is a part of this wave, and an important part.
It is this revolution that most challenges Google — a proliferation of tools and services that allow us to find good content through other people. Some of these services and tools have real-time web components, some don’t — that’s an aspect of the revolution, not the center of it.
Cities and Scale
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One of the obvious things about cities, especially those of the dense and very urban variety, is that they scale. It’s such an obvious point I wonder if it’s even worth pointing out; but then, we haven’t really learned that lesson yet in America.
I’m just wrapping up my fourth trip to New York in an equal number of months. As I’ve gotten older, and have travelled more and have more cities to compare it to, it has become more obvious that the city just works. Particularly the subway and train systems (some resident New Yorkers would surely grumble in hearty disagreement with me).
Compared to other cities, it’s a breeze to get around. In the last five days, I got in a cab just once. The rest of the time was on subways and trains. And it all just worked (it delighted, even). The #2 or #3 express uptown and your at your Midtown meeting from Tribeca in 10 minutes. The combination of express trains and locals. The LIRR train and AirTrain combo that gets you to JFK in 50 minutes, with trains leaving every 10 minutes from Penn. Station. All of this possible because of the sheer scale of the city.
London (where I lived for 3 years) has this, too (without the brutal and awe-inspiring efficiency of New York). Tokyo and Paris as well. These cities are a delight to visit because they’re easy to get around. They operate at scale, taking advantage of their densities and burgeoning populations. Cities like San Francisco (and I include the Bay Area), Chicago, Washington and Berlin are the next level down — good, but not yet great, because they dont’ quite have the scale of these bigger cities.
Contrast those to LA, Atlanta, Houston — all horrible places to get around, and which diffuse the power of scale through their sprawl. Do our urban planners and transportation planners think of it this way — the advantages of scale? Are there books that push this theme? If you know of any, would love tips in the comments.
Hi Mark
I’ve just started using Vodpod and have a very simple question. For now I’m using the “post to wordpress” button via Firefox. When I post videos it works GREAT, except for the fact that they ALL default to auto-play. Is there a setting for that? Or do I need to install the widget for that kind of control?
Thanks!
John in Valencia, CA