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Monday, April 02, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Work! Work! Work!
I've been getting pretty busy these last few days at work, but I did manage to get to the BostonNOW meeting right at the end on Tuesday.
It was good to see Regina and John, it seems that BostonNOW is gearing up for their first release.
So an update on the blog rolls. I like MyBlogLog, but I haven't really seen too much traffic coming from the AutoRoll. I'll be keeping MyBlogLog, but I don't see much value in AutoRoll as of late.
I'm actually going to be moving my blog out to self-hosted cyberspace soon, as I've become motivated to do so while helping my friend Scott start his blog, Blogger Says What.
He's trying to do something pretty cool actually, and you guys might see more of it coming soon so stay tuned.
It was good to see Regina and John, it seems that BostonNOW is gearing up for their first release.
So an update on the blog rolls. I like MyBlogLog, but I haven't really seen too much traffic coming from the AutoRoll. I'll be keeping MyBlogLog, but I don't see much value in AutoRoll as of late.
I'm actually going to be moving my blog out to self-hosted cyberspace soon, as I've become motivated to do so while helping my friend Scott start his blog, Blogger Says What.
He's trying to do something pretty cool actually, and you guys might see more of it coming soon so stay tuned.
Monday, March 26, 2007
BostonNOW update
A bit late for them to send it out the day before, but there's another BostonNOW meeting tomorrow, here's the info for anyone interested:
I haven't decided if I'm going since it's so last minute, but let's see if I feel up to it tomorrow. If you actually read this and want to drop me, leave me a comment and let me know!
Where:
BostonNOW Offices
30 Winter Street, 12th Floor
Boston, MA 02108
When:
Tuesday, March 27, 5pm to 8pm
RSVP at Upcoming.org: http://upcoming.org/event/163416/
I haven't decided if I'm going since it's so last minute, but let's see if I feel up to it tomorrow. If you actually read this and want to drop me, leave me a comment and let me know!
News at Seven Whenever You Want It
The days when you could only catch the news at 7 or 11pm on the local station are long gone. But these days there is something even weirder out there then Naked News.
It's called News at Seven and although the news anchor is a woman, she's not as curvy as a real one might be. She is in fact, a computer generated and computer voiced, automated character.
Each episode consists of one topic with background illustrations much like those you might see on a real program, photographs of relevant parties and of the topic at hand. For March 26, the news was about a new Tolkien book due out later this year.
Unfortunately for them, being automagically generated means that the photos on the background are not checked for actual relevance or hilarity. You might notice it when you see Jack Black's photo in the background for this skit.
Anyways, it's a great idea, they just have to work on that algorithm a bit more. I'm looking forward to what they can do with this in the future.
It's called News at Seven and although the news anchor is a woman, she's not as curvy as a real one might be. She is in fact, a computer generated and computer voiced, automated character.
Each episode consists of one topic with background illustrations much like those you might see on a real program, photographs of relevant parties and of the topic at hand. For March 26, the news was about a new Tolkien book due out later this year.
Unfortunately for them, being automagically generated means that the photos on the background are not checked for actual relevance or hilarity. You might notice it when you see Jack Black's photo in the background for this skit.
Anyways, it's a great idea, they just have to work on that algorithm a bit more. I'm looking forward to what they can do with this in the future.
Friday, March 23, 2007
What me blogging?
So for the last week or so I've been rather deathly ill with some sort of bronchial inflammation, otherwise known as bronchitis. The prognosis is good, but I haven't really felt up to blogging these last few days.
I'll start anew next week, so look forward to it!
I'll start anew next week, so look forward to it!
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Google sued by Viacom for $1b
Via The Guardian Unlimited, Viacom filed a suit today in NY against Google and YouTube, saying the internet giants were guilty of "massive intentional copyright infringement."
More after lunch.
"After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.".
More after lunch.
On the State of the Blog-o-sphere
Taking a tip from Rober Scoble’s feed, I checked out Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion, where he blogged about the latest State of the News Media report. It’s interesting to see that, as Steve noted, by January 2005, some 10% of the online population was blogging. By December 2005 up until April 2006, that number had already reduced to a steady 8%.
2006 saw a more than two-fold increase in the number of people who reported having read blogs versus early 2004 numbers, from 17% to 39%.
One thing that Steve didn’t touch on however, was the state of public attitudes of young Americans towards online media:
45% of young Americans (high school students) say that television stations are the most accurate source of information they know, with only a meager 23% looking at newspapers for their daily news feed and a bit more surprising number, 10% saying they read Blogs for their accuracy in reporting.
For blogs, as a nascent form of distributed media content, 10% seems like a pretty good number, I’d love to find out what those numbers are now. Looking at things like BostonNOW and seeing these numbers, there might be a real future in this new newspaper/blog mash-up. But as always, I’ll wait to see how they play out their hands.
2006 saw a more than two-fold increase in the number of people who reported having read blogs versus early 2004 numbers, from 17% to 39%.
One thing that Steve didn’t touch on however, was the state of public attitudes of young Americans towards online media:
45% of young Americans (high school students) say that television stations are the most accurate source of information they know, with only a meager 23% looking at newspapers for their daily news feed and a bit more surprising number, 10% saying they read Blogs for their accuracy in reporting.
For blogs, as a nascent form of distributed media content, 10% seems like a pretty good number, I’d love to find out what those numbers are now. Looking at things like BostonNOW and seeing these numbers, there might be a real future in this new newspaper/blog mash-up. But as always, I’ll wait to see how they play out their hands.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Time Travel, XKCD strikes again
The latest from LiveScience.com is that you can't travel backwards through time.
Forward time travel seems more plausible:
XKCD, however, had an answer to these questions from the get-go:
Forward time travel seems more plausible:
For now, the only definitive part of travel in the fourth dimension is that we’re stepping further into the future with each passing moment. So for those hoping to see Earth a million years from now, scientists have good news.
“If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time—that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”
XKCD, however, had an answer to these questions from the get-go:
Fanboy Video of the Week
So you love Heroes? Do you love cavemen? what about cavewomen? Ali Larter from Heroes might just give you a reason to. The past truly was a magical time...
This movie looks AWESOME!
This movie looks AWESOME!
BostonNOW!
I was "invited" by Regina O’Brien, BostonNOW's Web Content Manager, via Twitter, to attend their Boston Bloggers Summit. Although I wasn't 100% sure on what I was getting myself into going there, I decided to drop by. I assumed it was just a convention for any and all bloggers who live in Boston to network and get to know each other.
While it might sound like a command, and on the coattails of the death of the namesake band's lead singer this weekend, apparently there's a new newspaper in town.
Or there will be soon! Despite their future home still just being a placeholder, they are already making preparations for the publication's debut.
Unlike a regular newspaper, BostonNOW will incorporate traditional (think AP Wire) and citizen (think bloggers with actual writing potential) journalism. According to John Wilpers, BostonNOW's Editor, this publication will be a tabloid style newspaper released 5 times a week.
The idea is newspaper readership is falling among younger readers; well, more plummeting like a rock than falling; and I've long had the speculation that if the traditional newspaper doesn't change to accommodate the times, it might go the way of the floppy.
It's no secret that readership among the youth of America is slowing down, but Boston still has 2 of the top 100 newspapers in circulation in the United States, #15 the Boston Globe, and #53 the Boston Herald according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
From talking to John, I found out that they are still ironing out some critical issues, i.e. how do they decide which stories will be showcased in the front page, how will people be paid, hell, I'm not even sure how many bloggers they actually have signed up to submit content, but it looks like they might be on to something here.
I'm not one to jump on the band wagon (yeah, right), but free publicity and syndication? Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope to be able to hear more about this from the people running it and get a better idea as far as the final business model and the technology behind it.
There is plenty of room for them to run around, let's just see how they cope when they run into the proverbial "wall" with any number of issues.
While it might sound like a command, and on the coattails of the death of the namesake band's lead singer this weekend, apparently there's a new newspaper in town.
Or there will be soon! Despite their future home still just being a placeholder, they are already making preparations for the publication's debut.
Unlike a regular newspaper, BostonNOW will incorporate traditional (think AP Wire) and citizen (think bloggers with actual writing potential) journalism. According to John Wilpers, BostonNOW's Editor, this publication will be a tabloid style newspaper released 5 times a week.
The idea is newspaper readership is falling among younger readers; well, more plummeting like a rock than falling; and I've long had the speculation that if the traditional newspaper doesn't change to accommodate the times, it might go the way of the floppy.
It's no secret that readership among the youth of America is slowing down, but Boston still has 2 of the top 100 newspapers in circulation in the United States, #15 the Boston Globe, and #53 the Boston Herald according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
From talking to John, I found out that they are still ironing out some critical issues, i.e. how do they decide which stories will be showcased in the front page, how will people be paid, hell, I'm not even sure how many bloggers they actually have signed up to submit content, but it looks like they might be on to something here.
I'm not one to jump on the band wagon (yeah, right), but free publicity and syndication? Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope to be able to hear more about this from the people running it and get a better idea as far as the final business model and the technology behind it.
There is plenty of room for them to run around, let's just see how they cope when they run into the proverbial "wall" with any number of issues.
Friday, March 09, 2007
Scoble is the new prom queen
If you haven't heard of Twitter, it's a new way to chat, from anywhere, from work, home, heck you can even do it in the bathroom from your cell!
It's really cool, in kind of a decentralized way. There are some really big names hopping around in there, like John Edwards (Pres. Candidate) and Robert Scoble (all around crazy tech guy).
It's fun and even I'm there!
Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann made funky little web app to rank your score from the number of friends you have. Right now Scoble is the prom queen but if you think you can take his crown, give it a shot!
It's really cool, in kind of a decentralized way. There are some really big names hopping around in there, like John Edwards (Pres. Candidate) and Robert Scoble (all around crazy tech guy).
It's fun and even I'm there!
Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann made funky little web app to rank your score from the number of friends you have. Right now Scoble is the prom queen but if you think you can take his crown, give it a shot!
Funny Ad of the Day
I love video games, I love funny ads for games even more, so here it is, Battlefield: Bad Company, care of VideoSift:
Follow up: Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
So this post is an update.
I've had some more time to play around with RoR since the last time I mentioned it, and for a trial run, I recoded part of an application I had written in PHP.
The result? Arguably a cleaner much more concise solution, but the kicker, in about 1/4 of the time! Seriously! The RoR learning curve wasn't bad at all, although I can still do so much more with PHP than I can with RoR right now.
So getting down and dirty and a few disclaimers:
The reason why development using RoR is so much faster than PHP isn't because RoR is 4x better. PHP itself is a language. RoR on the other hand is scaffolding framework. What that means is, you type in a few lines of code and the framework does all of the heavy lifting and code generation, meanwhile, you have to do everything by hand in PHP.
I.E. creating a page to input and edit items from a database might take you 20-30 minutes for just a half a dozen or less items in PHP. In RoR all you have to do is build the database and set the scaffolding to work! Boom, instant input, edit, delete and even some basic error checking.
Recently, for one of my ventures with some friends from MIT, we had a debate over RoR or PHP development for our site. Clearly its a lot easier to find skilled PHP developers than it is to find Ruby gurus. After learning more about Agile Dev with RoR, we decided look into a few different RoR developers, because for us, it seemed like the most cost effective/results oriented way to go.
We are still in discussions about the developer, but if anyone knows a skilled RoR developer who is willing to work with a crazy start-up crew, drop me a line!
UPDATE: Got a PHP vs. RoR question? Ask me! I'm no expert but I'm might fast at googleing and I'm nice enough to try to help out :-p.
I've had some more time to play around with RoR since the last time I mentioned it, and for a trial run, I recoded part of an application I had written in PHP.
The result? Arguably a cleaner much more concise solution, but the kicker, in about 1/4 of the time! Seriously! The RoR learning curve wasn't bad at all, although I can still do so much more with PHP than I can with RoR right now.
So getting down and dirty and a few disclaimers:
The reason why development using RoR is so much faster than PHP isn't because RoR is 4x better. PHP itself is a language. RoR on the other hand is scaffolding framework. What that means is, you type in a few lines of code and the framework does all of the heavy lifting and code generation, meanwhile, you have to do everything by hand in PHP.
I.E. creating a page to input and edit items from a database might take you 20-30 minutes for just a half a dozen or less items in PHP. In RoR all you have to do is build the database and set the scaffolding to work! Boom, instant input, edit, delete and even some basic error checking.
Recently, for one of my ventures with some friends from MIT, we had a debate over RoR or PHP development for our site. Clearly its a lot easier to find skilled PHP developers than it is to find Ruby gurus. After learning more about Agile Dev with RoR, we decided look into a few different RoR developers, because for us, it seemed like the most cost effective/results oriented way to go.
We are still in discussions about the developer, but if anyone knows a skilled RoR developer who is willing to work with a crazy start-up crew, drop me a line!
UPDATE: Got a PHP vs. RoR question? Ask me! I'm no expert but I'm might fast at googleing and I'm nice enough to try to help out :-p.
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