StewtopiaOne of the things that stunned me when I joined Epinions was that they had no formal message boards. Before I joined, (in my mind) the very definition of a Web community was message boards. I had spent countless hours either lurking or actively participating in many message board, Usenet, and BBS communities even before the Web existed. It was weird that Epinions didn’t have message boards. This was community, right? How did they talk to each other?
I discovered, however, that members did talk to one another. Quite a bit actually. First, there were off-site message boards (we’ll save those for another post), but second, while I hadn’t noticed it, every review on Epinions has a comments section. The comments section is where all the community interaction happened on Epinions prior to the launch of Epinions’ message boards.
So what could you expect in the comments section? This is what Epinions wanted to happen in comments:
And here is what happened as well:
In many cases, comments were just a way for friends on the site to let each other know that they read the review and what they thought of it. This is where the flame wars happen. This is where people let you know that they like you. And just like the blogosphere, that’s where community happens on Epinions.
Lesson learned – give people a place to talk, or they will do it wherever they can.
[By the way, we launched message boards on Epinions while I was there. A hell of a lot of community happens there as well :-) ]
Del.icio.us slightly less ugly
Hey, I didn’t say that I didn’t use it, but come on, it ain’t pretty.
YouTube talking to record labels on music videos
YouTube owns the long tail of internet video and they seem to be going after the head. Interesting… now, if only it worked on my iPod.
CBS to Webcast Evening News
Ok, that might be the worst headline ever, but sometimes you just gotta post. I mentioned the TEDTalks video feed a few weeks back, and I’ve seen quite a few really great presentations. If nothing else, most of these talks are worth taking notes on how they gave their presentation as much as the content of their presentations.
But last night while washing dishes, I stopped everything I was doing to watch this presentation and it absolutely blew my mind.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It seems we’re getting much closer to getting rid of the WIMP interface.
Duran Duran to perform live on Second Life?
Wow, washed up rockers can live forever in their Second Life. This is huge!
DirecTV ships HD DVR
Might be time to start looking at DirecTV again. Have I mentioned how the Comcast DVR is Sucktastic? [via Engadget]
Life Explained
Now here is a video sharing site I can use. VideoJug shows you how to do stuff like tie a windsor knot, unblock your toilet, and of course how to make a Knickerbocker Glory, whatever the hell that means. Great site if you can get past those wacky British accents. [via PVRWire]
New York Times compares Canon’s H10 to Sony’s HC3
HD camera smack-down! It’s pretty amazing how quickly these cameras dropped in price.
User created games on Xbox 360
Looks like MS made it a lot easier to create games for the Xbox. This really opens up 3rd party development for the Xbox to almost anyone who develops games.
Peter Moore on the Long Tail of Gaming
Xbox head honcho talks about rationale for opening up the Xbox.
Fox to sell video download on MySpace
Between this and the Google deal, I think this whole MySpace thing might make Rupert Murdoch some money after all.
WWDC has come and gone and many were left disappointed. Folks, WWDC is about the Mac. It’s not about the “iTunes Music/TV Shows/Movies/Games/ Books/whatever other rumor there is out there” store. Nor is about an iPod that slices, dices and julians. Nor was it about iPhones that Steve may or may not be showing off to all of his friends. It’s about the Mac. And boy did we get a good one. Who knew that Apple could produce a machine cheaper than Dell?
MacPro Benchmark Roundup – TUAW rounds up all the benchmarks fit to find on the web…. with one exception –
Ars Technica Mac Pro Review
The skinny on the Mac Pro, in 10,000 words or less.
Oh ya, WWDC was about Leopard, too. Time Machine (which I continually remember as Time Warp), iChat (which will be great for fixing my parent’s machine), and that irrepressible Core Animation (ok, whatever) are all really cool and maybe even useful new features. Honestly, though, I don’t think we’ve seen the cool parts yet.
Would love to meet you if you are here. Come up and say hi.
Personally, my money is on just speed bumps, OS X.5 and natch, the Mac Pro. It’s WWDC, baby. It’s all about the Mac. We might see one more thing, but ultimately, it’s about the Mac.
TUAW roundup
WWDC banner – Engadget
“a dizzying amount of new products.” – Scoble
Leopard Feature Set Leaked – PowerPage
Microsoft Photosynth demo
Wow… I never say wow about Microsoft products (unless it’s wow, that’s lame or wow, have you heard of usability?). But this is a very cool 3d photo visualization tool. [via Addicted to Digital Media]
Jeff’s Quick Guide to TV on the Net
Get your fix here. Comprehensive guide to repurposed television shows on the net. [via PVRBlog]
Newton takes down Samsung UMPC
No love lost for the Newton, but a brand new piece of tech taken down by the old school handheld… gotta love it. [via Engadget]
WSJ has a great profile of video and audio social media moguls. No surprises here, but Chad Vader sure was fun.
While I’m pretty familiar with the world of user created content, I hadn’t ventured into the world of user created games. Fancy Pants Adventure on AddictingGames is the rightful successor to the Super Mario side-scrolling crown. With simple, yet effective graphics and terrific physics (now those are two words I’ve never put together), it adds up to a truly addictive game.
Show me the money – well, this is the WSJ and nothing is more exciting than a hobby that pays. Apparently their pals over at Eepybird.com have made over $30k for their Mentos-meets-Diet-Coke-meets-Bellagio video brilliance and their partnership with Revver.
Trashiest link – clearly Forbidden’s MySpace page takes that dubious distinction, with her not-work-safe mega ad for both her and her new line of jeans. This also serves as a good example of the kinds of ways that people are building businesses off of social media.
Great article and a great way to waste a Saturday afternoon.
Tags: video, social media
Mergers, wikis and movies, oh my!
AMD buys ATI
Are any TLA companies starting with “A” safe from this insanity?
SocialText goes open source and JotSpot goes 2.0
Two wikis enter, one wiki leaves. Will the open source wonder take down its more usable, more expensive foe?
Amazon to offer movie downloads
Jobs better get their service out soon before everyone else does.
While the blogging world is falling all over itself in praise of Yahoo!’s release of the so-called “DRM-free” Jessica Simpson track (I won’t even comment on the fact that the track is from Jessica Simpson, oy), I think that the music industry is indicating how desperate they are to break from the iTunes hegemony that they have created and how they aren’t really willing to get rid of DRM any time soon.
First, let me address the DRM issue. The downloadable Jessica Simpson track is available as a personalized track. If your name is Jason, Jennifer, or Jared, you are in luck and pay $1.99 for a personalized track from Jessica Simpson, which if you think about it, is a pretty cool idea. But if you continue to think about it, unless your entire social circle has your name, most of your friends won’t really want to copy your song. File trading networks probably won’t have a comprehensive version of this song, so while the Jason’s of the world could probably find their version of the song on BitTorrent, I’m betting the Jordi’s of the world are probably out of luck.
You see, the Jessica Simpson track is only available as a personalized track and therefore, the DRM is social.
Second, even if I’ve overplayed the impact of personalization (I haven’t heard the song), this still signals what the music industry really wants to do, and that is to raise prices on music downloads. The music industry has created a monster and that monster is more concerned about the user experience than about making a quick buck.
Despite all of this, I wonder if the music industry is starting to realize the truth, DRM-free music is the easiest way to break iTunes’ dominance on music downloads. The music industry loves price fixing, but not so much if someone else is doing it. DRM-free music removes most of the advantages that iTunes currently enjoys and allows any number of resellers to distribute music for any price that they (or the labels) want.
So, come on, music labels… let’s hop to it. I’m a huge fan of Apple, but DRM sucks and we all know it.
Movielink to allow movies transferred to DVD
Didn’t they already do that? Maybe it was the other guys.
Build your own iPod HiFi
Two in wall speakers, $200. Two dead Mac Classics, $25. Retro iPod HiFi, priceless.
Yahoo! to the 9’s
Daily video feature of the top 9 videos from the web. No podcast, so you gotta watch it on Yahoo! And just as an aside, apparently Yahoo! finally figured out how to do video that works with a Mac. Maybe one day Launch will actually work outside of IE6 on Windows.
[via CNET]
A couple of weeks back, I attended the Gnomedex conference to hobnob with the digital l33t and make some techie contacts in the Seattle area. I registered late for the conference and was not completely prepared to go.
I had no business cards.
The cardinal rule of attending a conference (and making people remember you) is to bring lots of business cards. As I’ve been playing stay-at-home dad for the last few months, my company (ok, my 2 year old daughter) hadn’t yet supplied me with business cards.
I’ve never designed or had business cards made, the companies I’ve worked for have always done it for me. Being a fairly DIY kind of geek, I set out to make them myself. I had several criteria:
Today I’ll talk about the design part of the process and tomorrow I’ll finish with how and where I got them printed.
More after the link.
I’ve been a mostly happy user of EyeTV for about a year now (I’ve got the EyeTV 500 for recording digital TV signals), but I’d always hoped that they would go the 10 foot interface route.
I use EyeTV in our kitchen and record programs mainly for my daughter and to stream signals to a network DVD player in my bedroom. My biggest complaint with EyeTV is that unlike it’s PC brethren (Windows Media Center, SageTV, and Beyond TV), it lacked a good way to control it from far away.
The new version of EyeTV will work in full screen mode (that is a little more than an homage to Apple’s FrontRow)and it appears most of the features will be accessible from a remote control. The upgrade will work with the Apple remote or the remote that was bundled with the EyeTV hardware. Unfortunately, there are no screen shots of program scheduling or upcoming schedules, but the two screen shots they have provided, it seems that they are keen to keep the simplicity of the FrontRow interface, for better or worse.
It’s a bit strange that this is a dot release for EyeTV given their recent upgrade from 1.x to 2.0 was a small upgrade feature-wise and they charge $79. This upgrade completely changes EyeTV into a TV friendly application, rather than merely a way to watch television on your desktop.
As a first release, I’m sure that their will be some kinks to work out, but I look forward to the EyeTV upgrade later this month. Kudos to Elgato for continuing to build and improve this great Mac program.
