Category: Video

Categories
Conferences Ignite Seattle Photos Video

What do you do with all those photos?

What do I do with all those photos? This is a question that I frequently get asked from folks at events I photograph.

At the last Ignite event, I took 1600 photos and posted 46 of them (just about 3%). Not all of the unposted photos were duds, but they weren’t as good as the photos that I did post. While I want to thoroughly cover an event, I try to post only the best photos of the night.

Portraits in a Dark Theater

Taking pictures at many events (especially Ignite) are challenging due to unique and difficult lighting situations. Couple that with people who are moving around a lot and talking about something that they are passionate about, capturing a passable photo, let alone a good one can be hard.

I aspire to always 1. make the person look as good as possible and 2. capture the essence of the speaker and their material. Occasionally, I succeed.

Looking over my shoulder

Here’s a quick, three minute video (really a super-fast slideshow) that shows you the photos I posted among all the pictures that I took. Hopefully it conveys the pruning and curating process I go through before I post a photo set.

You can watch the HD version on YouTube and the final photo set from Ignite Seattle 7 is here.

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Boxbe Video

What is Boxbe?

The company I’ve been working on for the last couple of years is Boxbe, an email overload tool that works with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Google Apps.

Here’s a three minute video that I created some time ago to better explain what Boxbe does and how it might be able to help save you from your overloaded inbox.

Personally, Boxbe made my eight year old Yahoo! Mail account usable again by removing the spam Yahoo! didn’t catch and shutting down all those marketing emails I didn’t really want any more.

You can learn more about Boxbe here.

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Funny Politics Video

Paris Hilton for President

Normally, politics and pop culture are two things I rarely talk about on this blog, but this is too funny not to share.

If you live under an advertising rock like I do, you rarely see political ads but I do frequently watch the Daily Show, so I catch the particularly interesting ones.

A recent McCain attack ad against Obama likened the Democratic candidate to a vapid celebrity that wasn’t ready to lead. Paris Hilton (one of the celebrities) created a response to the video presented below.

Hilarious stuff from Ms. Hilton and the good folks over at Funny or Die.

(via Laughing Squid)

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Pictures Video

Flickr has video

Long rumored and shrouded in secrecy, Flickr launched video today. Video is restricted to 90 seconds and dubbed ““long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.”

I think it’s a great addition to the site and like the idea of short clips rather than long form amateur video. This will be a great way to capture the moment to share with friends, family and co-workers that are often so far away.

Video up above is from my friend Josh Ellingson, a talented San Francisco artist.

Click through for a completely ridiculous video of Olivia.

Continue reading “Flickr has video”
Categories
Blogging Cool Tools Geek Fun Social Media SXSW Twitter Twitters Video

Twitter in Plain English

My pals Lee and Sachi LeFever of CommonCraft have done it again, just in time for SXSW. These guys do a really great job of explaining difficult topics in “plain english.” These videos are really great if you are just starting out trying to figure out this strange online world.

At last year’s SXSWi in Austin, TX, Twitter broke for the first time, err, um, was a break through product that helped people quickly figure out where the cool parties were and helped them track down their friends without calling them.

Since then, Twitter has been quickly adopted (and broken) by at least some of the masses (myself included).

I didn’t really get Twitter at first and I thought that it represented all the worst things about blogging (navel gazing, echo chamber). Here is a link to the day I spent talking about my cat in protest of Twitter. I even annoyed myself.

Eventually, I came around…

So, what the heck is Twitter? If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen my rapidly changing status. That’s coming from Twitter. And while I do kid about the Twitter uptime, by and large, they’ve created an incredible service based on something very simple.

Here’s CommonCraft on Twitter in Plain English.

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Conferences Social Media SXSW SXSW 2008 Video

SXSW Bound

sxsw2008.jpg

I’m excited to be heading down to Austin once again for the yearly SXSWi Festival in Austin, Texas from Friday March 7th until Tuesday March 11. That little “i” next to SXSW means I’m not going to the film thing or the the music thing, I’m going to the nerd thing.

From last year’s SXSWi, here’s Ze Frank explaining SXSWi.

[thanks for the pointer/embed code, Scott Beale]

One day, when the kids are older, I’ll drag my wife out to Austin and we’ll do both Music and Interactive. Music, in particular, looks to be amazing.

Anyhow, if you are heading down and want to say hi, you can get in touch with me on my phone (if you have it), email me at randy@boxbe.com, direct message me on Twitter or turn up near me at one of the panels or parties I’m planning on attending.

Hope to see you there.

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Product Design Video

Missing Kathy Sierra

As someone who designs products for a living, Kathy Sierra has been really instrumental in my continuing education of product design. Kathy has written a number of training books for O’Reilly and used to run a product design blog called “Creating Passionate Users”

Helping users “kick ass” has been my adopted mantra and I have Kathy to thank for that.

About a year ago, Kathy stopped blogging. I won’t talk about it here, but you can read about it on her site.

I really miss Kathy’s help in creating kick ass web sites so I was pretty happy to see this interview.

Here is a video interview from the recent Tools of Change conference. While the focus of the conference is publishing, this video serves as a great overview of Kathy’s studies and writings.

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Politics Video YouTube

Tomorrow’s primary

I’d complained for years that the California primary (and a few others) were held too late to matter. You’d think that the 5th largest economy in the world might play a slightly larger role in picking our next president.

No sooner did I leave the state, did they switch the primary to hang with the likes of New York, Illinois and 20 other states in handing out the largest number of delegates in a single day. Ugh.

Hangin’ at the caucus

There is a tiny chance Washington votes might matter in the primary. I’ll be going to my caucus on Saturday, but hopefully, the race will be decided by then.

How am I voting (or whatever it is I’ll be doing at a caucus)? Well, I heart Bill Clinton and wish that we could go back to the heady late 90’s. Hillary… um, well, I really like Bill Clinton and I think that having Bill back would be swell.

That said, I gotta go with Obama.

Here’s a video that a pal of mine, Eddie Codel did talking about Super Duper Tuesday and Obama.

Get out and vote, California!

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Video

SNL – The Change Bank

Really should be working… but this is one of my favorite SNL ads of all time.

“How do you make money doing this? The answer is simple. Volume.”

Love it.

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Ditching Cable Video

Hulu beta – The Simpsons

So, I’m traveling right now for the Thanksgiving holiday and catching up with some shows is difficult to do (legally). Being on Pacific Time still, my wife and I aren’t exactly the best at going to bed early, so naturally, a little laptop enabled television entertainment is in order.

Normally, if there was a program that I missed or am away, I’d pay the $1.99 to download the episode, or in the case of many programs unavailable on iTunes, I’d find them… well, elsewhere. This morning, however, I got an invite from Hulu to try out their new service.

For your viewing pleasure, I share with you, The Simpsons. It’s not going to help you on that transcontinental plane ride to see your folks, but it will help you once you can’t go to bed at 8:00 pm PDT.

I have to say, it is cool to watch The Simpsons on your own blog.

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Home Entertainment Off Topic Video

The case for the writer’s strike

Growing up in a union family, I’ve always had sympathy for the working man (ok, I’m also a working man, but you get the point).

Admittedly, some unions are better than others and not knowing both sides of the case, I whole heartedly, with full disclosure, present this video I found today about the writer’s strike going on in Hollywood.

Godspeed, Writer’s Guild of America and good luck. I’d like to see the Daily Show again this year.

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Social Media Video

Common Craft’s Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Lee and Sashi LeFever, they share, so I don’t have to write.

Seriously, I was just having this conversation with my friend Jay yesterday, who tells me he doesn’t get social bookmarking.

Jay – here ya go.

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Building Community Social Media Marketing Video Wetpaint Wiki

Wikis made easy

Ah, Lee and Sachi LeFever, you’ve done it again! I love wikis, but often explaining a wiki to people who don’t use them can be difficult. And honestly, until Wetpaint, I didn’t recommend wikis to non-technical people as the wiki text used, while easier than HTML, isn’t that easy for non-techies to pick up.

Them: “what’s a wiki?”
Me “um, it’s a web page that anyone can edit”
Them“oh, like Wikipedia? you mean I can edit that?”
Me: “ya, like Wikipedia, except it can be about anything you want”
Them: “oh…That’s … kinda neat. But why would I want to make an encyclopedia about something else?”
Me: “no, no, it doesn’t have to be an encyclopedia. It can be anything you want it to be. It can replace long email threads, it can replace message board thread gone amuck with the same questions over and over again. Wikis are really versatile.”
Them: “oh… Hold on, hold on… Anyone can edit Wikipedia? How is it so good?”
Me: “Ugh.”

For a quick look at what a wiki is, click below for CommonCraft’s video. Thanks again for your help crystalizing this topic, Lee and Sachi.

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Video

Copyright explained, Disney-style

Although a bit tedious at times, here is the video version of a ransom note explaining copyright law through the works of Disney. Happy Monday.

[via Slashdot]

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Video

Lee LeFever on RSS in Plain English

A lot of folks get fancy-pants TLAs flung at them all day long. My pal Lee LeFever over at commoncraft just published an excellent (and short) video about what RSS is. Enjoy.


Click To Play

Originally posted here.

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Geek Fun Video

Commercials not available

I’m a big fan of alternative means of watching television. Hell, I launched a separate (now sorta kinda abandoned) blog about it. So when ABC announced that they were going to do high(er) definition versions of their show online, I was stoked.

I tried it out on launch day and got this image (which I thought was pretty funny):

ABC.com-NoAdsAvailable.jpg

Now, maybe it’s just me, but “advertisements not available” sounds like a feature, not a bug. Still, the fact that ABC is upping their video quality and offering a limited number of ads on their online programming is pretty cool.