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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

[video via Laughing Squid]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Click To Play

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]

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.

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):

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.

In the last few months, I’ve become more and more disgruntled with my cable service. The cost is high and I simply don’t watch enough television to justify the price. The video quality is poor and the DVR makes me not want to watch television. The selection of video on demand and movies on the “movie” channels are so poor that we also subscribe to Netflix to supplement our entertainment “needs.”

I looked hard at our television viewing habits and realized that most of the tv programming we watch is freely available over the air. There are some exceptions but by and large our “regularly scheduled programming” comes from the big networks. The value proposition is just not there.

While we do receive HD signals from our provider and that provider is increasing the amount of HD channels on the network, by and large, HD content comes from the major networks. Standard definition, or SD content is so compressed, legitimate download sources are starting to look better.

Crappy picture, lack of selection and high costs leave me with two options.

1. I could sit and complain about it.
2. Or, I could ditch cable.

Given all that, we decided to ditch cable and launch this blog to tell you about it.

If you’d like to know more about my little experiment, head on over to Ditching Cable, where I’ll be showing folks how easy it is to get rid of your cable subscription. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be spending some of my time fixing it up in the next few weeks.

Feeling much like most sequels do, the EepyBird boys are back. Bigger and better than their first video, but lacking the wonder and awe. This time, they’re getting paid by Google, not Revver.

TechCrunch reports on the deal between Google, Eepybird and their new sponsors, Diet Coke and Mentos (You’d think that Diet Pepsi would beating down their door). According to the report, this will be the first of many sponsored videos from Google Video, but this doesn’t appear to be for just anyone. Google is focusing on the top producers, rather than their typical long tail.

Unfortunately, the biggest loser in this deal is Revver, but this certainly proves their business model.

PopSugar gets $5mm in funding from Sequoia
Blog network for “young, hip women” got a nice kitty from the folks at Sequoia. It looks like PopSugar’s main site has been growing a fair clip on their main blog (see graphic) and are doing a bit more than just blogging with a little bit of social networking thrown in. With women marrying and having kids later in life, this is a strong demographic that is under-served on the net.

UndoTV launches…kinda

Looks like Chris Pirillo and Leo Laporte are getting the band back together for one more show…or an online revival of the TechTV gang of old. The site also looks to be a hub for getting other folks involved uploading their own reviews and tech related content. Looks interesting, although, this could just be a channel on YouTube, so I’ll be curious to see how they differentiate the product.

The first thing that I thought today was how strange it was that Mark Cuban had been calling Google “moronic” for thinking of buying YouTube. I don’t imagine that he was telling Tim Koogle that he was “crazy,” for buying his company, Broadcast.com, a company that Yahoo! would spend the next several years dismantling.

Mark’s definitely asking the right question as to whether this is a good deal for YouTube or not. After all, Broadcast.com, which arguably was more of a “real business,” (they had corporate customers, after all), wasn’t making any money and still got $5 billion. YouTube probably should have held out for a lot more money.

Ah, but those were bubble times and everyone thought that the future would come more quickly than it did. Who could have imagined that streaming video would suck so much? Aside – can you pause Real, QT or WMV streaming without waiting for 2+ mins for it to restart yet?

While the YouTube acquisition is similar to Yahoo!’s acquisition of Broadcast.com, I think there are two key differences. First, the iPod (and to a certain degree, the cell phone). Everyone has one (or both) and short form video excels on these devices. I know you can’t carry these YT videos around easily yet, but it’s coming.

Second, and more importantly, is the Class of 2009. If you live anywhere near teenagers, you may have noticed that there are a lot of them. The Class of 2009 (and the years surrounding them) is the largest graduating class in American history. These kids are already powering a lot of Web 2.0. They have always had a computer in their home and they probably can barely remember not being connected to the internet.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is part of their bet on this upcoming generation of creators. It has taken us a long time, but we’re finally getting people off their butts and making them into content producers not just consumers. Mark Cuban helped lay the groundwork for this revolution and instead of pedantically nitpicking from the side lines, he should be cheering them on.

Now, let’s just hope they find a business model. :-)