Assuming you didn’t already share your Instagram photos to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter and also assuming that you deleted all of the photos off of your iPhone without backing them up first – you could export your photos from Instagram using instaport.me.

I’m in no hurry to leave Instagram. But we’ll see what the next year or so means for the service.

There are services that fit in between the size of Flickr and Facebook (such as Photobucket) but it is an interesting way to look at things.

PicPlum is everything printing photos usually isn’t; easy and affordable.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

Thanks to the Macworld team for reaching out and including my post in the article.

Some guy named Kirk proposed to me. Sorry Kirk, I’m taken. But I am glad you found the information useful.

Yesterday I said that I’d share the many ways in which I use Smart Albums in iPhoto. Instead of sharing all of the ways in one post I figured I’d break them up. One of my Smart Albums helps me to locate possible duplicate photos. Here is why and how this works.

I stress possible duplicates because this Smart Album is neither fool proof nor genius. This is a dead simple Smart Album yet it seems to get the vast majority of duplicate photos in my personal photo library. Perhaps it can help you too.

So, why are there duplicates in the first place?

iPhoto has built-in duplicate photo detection on import. It warns you when it finds what it believes might be a duplicate photo to one that is already in your photo library. iPhoto does a fairly good job at this too and it is based on filename and date/time.

In my own personal experience I’ve found that 90% of my duplicate photos happened because of something that happened just prior to the import process. In some cases it was simply that my Macintosh automatically added a _1 or _2 to the photo’s filename because it already existed in a folder that I was using to store photos prior to importing them into iPhoto. This happens, perhaps, when both my wife and I are storing photos on a laptop while traveling and waiting until we return home to import them into iPhoto.

Since iPhoto does not check the binary of the photo nor does it recognize duplicates based on some sort of ‘visual’ check then some of these duplicate photos slip by. What we end up with is two, or sometimes three, photos that match each other in every way but filename.

For this specific case of duplicate photos that share everything except filename I’ve come up with this simple Smart Album that seems to do a good job at finding most of the duplicates in my photo library. Here are the rules.

This simple Smart Album simply looks for images where the filename ends in _2.jpg, _2.JPG, _1.jpg or _1.JPG. (iPhoto’s Smart Albums are case sensitive.) Usually what you’ll end up with, but you should definitely verify with your main library before you delete any of them, is a bunch of duplicate photos that have a match in your library and can probably be deleted. To delete the photos from your main library from within this Smart Album see How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

When I first created this Smart Album for my personal photo library of around 52,000 photos it filtered out little over 1,100 as duplicates. After going through each of them to verify that they were indeed duplicates I ended up being able to delete about 900 of them. Not too shabby.

"Move to trash" inactive.

I use Smart Albums in iPhoto for a number of reasons, which I plan on covering in an upcoming post, but every once and a while I find a few photos that I’d like to delete. Not just delete from the Smart Album but actually delete from my entire Library. Until today I had not figured out how to do that.

The problem: When you have a photo selected in a Smart Album and you want to delete it the ‘Move to trash’ option in the Photos menu is inactive. I thought I had tried every single key combination I could think of, tried dragging the photo, tried to “find the photo in the Library” (like iTunes can do) and still nothing seemed to work.

The solution: Dom Barnes came to my rescue on Twitter. The magic keystroke is CMD + OPT + DEL. Or, Command, Option and Delete, when you have the photo(s) selected that you want to delete. This will move those photos to the Trash (even though iPhoto doesn’t show you this option anywhere).

This is going to save me a lot of time. Thanks Dom.

Thanks to Apple for providing a solution in relatively short order.

Random 60: Calendars | Favorite on Viddler.

I don’t know about you but I love calendars. If I didn’t self-impose a limit of two my wall would be filled with calendars of all types. Right now I have a stunning Hawai’i calendar hanging up (thanks to Eliza). It has photos from different islands that make up Hawai’i. And I also have a National Parks calendar that is a yearly gift from my brother-in-law from South Dakota, John. This calendar is big, has amazing photographs from many of the National Parks in North America, and is extremely well designed.

Do you have any calendars? If so, share them in the comments. Oh – and if you’re going to post a photo of your calendar just paste the link to the calendar and I will fix your comment to include a photograph. The penmanship episode really turned out terrific with photos so thanks to all those that participated over there.

Me, speaking at Podcamp Hawai’i. Credit: Eliza Devroe

I have an awful lot of writing to do. I figured one of the easiest things to start off with, and hopefully get the ball rolling with everything else that I need to write about, would be the photos, videos, tweets, and much more from both Podcamp and Wordcamp Hawai’i.

Oh, did I mention that I learned how to properly spell Hawai’i while I was there?

If you’ve been following the pch08 tag on Flickr, on Twitter, on Viddler, and pretty much everywhere else, you’ll probably have seen these already.  If not… than I just did you a favor.

The visuals tell only part of the story. You’ll have to be there next year ((There will be a next year, right?)) to experience what type of conference the outstanding people in Hawai’i are able to put together.

I have a few problems with the way this has been implemented on the iPhone and also how it works on my Macintosh.  But before I begin bashing Apple – I do want to say that I’m fairly optimistic that other applications will use this feature much better than Apple has.

A few quick notes and then you can watch the video below.  First, the iPhone asks (though I didn’t manage to capture this on “film”) if you’d like to record the location the photo was taken.  It doesn’t say why, how, or where to view this information.  It just asks, you hit ok, and you’re never told about anything ever again.  Second, the iPhone stores the latitude and longitude inside of the file’s meta-data. There is no way to visualize this information on your iPhone.  In fact, photos that are geo-encoded look exactly the same on your iPhone as the photos that are not.  Third, when you import them onto your computer – there is no real way to tell the difference on there either.  I use Image Capture to import, but I also tested iPhoto, and neither application lets me know that the location was recorded (without a little digging).

Here is a quick video demonstration, and I threw in my opinions for those that don’t like to read, of how the iPhone handles things with the camera now.

So there you have it.  Yes the iPhone records this information properly.  But I think the iPhone needs to take advantage of this information in some way to make it valuable to the lay-person, and I also think that iPhoto needs to be updated to support geo-location so that these photos are fun to play with on your computer too.

Anyone know of any iPhone / Macintosh applications that would be fun to play with these photos now?

Update: Somewhat unrelated, new post called How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily.  And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface.  If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.

So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete.  Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.

Solution: Use Image Capture.

My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome.  Opening iPhoto is a chore.  Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time.  So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.

1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
6. Click “Download all”.

Here are some photos of the process.

Image capture.

New folder.

Delete the photos.

Empty camera roll result.

Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while.  When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.

What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone?  This can be done but it takes some work.  After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”.  In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone ((You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes.)) select this album for syncing.  This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.

I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!

I couldn’t think of a much better title for this link, so I used the title from the actual ManBabies.com web site.  ManBabies.com, essentially, is a collection of altered images with men holding babies but having their heads swapped.

While the purpose of this site originally was to showcase Dads with their children, and having their heads swapped, it seems to have grown outside of those boundaries pretty quickly because I find it hard to believe that all of these photos are actual father / child.

My favorites so far? There is this guy being thrown into the air and the bodybuilder – as two examples.

Source: ManBabies.com — Dad?
Via: Boing Boing: Swapping heads with dad and kid photos.

I was wrong about the marsh, but I was able to get a few good photographs anyway.

But, that’s ok.  I fully expect to be wrong now and then.  I spent maybe only about 30 minutes pushing through some thick brush in order to get to the place I wanted to be to find nothing but a small trickle of a stream.  I’ll get over it.

Hmmm, where to shoot next?  Maybe it will be a good spot, maybe not – but I’ll keep trying regardless.

You’ll notice that after each link on my site, I have the following text:

“Have a recommendation? Do you have a link, product, service, book, or something you think I’d be interested in linking to? You can write me an email and let me know about it.”

If you find something interesting, please let me know about it!  If I find it interesting, I’ll post about it here on my site and give you credit for the find.  Oh, and I don’t want this to be limited to virtual things, quite the contrary.  If you let me know about a physical “thing” that I might be interested in, I might just beg you to send me one so I can try it out for myself and then write about it.

Buy! Buy! Buy my photos!  I am not sure why I haven’t done this sooner but you can now ask to purchase any of my photos.  You can request the original digital file or a print!  Here is the text that appears below each photo here on the site.

“Please note: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. If you would like to buy an original copy of this, or any of my photos, please contact me.”

I’m mainly doing this for anyone that would like to use my photos commercially, obviously.  The license that I’ve decided to use, for any content on my site, pretty much states that you are free to use my “stuff” non-commercially so long as you give me proper attribution.  If you want to use it commercially, you’ll have to throw a few dollars into the tip jar.

So please, use the suggestion and money boxes.  I’m excited to learn about interesting things that you come across in your lives.  So get started!

Last night Keystone College’s Thomas G. Cupillari Astronomical Observatory was open to the public, and so Eliza, Chris, Andrew, and I took the short ride out to take advantage of the exceptionally clear skies. I could not be happier with my decision to go. We had a great time learning about, and gazing at, our solar system’s planets, stars much larger than our own sun, and distant galaxies.

Every Wednesday and Friday from March 12th until May 30th, of this year, the observatory is open to public lectures and viewing sessions. While we were there we were given a ~30-minute lecture about the viewable sky in our hemisphere, the constellations, and some of the quirkiness of star gazing. The lecture was jammed packed with information and I look forward to one day listening to it again, just so I get it all.  After the lecture you are free to use, under the careful observation and help from the staff and volunteers there, the telescopes that the Observatory has in place.  We primarily used four main telescopes while we were there.

The planet Mercury at sunset (just left of center).

Before the lecture, and before we even peered through any telescope, we were able to get a clear glimpse of Mercury, the planet closest to our Sun and only visible during the morning and evening.  An object so clearly visible, yet often overlooked as probably being the first star you can see as the sun sets, yet is actually an entire planet.

After the lecuture, the first telescope we used in the circle-shaped building with a rotating roof, is a telescope built by the firm of Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport, MA in the late 19th Century.  In 1971 Thomas G. Cupillari bought the telescope from an ex-host of the Today Show on NBC, Dave Garroway, and with a contribution of $5,000 from the Scranton Area Foundation – built the building in which it now sits and is operated.  Focused on Mercury we were able to get a much better look of the atmosphere’s affects on how we see objects in the sky.  Mercury appeared to be a giant rainbow, really a neat looking site.  With a rather swift movement, the gentleman maneuvering the telescope for us, pointed the telescope nearly straight up in the sky.  After adjusting the rotating roof into position, making slight adjustments to the telescope through the finder, he said “Ok, this next thing is a fake.”.  I was the first to look through eyepiece when I saw Saturn, complete with its many rings, being displayed as vividly as a photograph in a science book.  With black space and only a few stars surrounding it, it really did look fake.  I was amazed.

The second telescope we used to focus in on Betelgeuse and Mars.  The woman handling this telescope, who also gave the lecture, put me to the task of finding some of these objects.  The telescope were were using was “thrown together” by one of the volunteers using a few old parts of a Meade telescope he had.  I am not sure which parts were original, which parts were modified, but the telescope performed wonderfully.  The view finder (not sure of the technical term) was equipped with an infrared bulls-eye.  Lining it up to an object in the sky could not have been easier.  Mars shown like a jewel in the sky.  It looked like a woman’s ring; diamonds surrounding sapphire.  I can’t describe it any other way.  Saturn appeared much more far away but still just as crisp.

The third and fourth telescopes were in a building with a fully retractable roof.  The one we used most was, I think, a Meade LX200 on some sort of custom fixed mount (here is a photo of its lens).  It was operated by remote control and held hundreds of thousands of astronomical objects in its database.  Type in a number, hit enter, and the thing lined itself right up with what you wanted to see.  Using this telescope we focused on entire galaxies, appearing like nothing more than dust in space, which contain billions of stars.  We were also able to see a planetary nebula (described as such because of the relative shape of the nebula, not because the nebula produces planets rather than stars) which had a bright center and a fuzzy aura.

Me

Eliza

Chris

Andrew

Looking through the Meade LX200 at Mercury.

The fourth telescope was fixed towards the southern sky and, using it, we were able to see a few stars that were “nearing the end of their lives”.  The star was bright red, like a distant break light, and was clearly distinguishable from its neighbors (yet you’d never see it with the naked eye).  We used this telescope the least of all.

Left: The main telescope building. Right: Same building from the rear at sunset.

Being clothed in only sweatshirts as the temperature dipped into the low 30s, we had to leave before the sky truly got pitch-black, but I’m looking forward to a return visit in less than two weeks, were we’re encouraged to bring our own telescopes (I have one that I want to learn how to use better).  I can’t tell you how anxious I am to get back out there, prepared with tools and proper clothing, to be up all night and gaze at the stars once again.

I know it isn’t even 10am yet, but lets just call this the “link of the day” shall we?

Nina Katchadourian decided, in 1998 no less, to repair broken spiderwebs around the home she was living in at the time.  She used red sewing thread and a few dabs of glue.

Here is what she says about the reception of her work by the spiders:

“My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.”

I could look at this exhibition all day.

Source: Nina Katchadourian.
Via Kottke, Boing Boing, and others.

GGW! Normally that accronym would be reserved for late-night commercials about incredibly inexpensive DVD-sets with future women that will sue Joe Francis.

But not this time.

This time GGW refers to NASA’s celebration of the Hubble Telescope being launched 18 years ago!  And so they’ve put together a site of awe-inspiring images that Hubble has captured of galaxies that are “merging”.  They wanted to put up photographs of galaxies that were “in love” since they are “in love” with Hubble.  Truly touching, isn’t it?

“As this astonishing Hubble atlas of interacting galaxies illustrates, galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures.”

Indeed.

Source: Merging Galaxies.

The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, is a natural phenomenon worth researching. The hows, whys, and whens are not as stunning as just sitting back and looking at it though. This series of photos gives us a glimpse of what the Aurora looks like from Murmansk, Russia.

I’ve never had the opportunity to shoot the Aurora, but I plan to one day have my own photos of both auroras borealis and australis.

Source: English Russia » Aurora Borealis in Murmansk.

“Good afternoon, I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up. Love, Jay / The Plug”

Source: The Plug – Stranger Photos Have Happened.

Ranging from interesting to weird, the Consumer Reports Vintage photo gallery is an entertaining resource to look through. With images dating from the mid-1930s until the 1980s this gallery is a collection of some of the photos of the CR cataloging their research.

They say these images show the “ingenuity of [their] testers”. This one I found (pictured) makes me beg to differ.

Source: ConsumerReports.org – Vintage photo gallery.

Sameer Barkawi, actor

My good friend Sameer Barkawi, who has been writing on TUG.n a little lately, has wrapped up shooting on what will be his movie debut.

Sameer plays a homeless man. When Sameer came to visit us last month his hair was getting really long (not too much of a surprise if you know Sameer) and he said that he was “playing a bum” in an upcoming film project at school. Little did we know how awesome he’d look as a homeless person (pictured).

“I just made my first film debut. Two consecutive days of eight hour shoots, and the film is done. Thanks to the director, Brian Miller, for giving the role of the homeless painter. Also, thanks to Ross, Brianne, and everyone else responsible for making the shoot fun, even when I wasn’t doing anything. The shoot was just more reason as to why I’m a film major.”

Congratulations my friend.

More photos are available on his Web site.

Source: My Movie Debut « Unfiltered Sarcasm.

Looking through Keegan’s now aptly named “The Great Springfield Coffee Tour” photoset I came across a link to theworkshop | 308. On their site they have great photos showing off some of their unique products and I saw this photo (pictured) which reminded me of the Life Posters we used to put together.

I’m wondering now if this should be the second coming of the Life Poster for Eliza and I. I really like the way this looks, and I like the idea of the “poster” coming off of the wall like that. Neat.

Source: theworkshop | 308 – furniture

Tiananmen Square

Mike Stimpson does an excellent job recreating classic photos using Legos. Some of the most notable photos include:

• Tiananmen Square (pictured)
• V.J. Day Times Square
• Lunch Atop a Skyscraper

More please.

(Source: Classics in Lego – a photoset on Flickr)

Baron Woolen Mills

Heather Armstrong, also known as Dooce due to the domain name of her Web site, is an excellent photographer. I recommend perusing all of her photos – but you can start with this one.

“This is an old abandoned building in Brigham City, a few blocks from the house Jon grew up in. I’d say this photo pretty much sums up that tiny town.”

(Source: Baron Woolen Mills | dooce ®)

Jeremy Wheaton, brother of Wil Wheaton (writer, actor), recently won a prize for one of his photos (this one actually).

After bouncing around on his site for a little while, I must say that I agree with his brother Wil – he is very good.

Photo comparison.

Chippewa Lake, a now abandoned theme park in Ohio, was once a booming park full of ride enthusiasts and families on vacation. Now it is a rundown, dilapidated and overgrown patch of woods. Sort of like a deep sea shipwreck turned coral reef.

This photoset by Flickr user Brian B. shows the current state of Chippewa Lake today – as well as a few comparison shots of how it looked in its heyday.

After doing some research I’ve found out that this theme park was open for nearly 100 years, and was the victim of some arson since its closing in 1978.

/source the big dipper – a photoset on Flickr
/via Jason Kottke

Eliza Devroe, my wife, captured a nice photo at a 50th Anniversary party that we attended this past weekend. I’m linking to this photo for two reasons.

1. I think it is a wonderful photo.
2. I wanted to test how I plan to link to photos in the future.

Great shot babe.

(Source: Love on Flickr – Photo Sharing!)

Source: Rion.nu a photoblog by Rion Nakaya.

(Source: New York City | Veerle’s blog)

These four TVs show weather, news, stock market information, company profiles, and much more. These are in the ViddlerHQ lobby.

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

The script isn’t anything special mind you, all it does it “watch” any Flickr feed for new entries. To be more precise, my server runs this script every 15 minutes and checks for new photos, when there is one, it creates a TinyURL and posts it to Twitter (like this).

But I wanted this to work for Pownce.

I immediately dove head first into Pownce’s API only to find out that the API didn’t allow posting anything. I thought my Powncing days were over until, out of some crazy stroke of coincidence, I read an article on TechCrunch that said Pownce was due to release a new version of their API the very next day. Turns out, I didn’t even have to wait that long and the Pownce wiki was updated to include documentation for version 2 of their API.

Without blinking an eye I finished my script, grabbed myself an app_key, and Pownced the script (you’ll need to be logged in, and be my Pownce friend to see this Pownce message). Once I figured out that I couldn’t Pownce a file to the general public, I knew I had to find some time to write this post.

Since then I read that Dave Winer also enjoys the way Pownce shows links to Flickr photos and that he is running a similar script. So I thought I’d put this out for everyone to use.

Powncer!

Enough beating around the bush, you can download the script here which includes an XML parser for ripping through Flickr’s RSS feed. You’ll need to edit the first few lines of powncer.php for it to work, so this isn’t your run-of-the-mill plug-and-play type script, unfortunately, but for the PHP savvy of you, you should be able to get it up and running pretty easily. If you need help getting it setup, just ask in the comments.

I run this script here on cdevroe.com every 15 minutes using cron. You may run it however you’d like.

You’ll notice in the upper right hand corner of each photo’s page is a small icon of an iPhone. Clicking that will bring you to the image that has been cropped for use as an iPhone background.

Clicking on each photo, then clicking on the iPhone, then downloading the image, might seem like a pain – so I’ve created a zip file, which contains every photo to-date, that will be updated every time I publish a new photo. You can find this zip by clicking on the iPhone on the main Photo index.

Three example iPhone backgrounds.

I’m releasing these photos under the same license as the rest of my site (see footer). In other words, you can take them and use them as you’d like, but don’t sell them, mmkay?

So go page through some of the photos and grab some.

Recently I decided that, instead of allowing my Flickr account to go to waste, I would use it as my primary way of uploading photos from my iPhone. Instead of creating a mobile version of my photolog, I now just email my photos to my Flickr account and display them there.

After leaving MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn – I’m beginning to think of new ways that I can use some of my accounts that I have lingering all over the place. Do you have any good examples of how you’re reusing older accounts on web sites?

“The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.”

Over the last four months I’ve managed to publish more than “a dozen” photos, so perhaps this small update is a little overdue but I wanted to get something out because, let’s face it, the old index page was absolute bleh. Although I have even more plans for what the Photo section should include, I think this version should serve its purpose until I have at least a few hundred photos up and tagged.

Left: Old Photo index. Bleh. Right: New Photo index. Yay!

How it works

For those of you that will no doubt end up asking me how I pulled this off, here is the incredibly boring and simple details. The Photos section is still running a fairly vanilla version of WordPress – it is just that I’ve now added a custom field value to each photo post (namely: thumbnail) and created a thumbnail for each photo (about 45 at the time of this indexes launch) I’ve published.

A side note about creating the thumbnails: I had a ton of fun creating the thumbnails for each photo. Each thumbnail is not just a smaller version of the photo, it is a re-cropping of the original photo. In some cases, I’m actually happier with the way the thumbnail came out than the photo itself. It is like having a second crack at editing the photo – with only your distance from subject changing. Anyway, I’m showing my photo geek side.

There really are no secrets behind the new index page except that I’ve managed to produce some custom HTML output for the Photos category on this blog and am obviously pulling in the thumbnails accordingly and styling them differently.

Known issues

As with this Photo section’s history so far, there are a few things that I want to change over time. Being that this isn’t the final version of the index itself, I’m looking forward to sprucing it up again in four to six months.

There is also the question of beating WordPress into submission regarding the URL for the second page of photos. I’m having trouble not having the word /category/ in the URL (if anyone knows a work around, send it my way). Once I fix that, I’ll be much happier with the index pages.

The second main thing I hope to fix in the coming days/weeks is the fact that the thumbnails on each page show up a little oddly due to the fact that I’ve chosen to show the most recently published photo a little larger than the rest. Being that I’ve made that decision, and I’m sticking to it for now, I will have to play with the number of photos show per page in order to pull off the grid properly.

So, that’s all for now. I am hoping now that when people come across my Photos section they aren’t turned off by its appearance quiet so quickly and actually take the time to explore some of the photos. Let me know what you think!

Update: So I had to make a few adjustments already. But one thing I want everyone to be sure of – if you are using Safari, be sure to hit refresh once or twice on the Photos section. For whatever reason Safari does not love to show you the latest version of the page without forcing it to do so.

If only Safari’s over-zealous caching would trickle its way onto the iPhone’s mobile Safari.

One year ago, almost to the day

I use my Macbook on a daily basis. I’ve put it through its paces. I’v taken it on several trips across the country and it has always performed perfectly for me. The battery life is sufficient, the screen size is nearly perfect, its extensibility with external monitors and even my television is an added benefit. I have no real complaints.

Today, a little over a year

I’d say the only thing that I would change, now that I’ve used it for an entire year, would be the size of the hard drive (though much larger sizes are now available in current models). The hard drive is only 80GB in this model of the Macbook which is not large enough for me to keep all of my music, video, and photos locally on the computer. Being that I’m using a laptop that may never be possible so I’ll always be tethered to some external drive(s) when I need that data.

I’ve had the opportunity to upgrade to a Macbook Pro but I am going to stick with this Macbook. I may even run it into the ground I love it so much. Even if I did upgrade to a larger hard drive, faster processor, and the ability to have much RAM – I’d probably still stick with the black Macbook. I really like the form factor, size, and weight of this computer. It has been the best computer I’ve ever owned.

I can has cramp

Last week was the normal exercise and workout activities but near the end of the week Chris and I, via my good friend Larry, discovered HIIT running. The photo on your right is the result of my first HIIT session wherein I got a cramp and Chris nearly showed his lunchables. HIIT running is addictive and a little bit insane. Once you’ve done it and the pain along with the throbbing head veins subside, you crave it. You are constantly thinking about your next session and how you need to add another cycle. Like I said, insane.

This weekend we hit a few wineries, as we tend to love doing so much, and enjoyed a massive amount of great food and wine. Picnics in vineyards people! Naturally I thought I’d overdone it. Come to find out I didn’t gain an ounce over the weekend. So just like last week I’m sittin’ pretty at 185.

Yesterday was our third round of HIIT running. However, since Chris and I are insane (as mentioned before), we decided to go to the gym for biceps, triceps, and forearm workouts before heading out to play basketball for a few more hours. But boy did it feel good (at the time). This morning I’m a little sore and a few of my joints are cursing me – but overall I’m in good shape.

I’m looking forward to making this a great week to end the first of many years on the diet.

As with other overviews I’ve written I want to take you back to the time I first downloaded Skitch and met its designer Cris Pearson. I was sitting at a table in the Mashroom at Web2Open in the Moscone Center (which was caught by Scott Beale in this photo). Cris pulls up a chair next to me and begins enjoying his lunch provided by the Expo and we get to talking about Skitch. Details are a little fuzzy because of the number of conversations I had at that table but he quickly launched his Dashboard and was able to create an account for me which then emailed me a link to download Skitch for myself. I was thoroughly impressed with the way he setup his account activation process so I knew I was in for a treat with Skitch.

Being incredibly busy during events such as the Expo I was unable to give Skitch a thorough run through until I got home. Since then I’ve been using Skitch pretty regularly for both work and play and I’ve been loving every minute of it.

Me wishing my salad was made of Skitch.

Skitch’s features

How can an application, with the primary purpose of taking screenshots, quickly become one of my favorites? I think it is a combination of the user interface and how well thought-out Skitch really is. Skitch is jammed packed with features yet the interface for those features never gets in your way or becomes overbearing. This is the result of a ton of research, trial and error, and well thought out design by Cris and his team. Here are the main features of Skitch as I see it:

Quickly take a screenshot in just about anyway you can think of. The Mac OS has some really great shortcut keys for taking screenshots. You can select a specific viewable area for your screenshot, select a specific window, or capture your entire screen space. Skitch wraps all of these into an easy to use UI that then lets you “do something” with that screenshot.

Then you can annotate a screenshot once you’ve captured it. By adding shapes, arrows, text, etc. you can quickly highlight and draw attention to the specific parts of the screenshot that you’d like to. Or, you can put earrings on dogs. I remember doing this type of thing in Photoshop for years and what a pain that was! Not only was I forced to open an application that is far too complex for this type of simple annotation but it hogged all of my memory!

Sharing your screenshot with the world is probably Skitch’s strong suit. Skitch is not just an application but it also connects to a hosting service provided by plasq called MySkitch. MySkitch gives you a simple way to share your screenshots without worrying about saving, emailing, or FTPing those files to those you want to share with. With one-click your screenshot is available for the world to see! You don’t want to use MySkitch because all of your friends use Flickr? No problem because Skitch supports MySkitch, .Mac, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and of course Flickr. I’m fairly certain that this list will grow before and after launch of the final product.

Taking photos with your webcam is dead simple. Skitch does not come equipped with all of the effects that Photo Booth does, but if you need a quick way to take a snapshot with your webcam, annotate it, and share it – Skitch is for you.

The little things

The main thing that separates the good applications from the great applications is attention to detail. Skitch has a few ‘little things’ that both surprised and impressed me.

First was the delete feature. Skitch saves an entire history of your screenshots (which in itself is great), but the history remembers where you shared that file. So, when you go to delete something out of your history that you may have shared via Flickr, Skitch will ask if you’d like to delete the local file, the file that you shared on Flickr, or both. How cool is that?

Howdy, from Skitch.

I suppose the second would have to be the ability to drag the “drag me” file from the bottom of the window at any point while you’re editing the original screenshot. Instead of saving and sharing what you’ve done so far you can quickly drag that “drag me” file into an instant message, email, onto your desktop, or into a document. This saves a lot of time and also saves your Skitch history from having multiple copies of unfinished work.

Resizing screenshots has always been a hassle. Perhaps you’ve taken a screenshot of your entire desktop which spans thousands of pixels in every direction and you’d like to share that with someone via email who may not even have the same resolution as you do. Simply resizing skitch to be the size you want your screenshot to be (which is indicated in the bottom left hand corner) will resize your screenshot automatically.

There is a lot about Skitch that I’m leaving out. Really I wanted to provide a general overview of why I like Skitch so much and why I recommend that you register to be notified of Skitch’s public release. Also be sure to read what everyone else is saying about Skitch so that you know I am not alone.

Want an invite to try Skitch?

Cris was kind enough to allow me to give away five invites to use the latest Skitch beta along with getting yourself a shiny new MySkitch account. After noodling it for a bit I’ve decided on who is going to get these invites. The first five people to write a blog post about how they’d use Skitch (linking to both this entry and the Skitch site) will receive a MySkitch account and a beta copy of Skitch. Be sure to trackback this entry so that I see it and if you don’t know how to do that send me an email (which is on my about page).

Happy Skitching!

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

Gary Vaynerchuk in London
Photo credit: The hard working Tara Hunt

For those that do not know Gary, Wine Library TV, or Cork’d – let me take a second to catch you up to speed. Gary Vaynerchuk is the Director of Operations for Wine Library and began his career in wine at the ripe age of 17 (someone call the cops). He’s visited every major wine region on the planet, has probably tasted more wine this week than most people do in their adult lives, and is single handedly trying to “change the wine world” (or, trying to bring the community into every aspect of wine instead of it being an elitist club as it has been for so long).

Gary’s main mode of attack has been Wine Library TV, his daily video blog, where he tastes wine and rates it “live”. Even though he has personal relationships with most if not all of the vineyards that have their wine in his store, Gary does not hold back with his criticisms nor his accolades. His honesty, charisma, and passion for wine has made his video blog one of the top video blogs on the Internet and certainly the number one vlog for wine!

Cork’d, the brain-child of Dan Benjamin and Dan Cederholm, is a social network centered on keeping a wine journal and creating a list of wines you’d like to try based on what you’re friends have had. Cork’d is well built, beautifully designed, and bustling with active fans of wine.

For all of the above reasons – the merging of Gary Vaynerchuk’s empire with Cork’d is synergy++.

So now that you’re all caught up to speed, I thought I’d ask Gary a few questions about his acquisition of Cork’d and what it will mean for his current WLTV audience (of which I’ve been a member of since the very beginning).

When did you first discover Cork’d and when did you get interested it in as a property for Wine Library?

Gary: “Last May and last May! LOL. I knew this was it, I have been dreaming of launching a name I own, ratingwines.com, for 6 years (look it up) and when i saw Cork’d my dreams were dashed ”

I thought it was interesting that Gary knew he wanted to do something like Cork’d from the very beginning. This alone shows his dedication to his mantra or “changing the wine world”. Obviously the entire industry has been geared more towards paying attention to only a select few for wine ratings. Now, using Cork’d, one can see the consensus of the entire community rather than just one person using one rating system.

To show a little history here, Dan Benjamin shows that Wine Library was the longest running sponsor for Cork’d, which shows that Gary was always in the prime position to tap into this community and that Gary was always trying to help Cork’d become the best it possibly can be:

“One of our longest running advertisers was Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk’s excellent wine videocast. Each month, Gary would call us and buy out the top-spot in the Cork’d sidebar. Behind the scenes, he was always talking about partnering with us, coming up with ways we could enhance Cork’d, tie us in to his huge database of wines and wine labels – he really wanted to see Cork’d succeed.” — [source]

It is this dedication to helping something that he didn’t even own at the time that shows that Cork’d is in great hands going forward.

The synergy between Wine Library, Wine Library TV, your wine label service, and Cork’d are obvious! How long before we start to see all of these services mashed together, and what do you think the first thing to be integrated will be?

I’m a Vayniac – at Seneca Lake, NY
Get your shirt!

Gary: “Very soon! Give us 30-45 days to start wowing you!”

I’ve already seen and spoke to the WLTV crew about a few of the things they are working on. Obviously, being Viddler‘s Community Evangelist, I was interested to know how each episode of Wine Library TV (down to tasting each wine) would fit into this deal. Look for some pretty cool tie ins between Wine Library TV, Cork’d, and Viddler’s “linking to any moment” technology. However, as a “Vayniac”, I’m even more excited about having access to Gary’s tastings across this entire network of sites.

What part of this entire deal has you the most excited? I know for me its being able to watch the video of you tasting a wine that I may have had right from the Cork’d site. What about you?

Gary: “The fact that people can share and enjoy each other. Cork’d has given the infrastructure needed to create the wine community I dream of. I can’t wait to see wines have 100 reviews on them each, that will be fun!”

This also supports his mantra. At the end of each show, Gary emphasizes “You, with a little bit of me, we’re changing the wine world. Aren’t we?” Well now more than ever Gary is trying to put that power into the hands of the community rather than himself. Sure he’s the ring leader (and a very good one at that) but now all of us have the ability to say what we think about the wine’s we’re tasting and actually have it matter instead of falling on deaf ears.

You’ve got a ton of loyal Vayniacs that use the WineLibrary TV forums right now. Are all of us Vayniacs going to have to sign up to Cork’d and manage both accounts, or will you try to tie those two systems together somehow?

Gary: “I think the Vayniacs and everyone else will see the use. We will have a function that allows people to post a review on Cork’d and allow that review to go right to the WL Forum’s tasting notes, making it a whole 360 experience. My hope is people will see the huge value in using Cork’d though since it will also cellar your wines, keep a wish list, ect.”

The Cork’d blog (currently going through some DNS issues) has been silent for awhile, and never really took off. Do you see this as having more potential than just a random post every now and then? Do you have any plans for the Cork’d blog? I know you have a wine related blog already – can they be tied together somehow or will they remain separate?

Gary: “Not sure on this front but I think this is Cork’d's voice and it needs to be talkative. We mostly want to share thoughts and interact, I’m sure we will explore all possibilities.”

I’m a big proponent of blogging so I hope to see some of Cork’d's future plans, updates, and community efforts verbalized through their blog and on WLTV.

What will the JETS record be this year now that you’ve gone to the draft?

Gary: “16-0 with an easy win over the EAGLES;) honestly the 1st 2 games are brutal but a 10-6 is possible for sure!”

I’m pretty sure that jab is directed at Chris but I’ll let him respond.

Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions Gary. Personally I look forward to the developments that are sure to come in the near future to tie all of these great things together and really help us change the wine world one day at a time.

Additional coverage

There has been a pretty good amount of coverage since this acquisition was announced. Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin both wrote some really great background on the entire deal. Read Cederholm’s post and Benjamin’s post on their personal blogs. CenterNetworks was the first to get wind of this deal, but without having all the specifics they covered only the redesign of Wine Library TV’s main site. I’m thinking that someone over there is definitely doing their job. Mashable covered the actual deal but failed to get into many specifics and even got a few of their facts wrong. I think it is interesting to see, when you have inside knowledge of a “deal”, just how accurate some of these stories are (or are not). All in all I think the best coverage comes from those that keep their ear to the ground, are willing to ask for information before they post it, and strive to get every fact straight before they are willing to publish.

Update: Here is a photo of Gary wearing a Viddler shirt on Digg Nation.

[slug]interview-gary-vaynerchuk[/slug]

The Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo Floor

The expo floor was filled with companies of all types ranging from large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to smaller more fun companies like Viddler, Zimki, and Piczo. Some people were being very professional and demonstrating some very high-level enterprise applications (which are typically found behind-the-scenes of more social software. ie. Analytics and monitoring systems for server grids). Others were demonstrating their next-generation web service that can take care of all your development needs from coding, to versioning, to deployment all in a social and collaborative way. Each had their pitch, each had something very interesting to offer, and each were trying to make their product/service stand out from the pack.

The sessions that I got to see (which weren’t many since I didn’t have a session pass so I had to sneak into any of the rooms by tossing Hershey Kisses on the floor in front of the badge-checker on the way in) were much more “professional” than the panels I got to see when I was at South by Southwest this year. This isn’t to say that those panels at SXSW were not done in a professional manner, but that the sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo were much less interactive and more a demonstration of some products/services/companies that stood out as doing good work in their various fields.

Web 2Open

The Web2Open Mashroom

Running adjacent to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes and sessions was Web2Open which is a *Camp style event that run in the main corridors on the second floor. Various presentations and discussions given by people that attended and participated in Web2Open were very good. “Minutes” were taken by various people and left on the walls so that if you came late to a particular discussion, you were able to quickly catch up and be part of the conversation. If you didn’t like where the discussion was going you were able to change the topic yourself by suggesting a topic, or – you could literally get up and go into another room where maybe the topic suited you a little better.

The idea of doing Open conferences like this is still very much in beta – and the process is being refined by the attendees each and every time one of these events goes on – but they are definitely much more attractive than any other event that I’ve been to. Simply being able to steer the conversation by simply raising your hand and asking a question lends itself very well to building value for those that attend.

The Viddler team and version 2.0

Viddler had a massive push to finish Q&A and testing on the its latest version of the site and player and managed to fit in many hours of development in order to release version 2.0. There are still a few bugs being worked out as soon as the developers and managers get back home from this trip – but overall the release was a big success and was fairly well received. The roadmap for Viddler is still quite exciting and the entire team is looking forward to the next step. I’ll have some more information about this and will be asking for everyone’s feedback on some of our ideas shortly.

Viddler 2.0 Cake

We celebrated version 2.0 a little bit early with some champagne and cake. The entire team was staying in Saratoga at our President’s relative’s house. We were so well taken care of that none of us wanted to leave (freshly squeezed orange juice right off the tree every morning makes a man wanna stick around).

Meeting the entire team for the first time was awesome. Working remotely with our team is really great and is actually conducive to getting very good work accomplished without the added expense and overhead of having everyone move to one location and setting up the proper digs for such an effort. However, it was nice to finally spend some time together to get to know each other even better and fit a real personality to the people that I have the privilege of working with everyday.

Harry and I got to work on our commercial together, which has caused a little bit of a stir with some members – which is always good to know that our users are reading our terms of use. We’re looking forward to updating our terms of use to fit more inline with what we really want to be able to do — promote really good video content and display it in an interactive and valuable way.

The Web 2 Party

The moment I got a feel for who was going to be at the Web 2 Expo; namely my friends from Citizen Agency, Ma.gnolia, etc. – I decided I really wanted to have a party with a few companies to help fit the bill to really pull off something nice. I mentioned this to Larry Halff and Chris Messina and I must say – they really took the ball and ran with it especially considering my inexperience in putting something like this together combined with the fact that I’m on the east coast far away from finding out about all of the venues that were available.

Tara (unknown last name) (aka Tara 2.0) came through in a very big way and secured our venue and setup everything we needed go pull off a successful event. Having an “event planner” is really key when you are trying to do one of these events with multiple companies and tons of logistics involved. If you are thinking of doing something like we did – I definitely recommend assigning one experienced person to get everything setup properly.

The party attendees

The party, in my opinion, was a huge success and it seemed like everyone had a really great time. People were lined up outside to get in, we were “at capacity” for the entire duration of the party, and people had to be escorted out of the gallery when the place closed. I had been to a few events at South by Southwest where people leaved early, the bar tab ran out quickly, or where generally not many people showed up. Such was not the scene for the Web 2 Party and we had a great time meeting everyone who came, shooting some video, and had some great discussions.

We’ve been talking about doing something in New York in the Fall so be sure to keep your ear to the ground. We don’t want to let all the west coast peeps have all the fun!

I know I’m speaking for the entire Viddler team when I say that we’d like to thank Citizen Agency for helping to coordinate the entire event, and thanks to Ma.gnolia, Scrapblog, JanRain, faberNovel, Facebook, Plasq, and WineLibraryTVfor helping us in throwing the best party during the Web 2.0 Expo. We hope you had as much fun as we all did.

The photos

Here is just a small collection of photos that I took over the course of the week. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot many photos as I always seemed to be busy recording video, talking at our booth, chatting with friends or just generally preoccupied with other things. I recommend you look at the Viddler Group on Flickr for more photos (oh, if you have photos please put them in the Viddler group) and also watch the Viddler tag on Viddler to see any video that may pop up over the next few days from the Expo.

Oranges from Saratoga

Breakfast meeting

Chris Tingom

Viddler Palace

Lucasz and Kasper

Version 2.0 development

Viddler booth

Blake Burris

Crazy Keith

“Naked” Dustin

Joyful Jina

The gang

Firecracker Harry

Photos taken while in California

Again I wish that I had more time to take more photos than I did but I’m thankful that friends like Chris Tingom were able to take a bunch of photos during our trip.

So the next time you hear that Viddler is coming to your town or throwing a party in your neighborhood – be sure to give us a shout and come out and drink some of our beerz…

[tags]web2expo, viddler, ma.gnolia, citizen agency, chris messina, tara hunt, larry halff, scrapblog, party, event, version2, california, saratoga, san francisco, santa clara, photos, flickr, google, yahoo, microsoft, d. keith robinson, dustin diaz, jina bolton, harry snodgrass, chris tingom, food, oranges, faberlove, facebook, scrapblog, hatomic, microformats, zimki[/tags]
[slug]webexpo-experience[/slug]

Pickles just chillin’

Before I get questions about his nails, we use soft nails on both of our cats and I personally can not recommend them enough. The cats are not subjected to the pain of removing part of their bodies (which is obviously less traumatic to the cats at an early age) and your furniture is not subjected to the habits of cats.

Although I’ve mentioned my cat Pickles a few times in the past I’ve definitely not mentioned him enough to consider this a “blog”.

Pickles is “my cat” in that I picked him out and that my wife has “her cat” Pookers. I found him online through some classifieds, went to meet the owner (who happened to be the husband of an ex-VP of a company I had worked for previously), and chose Pickles out of a pile of kittens in a box.

Since then, we’ve been close friends. He’s my bud. There are more photos of Pickles on Flickr if you’re interested.

[tags]animals, cat, pickles, pookers, soft paws, photos[/tags]
[slug]picklestoday[/slug]

The clouds over Texas

Something always strikes me when I’m flying. Whenever I fly I’m inevitably sitting next to or near someone that feels that flying is “old hat”. Typically these people are reading the newspaper, sleeping, or just generally not interested in their surroundings.

I, on the other hand, am still astounded that it was only about 104 years ago that two brothers decided to see if they could use lift to allow them to soar through the air if only for a few feet.

My flight from Austin, Texas to Newark, New Jersey spans some 1,700+ miles. I’ll be traveling at around 500-600 miles per hour about 35,000 feet above the surface of our planet. How can that possibly get old? How can someone not still be in awe of the fact that in so short a time – most of this country’s population can afford to fly from one side of our continent to the next?

Sometimes when I’m up here, I think about what is under my feet (besides the dirty laundry of my fellow passengers). Some kids in Houston playing basketball before it gets dark. Someone who is stopped at a red light, who notices a plane going overhead, and wondering where that plane might be going. Perhaps I could Twitter that person’s cellphone to let them know that we’re on our way to Newark!

Perhaps I too will one day lose my enthusiasm for the act of flying… but I don’t think it will be anytime soon. So the next time you take a flight, put down the sports section – and stare at nature’s beauty.

[tags]flying, experiences, austin, texas, newark, photos, sxsw, new jersey, wright brothers, north carolina[/tags]
[slug]flying-still-rocks[/slug]

Thursday, March 8th

12:33pm – In preparation of the trip from the northeast, to south by southwest (fittingly) – I picked up some shorts and got my hair did (photo). I managed to get these two tasks done fairly quickly and get back to my office for a few “last minute” things that I need to get done before we set sail.

Right now I’m waiting on the WineLibrary TV crew to get their latest episode completed. I’m helping them integrate their show with Viddler‘s system so that they get the most benefit out of it. Yesterday’s show was a huge success and today we’re hoping to add even a little more value for the Vayniacs.

People are really coming around with how Viddler works in situations like this. I think WineLibrary TV’s episodes are the perfect candidate for Viddler’s technology. Check out this comment.

“Man, after being a naysayer yesterday, I have to say that these new tags are awesome, and I’m now a total convert!” — Kent I

As this service matures, I think many people will start to enjoy interacting with their video in this manner. Stay tuned – because today’s episode should have a few new features that I think their audience is going to love.

2:35pm – I think it is amazing how many people are going to this thing. I’ve gotten more instant messages and emails today than I have in a very long time, and most of it is about trying to get together in Austin. In one hand; exciting. In the other; overwhelming.

I’m still going over our itinerary with a fine toothed comb. I have a lot of friends that are speaking on panels, and it’d be really nice to see all of them on stage, but I doubt I’ll get to see anyone since they are mostly there for “Web dev stuff” and my primary focus will be on Internet video while I am there. Well, back to the calendar.

4:20pm – I had the privilege of helping to prepare WineLibrary TV Episode #196 using some new Viddler features. Things went really smoothly and so far it seems that their audience really enjoys it.

Now I’m packing my suitcase, going to see if I can get a small nap in this afternoon before I pack up all of my “technology stuff”. I have to leave at 4:00am..

10:51pm – Just packing up my “tech stuff”. Heading to New Jersey in 5 hours or so to catch a jet plane to Austin, TX. My next update will probably be from an airport or something.

Friday, March 9th

11:02am – On Continental Airlines Flight 350 at 34,000 feet: Our ride this morning was, well, interesting. I was supposed to be the navigator for Mike and I to get to Viddler HQ, pick up Rob, and head to Newark, NJ to catch our flight.

Mike and I got to talking and I managed to allow us to pass a few exits, a few times, so we did a lot of U-turning. Then, after we finally met up with Rob – we were on our way to Newark International Airport and Rob forgot his wallet. Another U-turn.

Morgan Spurlock and I
Newark, New Jersey

We finally made it to the airport, all of us having to pee like crazy, and managed to get on Mike’s flight (we were on standby for this flight). Mike is about five rows behind me right now, looking at some girl in a rather inappropriate way probably, and Rob is next to me (photo). Next to Rob is a nice guy named Jeremy who is also heading to South by Southwest with Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame), who I had a chance to meet and have a short chat with. (I will upload a photo once I dump my cameras contents).

James Bond: Casino Royale is currently playing on the screen as I am listening to Dan Benjamin interview Cindy Li on the latest Hivelogic Radio. I’m going to finish listening to Hivelogic Radio before I move onto watching the latest episode of Heroes that I downloaded before I left.

4:38pm – @ SXSW – 2nd floor: – Just got registered. Going to see if we can fit in a panel here at the convention center. The first panel we wanted to see is at a different place.

6:14pm – From the back of Austin Cab 451: – Rob and I are in Best Buy parking lot, in the back of a cab. We just bought some things we needed for the HD camera (since we now have a press pass), and we want to be able to tape some of the panels we’re attending.

I was twittering with Chris Messina and I saw him and Tara sitting at a table. If it wasn’t for them I would have never figured out that there was “big bags” to get full of cool trinkets. Most of them are purely marketing material, but that’s cool. There was piles of papers that people threw out of the bags onto the tables.

I just met up with David Seah just before leaving the convention center. I did an interview with him while he was trying to put together some legos. Video coming soon.

9:21pm – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Just got back to the hotel after eating at The Boiling Pot on 6th. Very cool place, nice and spicey. Alex, Rob, and I ate crawfish, potatoes, corn, and other stuff that was spilled out all over the table. Sound familiar Eliza?

Now we’re trying to get our Internet connections working. Here are some photos that I took today.

Rob and I in Taxi

Rob and I in Line

David Seah

The Capital Building

Wanna ride?

Our food

Poor guy

Friday, March 9th Gallery

I have some more photos, but I’m only going to do a few a day until I can get home and have the time to go through them all.

Saturday, March 10th

8:43am – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Woke up fairly refreshed this morning. Definitely need some breakfast and a coffee before heading to SXSW. Anyone having breakfast anywhere?

10:15am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 12AB: – In the Video is worth more than 1,000 words panel. Going over some of the trends, some of the history, and some of the future of social video.

11:13am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – on the floor: – Panel is over. Met Chris from Adobe. Still can just barely get the internet. Port 80 sucks.

11:56am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 19AB with Jeremy Keith and Andy Budd: – Just published my interview with David Seah on the Viddler blog.

7:10pm – @ Logan’s on the Sixth: – Ate some dinner, talked to my brother-in-law on video chat for the first time. Having a Logan’s Lemonade, very good. More video on Viddler coming soon! Stayed tuned.

8:05pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Dumping photos, video to our hard drives. Checking a few things, getting a shower, short nap – then off to see the Ze Frank + BuzzFeed party, then to the Virb party till 4am supposedly? Should be fun, we’ll shoot video.

9:15pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Just posted our Saturday lunch update, and our Saturday night update to our Viddler blog. Here are some photos from today.

Alex

Chris and Rob

Shawn Grimes

Jonathan Snook

Matt Mullenweg

Greg Storey, Paul Nixon

Anton Peck

Lunch update

Nathan Smith

Erik Sagen

Tag, You’re It

Overlooking Austin

Mike Stickel

“Niero” Gonzalez

Free beer w/ Zach

MeToday

Saturday, March 10th, Gallery

4:14am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609, after the Ze Frank party: – Ze Frank, BuzzFeed and another company threw a party at the Molotov Lounge. It was pretty good, Ze did a funny bit on airplane safety (which will be on Viddler later). Then there was free drinks for a few hours. Thanks to all the sponsors, it was a cool place to hang for a bit.

Here are some photos of the people I met at Ze’s little bash.

Bill Streeter

John Gruber

Irina Slutsky

Ze Frank

Jeremy Keith

Mike Stickel

Shaun Inman

Adam Michela

Peter Flaschner

Garret Murray

Ze’s Party Gallery

It was really great to finally meet everyone. It kinda makes me wish we all could do this every month if for no other reason than to bounce ideas off one another and chat about the stuff we love. The world is such a small place, thanks to the Internet, yet it remains so large that I feel as if I am going to lose “contact” with everyone the moment I leave South by Southwest. We’ll see…. I guess I can still Twitter spam for Adam.

Sunday, March 11th

10:58am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Stayed up until 7am playing around with something “special”. Alex and I will put some polish on it today/tonight and release it. It is the culmination of the brain power of myself, Rob Sandie, Adam Michela, Peter Flaschner, and several other contributors. Should be fun.

Now I have to get over to the conference center so that I can show up fashionably late to the second panel of the day after finding some coffee and a muffin or something.

1:14pm – @ PF Chang’s for lunch: – Spent most of the morning getting things prepared for the rest of the day. Had a great discussion with Molly about some of the stuff she’s able to accomplish with Microsoft, I definitely wish her all the best with everything professional and otherwise.

Now we’re eating and planning the rest of our day.

4:50pm – @ SXSW Ballroom F: – Waiting for the next panel to start, so I might as well fill you in. (I won’t have time for many links or photos so I will update this from the hotel later). I finally was able to meet up with Irina Slutsky to do The Vloggies Show (which is a new show she is doing so be sure to stay tuned as it will air this week). Spoke to a guy from Microsoft about Expression Web… he said there was a lot of things going on in the pipe and that the initial release is only the beginning. Being an ex-Frontpage 98 user, I hope they are able to build something that is relatively solid for their audience.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks.com asked what the little black guy was in the big bag you get here at South by Southwest. I figured it out. If you go to the exhibit hall, find Vital Stream’s booth, you can throw it at a dart-like board and win a shirt. I got a bulls-eye on the first try and won a shirt.

We only were able to attend one or two panels so far today, and hopefully tonight we’ll be able to see Morgan Spurlocks doc “What would Jesus Buy”.

11:28pm – @ Hilton Lobby: – Just had a nice conversation with Irina and two guys that did not give me their cards because they had run out of them (if you are reading this, email me your contact information). Talking about ad networks and how to display ads based on content within a video on Viddler rather than just the content on the page. Pretty cool stuff.

We’re sending all of our HD video that we’ve captured to a professional video editor, so I am excited to get all of that back and have it up on the Viddler blog soon enough. If anyone would like to do an interview, or has not signed my shirt, please grab me. I’m hoping to have content being published regularly over the next few weeks.

Monday, March 12th

3:00am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – After hanging in the Hilton’s lobby for a few hours I heard through Twitter that the 9rules crew was hanging out in the bar. I ran over, had a drink with Molly (thanks for the shot Molly), Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, and Mike’s fiancé Eleni.

Back to work though as we headed for our hotel and I featured a video that was taken during one of the panels here. Rob and I managed to record many of the panels we went to, and we’re hoping to get that video up slowly over the next few days. We have someone helping us with that too, which is great – because Rob and I are stretched pretty thin.

Even though I am starving, I am going to head to bed and see if I can’t get up on time tomorrow.

10:22am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Awake. Slept in a little, somehow our wake-up call never happened. Today will be another busy day. I didn’t have the chance, nor the energy, to go through all of my photos from yesterday and get them posted, but I will try to do that if there is any downtime during the day.

Remember, if I “know” you, but I have not met you yet, please make it a point to run over to me. I’d like to meet everyone at this opportunity. I’ll be the blonde guy in the Viddler tshirt.

2:46pm – @ SXSW Room 12AB: – Just ate lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse for a discussion about OpenID. Very interesting stuff and I am definitely going to recommend that Viddler make it part of their development roadmap. For anyone that has not looked into OpenID be sure to do so, especially if you’d like to be prepared for the future of online, cross service, authentication.

On my way back from the lunch, I saw Paul Nixon running and we both said I should have been running with him. Damn him and his Nike+ package and the motivation to run while in the Texas heat.

Right now I’m in an interesting panel about whether or not User Generated video is considered film or not. Sounds really niche, and it definitely is, but it is also incredibly interesting as a discussion topic – and I never ever thought it would be.

Tuesday, March 13th

Robert Scoble

10:33am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Good morning! Sorry that I haven’t updated since early afternoon yesterday but things went a little hectic there. After watching Luke W‘s panel on the various interface libraries (which was absolutely packed and should have been much longer), I needed to be outside in front of the convention center to go to The Salt Lick, which is a BBQ pit about 45 minutes outside of Austin, with Robert Scoble, Chris Aarons, Sarah Beck, and Patrick Nichols of AMD, an extremely nice gentlemen from AT&T’s Web department, and Jim Posner from IBM who was in Apocolpse Now (more on all of this later).

After that I headed to the Great British Booze up, which was just about ending at the time. I hooked up with the entire Forty Media crew (there is a lot of them), and went to the next party where I ended up spending most of my time talking to Larry Halff about all things Ma.gnolia and Ruby on Rails. It was a great discussion and having never used Ma.gnolia – I can say that it seems like a service I should have been using for years. I’m going to give it a try the moment I can find some free time with wifi (aka: when I get home).

So now I gotta hop in the shower because Rob and I are going to do a Lunch Meet.

2:03pm – @ In the Hilton Ballroom, 6th Floor, for Will Wright’s keynote: – Our lunch meet got postponed by a few hours. Hard to get everyone in one place at the same time. So Rob and I are recording the Will Wright keynote. I am definitely looking forward to seeing a demo of Spore.

Tuesday, March 14th

10:44am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – The demo of SPORE was really awesome. Will Wright’s keynote alone was very good, but the demo just tops it off that Will actually does what he feels.

I have a ton to more write about. I’ve kept this “live blog” as up-to-date as I could considering the circumstances with time, internet connectivity, etc. So instead of writing a huge wrap up to what is already one of my longest posts ever, I will be writing single entries that highlight very specific panels, discussions, lunches, and parties after I get back home to Pennsylvania.

As a short overview of what happened since yesterday’s keynote – We recorded one or two more panels, went to Logan’s again for dinner, then hit up the VIP at the Media Temple party.

After that it was a bunch of sad goodbyes, as most of us know that we’ll only be in contact virtually for awhile… but overall the experience was good.

Thanks to all that kept up with me over the conference. Those that came over to say hi, those that signed my shirt, those whom I met for the very first time, and those that I will be friends with for a long time to come.

Sorry to any of you that were looking for me, or didn’t have a chance to talk to me for whatever reason… send me an email and maybe we’ll get together sometime.

Stay subscribed, a ton of stuff to come.

[tags]sxsw, austin, texas, pennsylvania, new jersey, travel, conference, festival, live, winelibrary tv, viddler, photos, video, robert sandie, alex hillman, rob sandie, john gruber, shaun inman, ze frank, adam michela, mike stickel, ma.gnolia, larry halff, openid, the salt lick, bbq, robert scoble, amd, chris aarons, Bill Steeter, Irina Slutsky, Jeremy Keith, Peter Flaschner, Garrett Murray[/tags]
[slug]live-sxsw07[/slug]

The video is only a few minutes. Enjoy.

The MeToday group was founded by Luke Dorny (luxuryluke). Since then we’ve grown slowly to over 38 members and we’re still looking for more people to do this, so if you’re interested – join the Flickr group and start tomorrow!

Happy Anniversary MeToday-ers!

[tags]metoday, flickr, photos, video, viddler, anniversary[/tags]
[slug]metoday-3m[/slug]

9:30am – Woke up around 6, left at around 7:30, arrived at Viddler HQ – hit up Starbucks for Rob to get his “fix”, and now we’re at the office.

The first order of business? Update the featured videos on the explore page for the week. These videos are hand picked by internal staff so if you see a video highlighted there, you know we all really like the video and the use of Viddler.

10:00am – Donna just got here and now it is time to go through some community strategy.

10:09am – Before we head off to the conference room, maybe any of you could leave some suggestions.

12:37pm – Great strategy meeting. Hopefully some of the ideas we generated during it will be put into play pretty soon. Exciting things not only for Viddler but anyone that wishes to promote their video online.

Rob, Donna, and I at the Viddler HQ

1:09pm – Rob just ordered some lunch (I’m starving). I’m getting a “huge salad”.

Donna is sitting next to me on a brand new HP laptop running Vista. Donna is no slouch when it comes to computers and she’s spent about 30-minutes trying to get a printer running. I think Vista is showing its true colors for sure right now.

Maybe I can get the Viddler team, since Andrew and I are already running Mac OS X, to switch? Oh wait, Rob needs the nipple (more on this later).

Be sure to check out the new featured header I created for this post.

2:26pm – Lunch was good! I’m actually really full. Now back to writing today’s blog post!

4:09pm – Finished today’s featured videos blog entry (look for it on the blog after it is reviewed). I can’t wait to be able to create those types of posts much quicker with some of the tools I envision…. more on this later.

For now, enjoy a photo we got right before lunch. It is the serious version of the one you see in the new header promoting this post.

5:06pm – The featured video post for this week has been published. It is nice to have all of the featured videos in one location to quickly flip between them.

5:36pm – I’m on my way home. Good day.

[tags]viddler, bethlehem, pennsylvania, live, video, photos, windows vista, donna demarco, colin devroe, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]live-viddlerhq-again[/slug]

Well I was digging through some video and I found the video that Eliza had taken while I took these photos of the lightning. Although the majority of the video is a simple black screen with Eliza and I having a very uninteresting conversation – I find it a nice video to see how we ended up getting those lightning photos.

If you are reading this in some type of feed-reader, be sure to come to the site to read this post so you too can watch the video.

What I thought was really interesting, after having uploaded this video to Viddler and tagging it with lightning each time a bolt shot across the screen, was that we technically gave ourselves a “graph” of sorts to show the frequency of lightning over the 10-minute period of the video. If you look at the timeline of the video each black dot on the timeline represents a bolt of lightning. Pretty cool if you are a geek like me. This was an unexpected result but a welcomed one.

Hope you enjoy this video and the photos. Thanks for recording it Eliza.

[tags]lightning, video, viddler, weather, storm, thunder, bolt, colin devroe, eliza devroe, photos[/tags]
[slug]lightning-video[/slug]