10 Websites I Don’t Want to See Die in This Economy
- Vimeo - Just love this video site with an even better community. Very well done guys.
- Viddler - Another great video site that is doing some great stuff with their API and other features.
- Twitter - Duh.
- LastFM - I just fell back in love with this music site, I would hate to see it go now.
- Yahoo – I know, I know…but they are doing some really cool stuff in there.
- Current – They are doing some cool things over there with the “Hack the Debate,” just wish I got the channel.
- Facebook – Look, if I have to keep one social network, this is the one I’m picking.
- TWIT – Gotta give some Leo Love out in this list.
- UStream – This was a toss up between Justin.tv, UStream and the other “live streamers”, but UStream was top of mind. Very important technology.
- YouPorn – Just being honest, and if you were the same it would be on your list too.
The Disappointing Lineup For The STL Interactive Festival
When I saw that the St Louis Interactive Festival was announced not long ago, I was excited to hear that finally, someone was organizing something to do with web and interactive media and it was actually in St. Louis as opposed to San Fran or Chicago or wherever! Needless to say, as a professional web developer that longs for the action of San Francisco and a blogger of over five years, I was completely on board with this, but when I first saw it, it was still in its infancy and I was, as usual, busy with work, so I kind of lost track of it until today when I saw someone retweet something from the festival’s Twitter account.
Thats how I got to the page with the I guess final line-up of panels at the festival (here). Don’t get me wrong, I think most of these are solid panel ideas for some people, but honestly I was VERY disappointed with the lack of any video related panels and the fact that there weren’t at least some deep and more high-level discussions. This isn’t to say I won’t go, and its not to say I wouldn’t love to get on the CSS panel (I consider myself a bit of a CSS ninja, especially for a developer and I am one of the few developers I know that feel that knowing CSS is a major key to being a good developer) but I was really hoping for some topics that covered:
- Social Network Creation: Should I? Why? How?
- The New Streaming Video Frontier: Qik? Ustream? Justin.tv? Kyte.tv? How Can You Use This New Medium?
- What to Make of the Sudden Crush of Semi-Social Entertaiment Sites Rising Up For St. Louis (something I know a little bit about)
- Creating Video for the Web (Hello!?! Anyone out there heard of a dude named Bill Streeter that lives in this neck of the woods?!? …I mean really?! Nothing about video?)
Ruminations on Web TV Shows
So there is a very good chance I’ll be in some web “TV” shows in the coming weeks and I thought this would be a good time to think about this in type and throw some questions out in to the ether of the web.
Though there is clear evidence that non-tech related shows can make it on the web (see: Wine Library TV and lots of others) I haven’t yet seen any evidence that anyone that is a non-techie is getting into said shows. I wonder what it would take to get my mother to watch a show on cooking, crafts or whatever on the web on a semi-regular basis. ( I asked your mother what she would like in a web show this mother this morning but her mouth was full, so she wasn’t much help. ) I found that my wife (still kinda weird to type) turned out to like Call For Help with Leo Laporte, but it was after me making her watch a few time that she grew to like it, which makes me wonder what it would take to get a bunch of non-techies to make a point to go on to a site and look for a new episode. …or does it matter? Clearly you can do quite well with just the power of techie page views (see: revision3.org) I’ve kind of been operating on the idea that if you get the geeks, their page views will buy you time to get the non-geeks. Maybe staying the course for the video side of things is the way to go as well.
Thoughts?
Your April Fool’s Day Joke Sucks
The follow is a list of the lamest April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve seen this year:
- Egotastic.com – Thanks for 3 Great Years, and Goodbye... (Yeah, someone’s going to buy that.)
- Infoworld – Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price (Nothing screams funny like a corporate take over.)
The following is a list of the best April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve seen this year:
- YouTube – Go there and click on any of the featured videos.
Honorable mention to this one.
Kevin Rose to Squeeze Out Another Startup
According to Om Malik:
Business Week poster boy Kevin Rose is rumored to have teamed up with Daniel Burka also of Digg, and first time entrepreneur Leah Culver and has started a new company. Rose and Burka have worked closely on tools like Digg Spy. Burka is one of the main designers of Digg.com. Rose and Burka have worked closely for nearly two years.
Apparently the startup is to have something to do with instant messenging, but frankly who cares. Not only that, it really doesn’t even matter if the product is any good, because no matter what he does, he will have his little TechTV The Broken Revision3 Digg army of preteen script kiddies march right over and praise whatever he does. I’m not saying that Digg is lame or that Revision3 was a bad idea, all I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter. No matter how far advanced the world gets or how many more people get broadband in their home, the internet will always be run by preteen male nerds and the current set of preteen male nerds love Kevin Rose. Some day the man may be president.
What I’m really getting at is: You feel like making me a job offer Kevin? I’m good. I’ll stunt double for you if you want. Think about it.
Full disclosure: I happen to look a bit like Kevin Rose (I’ve been told) and because of this I prefer to spend at least two to three weekends a year banging chicks and stealing startup money from suckers in San Francisco. If you happen to look like Alex Albrecht please get a hold of me since I am currently in the market for a wing man on these trips. Benefits include all the free slightly chubby geek ‘poon you can handle and nothing else.
Way To Go Microsoft; Silverlight Looks Really Cool
I am Jack’s complete sense of surprise.
You must understand how weird it feels to say this, but as a professional web developer, I’m honestly excited to start using a new Microsoft web product. Seriously.
Silverlight is the new flash competitor that Microsoft is rolling out, and without getting into too many details (because that link to TechCrunch does a pretty good job of getting the details out) I couldn’t be more excited to start using it. Well…screw it. I’ll tell you one reason why I’m excited: You don’t have to learn some funky new language that you will never use anywhere else just to make a video player or something simple for your site (cough coughActionscript!). Don’t get me wrong, you are still going to have to kill me before I ever use .NET or ASP but with Silverlight you can use Python for example, or hell, you can even use javascript. Thats the kind of anti-lock-in feature you don’t usually see from Microsoft, just like their efforts to make sure this works on all browsers and platforms including the mobile ones (there’s another exciting feature!).
Look, I gotta go. Veronica Mars is about to come back on, and I’ll get back to the Britney Spears jokes later, I just wanted to go on record with my actual excitement with a new Microsoft web product.
AJAX is the New Polyester
Ted says that Meebo is what’s wrong with the internet.
In AJAX development, programmers can’t be held responsible for, say, the amount of memory their giant JavaScript application uses, because hey, that’s the browser’s problem. We don’t care about the browser taking 100% of the user’s CPU to drag a window, because those Firefox & IE developers just need to get off their lazy asses and write a decent JavaScript interpreter. Well, I tell you what: if you develop desktop applications for Windows and your application uses 100% CPU when you drag a window – pack your shit, you’re going home.
I can’t say he’s wrong. AJAX is new polyester: Sure there are some great uses for it, but if you cover yourself it in you will end up looking stupid.
(via Daring Fireball)
Apparently Required Blogging: Tim O’Reilly’s Dumb Blogger Rules
Tim O’Reilly’s “Rules of Conduct” for bloggers is, like its author, a pretentious piece of crap. Its a joke, and I wouldn’t even use it to wipe my ass (…and thats not just because printer paper is harsh and doesn’t make the best TP, its because it’s a pretentious piece of crap.).
By the way, Tim, I have way more than 2 sources of this, but I just don’t feel like listing them.
[There. I talked about it.]
Super Quick Follow Up: Jeff Jarvis has an excellent take on all of this. He didn’t mention wiping his ass with it explicitly, but his article were my initial thoughts on this exactly. Its a very well thought out article, which is something that would look completely foreign on this site between the Britney Spears jokes.
Wiki-Man. Show me a geek with a camera and I’ll show you a youtube page with over 100 inane comments.
Diggriver.com
Digg’s mobile site diggriver.com has relaunched and both looks a works great. You can even login and digg stories right from your mobile now. I don’t know about you, but when I’m sitting on the train or, lets face it, on the can, thats a prime digg reading moment for me and has now improved quite a bit.
Nice work.