I set this up for a class in school, i dont use it anymore, but check me out on twitter if you need to contact me.

Yay podcasting

This dude named Scott Sigler, in an attempt to get his book published, began podcasting it weekly. Since then he’s risen to 7th in the amazon charts (or at least was hanging out there when i looked on monday morning.)

A few things cool with this
First off, he’s able to get a ridiculous amount of feedback from his audience as they’re enjoying the story
Since he’s podcasting it himself, he knows how to deliver all the lines properly
And he’s selling ads in his podcast which are producing more money than his book revenue will

Link to amazon page

Course Feedback

What is the most important thing you learned in this course? Why?
This quarter i learned what people think about the range of topics we studied. I’d heard of most of them, but it was all mental masturbation because i didnt have anyone to talk to about them. Accept my girlfriend who rocks for putting up with it. Often times when you get submerged in something, you can lose sight of the popular opinion. This is what happened to me. When i heard the class shoot down my idea that we need to teach kids how to use computers, i was saddened. It reminded me of a time i heard a friend say “i’ve never met someone who voted for Bush.” And yet they’re out there, a lot of em. SO, getting a different flavor of opinion was nice.

What would you like to have had more time to study? Why?
Why, the whole class of course. But seriously, i felt it had a good pace. I was more interested in some aspects, and less in others, but thats something that can’t be fully tailored to. Personally i’m all about development of audio, video, and graphics. I care much less about text, which is why i look to web 2.0 as something to help me produce and distribute video content, and not something thats text based. The web has been text based for 20 years, its time to add more video.

What topic was the least interesting to you? Why?
I think i saw the class glaze over when we saw that youtube video about what a packet is and how it works and where it goes. The relevance of that subject is debatable, but i think it was filled with so much information the class couldn’t glean anything from it at all.

Vonage and Speakeasy Experience

To start, yes i could get service for both of the offers.

speakeasy
cost – starting at 55.95 a month, voip and data 83.90 a month
ease – I went to a lot of different sites before i found the info i wanted.
information – i had to call to get all the info that i wanted. Needless to say i didnt call, so i was left a little underwhelmed. Yes, talking to a person is the typical upsell, but i still want to be able to do some stuff on my own online.

Vonage
Cost – lower cost, though it was just phone and not internet as well, but the cost for viop was still cheaper. There were also a lot of options, which was nice.
Ease – very easy to use.
Information – had a lot of info about different plans and what that meant. Better site than speakeasy.

However i’m still not going to buy, mostly because this is such a new service, i’m worried that one of these companies is going to go under in a year and i’ll lose my service. Its also a lot of headache to switch. If there were ip tv options, or, incase of emergency it would switch over to being a regular phone, that would be a plus.

presentation thing.

The power point presentation went well. I didnt have a copius amount of pictures and cool effects, but i felt that when i pulled up a complicated table that the people i was presenting to were interested in reading what it had to say. I was also mindful of the fact that i was pulling up tables and i tried to make them as simple as possible. It was an enjoyable experience.

http://students.washington.edu/bellis/media_300_slideshow_powerd.pps

Week 9 Readings

Voip and the state of the empire.
Let me start by saying that voip taking over phone and cable is like saying the electric car will crush the oil companies. Yes, we’ve heard this for a while, but i still have yet to see it. In 3 years there might become some sort of tax on this and it will all become moot. But, until that happens, VOIP rocks, its cheap, effective, and amazing. It still has a ways to go though, and it will be a good many years before we’ve gotten rid of landlines in the deep parts of the US. What i think is more important is streaming video over. Having a video chat with someone is a lot more personal of an experience, and while i dont want to talk to the pizza man via video chat, i like talking to my family with it. Voip will only become a contender if it can band together and form an ad campaign or something of the sort. Part of having large companies is you have a large advertisement budget. Voip, being as its an idea, isnt something that has the same power. Its one of those features that just hangs out. We’ll see what happens.

Questions:

Would you consider a Voip phone for your house if you could get it for much cheaper than regular phone service, or do you just use your cell phone as your primary phone?

Do you think you would embrace video phone calls?

Do you think there will come a time when phone companies will back voip services?

Update on blog post

I’m staying true to the video podcast, i’ve got most of the stuff scripted, i’ve set up shots, lighting, gotten sound and mics down via the fun tools my roommate has (he’s an audio engineer). All i have left to do is shoot the stuff and work on the graphics. I’m going to be doing more of a news style thing with stuff in the lower thirds and pictures in the top right. I’ve got a 3d animator making me a sweet intro and a friends band writing me a song, should rock a lot…. hopefully. I’ll get back to you on that.

What is a politic?

First off lemme say that i really enjoyed Scheiber’s point that the internet allows the user to feel like he’s part of something much better than the past systems of involvement. I dont have to go outside of my house, or outside of my comfort zone in order to pledge myself to something. And this is a big thing. If we could figure out a solid way to text our votes in or efficiently do it online, we would see a dramatic improvement to the voting turn out. While the paper systems are most likely scammed on a smaller scale, online voting has been vastly turned down due to hacking reasons.
Usability issues are also of paramount concern. Its something i don’t often think about because i can usually navigate to find what i’m looking for, and i equate myself with a web designer. Most of the time its not something they think about when making their site. I guess i kind of think about web design as 1 part art and 1 part structured rules, and finding a way to make a compelling design and adhering to all the rules can’t always be done in a timely manner. That goodness websites can be updated as frequently as you want.

questions.

Often times websites will create a busy front page because the designers are worried people won’t fish through to find what they want. Often times websites, phones, pda’s and the like will have a ‘click limit’. Do you have a ‘click limit’ on websites before you’ll give up?

Will we ever see a more user friendly voting system, or something online? What do you recommend so that it can’t be easily hacked?

What websites have you been to that aren’t very user friendly?

What is the revenue model?

I feel like we really have two sets of blogging to talk about, these divid themselves into video and audio, and print. While there are many similarities, when comparing it to mass media we’re breaking them up.
We’ll start with video and audio, because i understand that. What makes advertising nice in these is that you can physically plug your products, place them into your videos, use the product in your audio. Whether its something simple like how Randy from American Idol always straightens his coke cup, or the ads that make the break. And these things are easily transferable to video blogs (or podcasts, depending on your desired terminology). As sites like youtube and revver start to make business models for uploaders we’ll see how it pans out. What i’m looking to see is whether it will force people to make good content, but limited quantities, or lots of things hoping to score on bringing people back to check out their stuff. With metacafe’s business scheme the video has to have a certain number of views and a certain rating. Its not likely that a weekly show will be able to get good enough numbers to support that, but if the person only makes one that gets some business, they can make some money. We’ll see what happens.
Writing online is a lot easier and as such there are a lot more people doing it. Whats happened is that big people arent advertising on blogs the same way they do for the newspaper. The audience isnt guaranteed and returns can be tracked, which is actually not desirable. Its one thing to say that 1,000 people read your blog, but if none of them are clicking your ads then its not worth a thing. And as you don’t rent out your advertising space online like you do in the paper, it makes for some different things.

How do you think blogs need to change in order to be financially viable?

Is production value as important a factor in judging online content as it is on TV and print?

Do you see newspapers adding blog posts to their sections, or bringing in outside writers found on blogs?

What is the 21st century?

As i was listening to Matt Rosenberg talk today i had several revelations. While i contribute to this class in many ways, i’m much more of a tech enthusiast, not a political theorist, as such my eyes have a tendency to glaze over sometimes. While i was listening to the speech i realized the need for a better system for blogging, a better infrastructure. My annoyance was that Matt, most likely, has to go to different sites to blog to his different sites. This sent me spiraling down thoughts of better systems so i thought i’d do some browsing around the net.
First stop i went to was the NYtimes, because they’re fairly tech savvy, making a lot of content just for the online audience. What i was looking for was to see if authors had an individual rss feed, which would make sense, ya? You can do a search for articles with a specific author, but its not a feed. While there are websites and search engines out there that will make an rss feed out of anything you search, i was looking for something a little more substantial.
What i wanted to see was a blog set up for each section overall; style. Then divided up into home and garden. Then finally let me browse all of the things that a specific person writes, no matter what section they’re in. It was all just a tad too hard to do. On top of that, the NYT site was very bad about its archiving format, i had trouble finding something that i looked at yesterday.
So, i’m looking for a single application that will post your entry to a number of sites and different sections, which is what i’m looking for in the future of blogging. I simply cant imagine it lasting as a media without bloggers banding together in a more unified blogosphere. Not simply just posting to individual sites, but where people have their own site, but they can also be invited to a different network and have the option to post something there with the extra tick of a button. Not only does this branch out on the standard blog theory, but it helps sort and organize everything as well.
Over at Weblogs inc. they do something similar with their blogs. Many different authors contribute to it, and they can be broken down into an individual feed, i’m just looking for something that spans beyond a single network, something unified and open source. But i’m not a programer, so i guess this might be for not.