- I'm at Reynihild Hotel Myvatn (Myvatn, Myvatn). https://4sq.com/cFUWYL #
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Tweets the week of 2010-07-31:
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Exploring The Atlantic Avenue Subway Tunnel
Last weekend, I had another opportunity to explore the Atlantic Avenue Subway Tunnel with Open House New York.
This time I brought a tripod along, and was able to get some interesting long exposure shots. This is a 30 second exposure of people walking by me with their flashlights. Interesting to see the different colors of the flashlights, between LED and incandescent bulbs.
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Testing wordpress for iPhone
Testing functionality of wordpress for iPhone, in preparation for blogging while traveling in Sweden next week…
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WordPress iPhone – WordPress – Facebook autopost
Blogging from iPhone, wordpress should post this to my blog, and Facebook should post it to my Facebook profile from the Feedburner integrated RSS feed. Hope for the best!
Also – just got some iced coffee delivered to the office, from Pump. Every two plastic cups of iced coffee were packed iN a sectioned out, custom plastic bag. Nifty way to transport multiple drinks without spilling, but extrordinarily wasteful…
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Testing Field Flickr Posting
Originally uploaded by jamfan2
In preparation for my trip to Turkey and Israel next week, I’m testing
out posting photos from my iPhone, using Flickr, and the “email to
Flickr” feature tied in with my blog. Next week, live blogging should
begin…—
Sent via mobile.
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Obama Flanked by Walls of Bullet-Proof Glass
As I was watching Obama’s victory speech last night, I noticed that he was flanked on stage by two giant glass walls. I was thinking these could be for sound, wind, or security – and it turns out that yes, they are for security. They’re put up by the secret service, are 10 feet high, and are bullet proof. Given the lateral configuration, this effectively eliminates two major angles of attack, and lets the secret service focus their security efforts in a more narrow field of view.
According to the Daily Mail (a UK publication), secret service extensively tested the venue to see where it’s weak spots were. They even went so far as to scout out potential sniper locations, and fire a laser at the podium, to check the line of sight, and establish the field of view that would need to be covered by them.
It’s interesting to see how they set it up, and also worth noting that instead of resorting to only high tech, transparent security measures for this, the secret service recognized that sometimes the most simple solution is the best – and just put up a big ole’ wall of glass.
One final thought, in light of CNN’s election night hologram technology, which projected correspondent Jessica Yellin as a hologram from Chicago to NYC. Now that the secret services is starting to make glass walls commonplace for high profile speeches, maybe they can start using those as both camera arrays and as virtual displays, to beam virtual speakers around the world, and into overly hostile areas. One comment to Wolf, using that nifty new CNN holographic display: Chill out a bit, buddy. Yeah, it’s a cool new toy, but you don’t need to get so worked up about how high tech it is on-air. Let it slide quietly, and the impact will be stronger, smoother.
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Pigs Roam the East Village
Pigs Roam the East Village
Originally uploaded by jamfan2
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Sent via mobile.
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Ikea Brooklyn
I’m going to Ikea Brooklyn… Here goes nothing. I will now spend the
next hour or so wandering endless aisles of strangely named Swedish
furniture.—
Sent via mobile. -
Cuil Stomping on Google’s Turf?
CNN is reporting that Anna Patterson, who sold her first web search technology to Google, is coming out publicly with a new, supposedly better search engine called Cuil. She claims it spans a much larger portion of the web than Google, and therefore gives better results. Read the full article on CNN here.
In Google’s defense, I don’t think that raw search index size necessarily correlates with a better search experience. Yes, having a complete index is good, but being able to parse out the index, decide what is relevant and valuable to the users, and ultimately deliver the best, most useful search results is what it’s all about. If Cuil returns a ton of random pages to me that yes, may not exist in Google, but are not as useful, it has no value to me. The golden balance is optimizing the index size along side content analysis and parsing, to reduce the number of pages in the searchable index to only those that are valuable to the user.
“It’s not the size of your index, it’s how you use it.”
This morning, in response to Cuil, Search Engine Land had a series of good thoughts about exactly this – Google “Knows” About 1 Trillion Web Items discusses the size of Google’s index, and their full Cuil post “Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?” thoroughly tests out this “Google competitor”.
In my quick test of Cuil, I didn’t find what I was looking for. “Cueling” my own name (with safe search on) returned nothing, whereas when Googling my name (with safe search turned on, at the default setting) returned 698 results. However, Cuiling my name with safe search turned off returned 25,110 results, whereas Googling with safe search turned off returned the same 698 restults. Honestly, although Cuil returned more restults with safe search off, I’d still trust google more. To my knowlege, there’s no content out there about me on the web that I feel should be restricted by a safe search filter – yet Cuil deemed all of it as “not safe”, and only showed it when safe search was turned off. This is exactly what I’m talking about – It’s not necessarily all aboutthe amount of raw data in an index, but more importantly, how a search engine parses out and organizes that data.
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DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist
DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist
Originally uploaded by jamfan2
DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist @ McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn, NY
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Manhattan Skyline from the New Museum
Tonight, between the Gawker Media Meshing situation and dinner, I randomly met up with a friend and checked out sunset from the top of the New Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I think we got there just at the right time, because the sun was just below the horizon, giving great light. This little panorama is quick and dirty, as you can see, and shot with a 16mm lens. You can see at the edges the distortion is very pronounced, especially where building elements join at the end of one frame into the middle of another frame – the differences in magnification is intense.
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Shooting the 4th of July BBQ
Nat and David’s 4th of July BBQ was tasty – and I had a good time shooting some photos… Photos on flickr.
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The Jeffzilla Wordle Contentcloud
Wordle is a service that takes any text or rss feed, and parses the content down into the most important and most used words. It generates all sorts of nifty tag cloud-like graphics. Next step, I wish, would be to get a Wordle wordpress plugin that dynamically generates a real blog tagcloud, but with the cool, randomized Wordle stylings.
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Who needs Instinctiv when you have real Pandora on your iPhone 3G?
Why make software for an increasingly dwindling market – the 1st generation (EDGE) iPhone. Instinctiv is a new company that’s making iPhone software that purports to predict what you want to listen to based on a number of factors, and the smartly shuffles your songs accordingly. But it only shuffles your own songs. Only the music you have on your phone at that moment. No network listening.I can see how this would appeal to iPod Touch and 1st generation (slow EDGE) owners, but, since the 1st Gen iPhone is no longer on sale, that group is starting to dwindle. On the new iPhone 3g, with speedy fast 3G network connectivity, is Instinctiv really necessary? (Or, does it have a viable future?) Why not just listen to real, genuine Pandora radio, if that’s the experience you’re going for? Although it’s not out yet, I’m almost positive a real, native Pandora radio application will be released for the new iPhone 3G, which will (or, should…) use not only the iPhone’s wifi connection, but the 3G cell data connection as well.
Better yet – ever shared with a friend a Pandora station you’ve made? Cool to be able to listen to the same batch of songs, no? How about allowing iPhones running the Pandora radio application to synchronize their stations, so two iPhone listeners can listen to a synchronized Pandora station? Why not push this feature to the standard browser based web player too? It might get dicey for the music licensing, but would be cool nonetheless.
(Seen on TechCrunch)
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Macbeth @ St. Ann’s Warehouse
Originally uploaded by jamfan2
Sitting outside under the Brooklyn Bridge, at the old tobacco factory, to see the St. Ann’s Warehouse production of Macbeth. Presented in Polish with English supertitles.
Its nice to be outside for theater, fresh air etc. We all get headphones to wear so we can hear whatever special sounds they have, and there are weird green lights all over the place…
The trailer:
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Kenai River
Kenai River
Originally uploaded by jamfan2
Kenai River, Alaska
Sent via BlackBerry. -
iPhone Followup: Qik
The possibilities for the more open, developer-friendly iPhone 2.0 software just keep getting better, especially on the speedier iPhone 3G. TechCrunch reports that Qik just announced that they are coming out with an iPhone application, to allow users to stream live video direct from their iPhone. Pretty cool feature, and that will also mean that the iPhone will now be able to capture and record video, since Qik records your video streams. They’re not the only ones doing live streaming, and I hope sites like Ustream.tv and Mogulus.com get on the bandwagon for over-the-air streaming too. Especially considering Mogulus’ capabilities for real-time mixing of multiple video sources, it could make an intensely robust control studio for remixing and re-broadcasting multiple live remote video streams. Live-mixing/streaming the next Tumblr Rock Band jam from multiple roaming cell-connected audio/video sources? Sure.
**Update – Max Haot, of Mogulus, just informed me via comments that Mogulus is actually already integrated with Qik, so users can do live mixes of multiple remote video streams – awesome!
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Weezer – Pork and Beans Video Sources
The new Weezer music video for Pork and Beans off their forthcoming album (the red album), due out June 3rd, 2008 is quite the mirror. In one foul swoop, they managed to distill down most of the major “viral videos” from the last couple of years, including some older classics, namely All Your Base (Zero Wing). It”s interesting to note how quickly internet video and viral video has become a mainstay of our culture and online life – enough so that it’s worked it’s way into popular music.
I don’t know if this is good or bad, or what this says about me but…. yeah, I knew instantly pretty much every single clip or parody in the video – amazing.
Here’s the video, and a list of all the source clips I could identify – disturbingly easily.
**Update….. looks like Weezer ended up disabling embedding of their video.. use the above link to check it out.
Weezer Pork and Beans video original video clips:
Numa Numa
(Brookers has a good one too – Crazed Numa Fan)
Dramatic Gopher
Japanese Gameshows from TV in Japan
Starwars Kid
Angry German Kid
Ms. Teen USA South Carolina
Tay Zonday
Liam Sullivan – Shoes
Will it Blend?
Chris Crocker
Stupid Ninja
Diet Coke and Mentos
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Evolution of Dance
K-Fed
GI Joe
T-Shirts
Soulja Boy (yeah… I still need to be cool and learn this dance..)Did I miss anything?
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Internet Famous?
A while ago I blogged about Jamie Wilkinson’s “Internet Famous” course. Now, the CNN comes out with this article, about internet fame and David Weinberger’s talk ROFLCon… Some excerpts…clipped from www.cnn.com
The new fame: Internet celebrityThe Internet is setting a new standard for celebrity. Fame is no longer about getting “15 minutes,” it’s about becoming famous to 15 people. The word-of-mouth spread of any given meme is another aspect of how Internet fame differs from traditional celebrity. Even the slickest PR effort can fail miserably if Internet users choose to ignore it. The general consensus of the content providers gathered at ROFLCon is that you have to just build it, and see if they will come. Mouse clicks determine what becomes famous and what withers away in obscurity. And the most certain way to get a huge bump in traffic is to be featured on Web news aggregators like Slashdot, Fark, Digg or Reddit, influential blogs such as Boing Boing and MetaFilter, or social bookmarking sites like de.licio.us. 
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3G iPhone and the Sad State of “Broadband”
Recently at the Beet.TV Executive Summit in Washington, Wall Street Journal writer Walt Mossberg spoke on the convergence of computer and TV entertainment, internet bandwidth, and the importance regulation/deregulation from the top.
I’m with Walt on this. The critical step for converging TV and computer content/entertainment, and allowing us to take the next step in rich content delivery, communication, and integration is bandwidth. Insuring that access to network bandwidth does not become more metered, restricted and taxed, and that it becomes increasingly more plentiful and open is critical.
Also in this talk, Walt foreshadows the release of the 3G iPhone in the next 60 days – I’ll be the first in line when it does come out! As for bandwidth and 3G – I think that when the 3G iPhone does launch, AT&T seriously needs to get their act together with the 3G data network throughput – having all those users able to browse the web, directly download/stream media, and use other data intensive applications (iChat AV?) is going to put a serious strain on the network.
Here’s the video of Walt Mossberg speaking on Beet.TV about broadband speed, rich media, and the iPhone.
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More shakeups at Yahoo! – yHaus Axed
Things seem to be seriously shaking up over at Yahoo! lately. In addition to a 45 Billion hostile takeover bid from Microsoft, I just heard via Portfolio.com that Yahoo!’s entire design innovation team was fired, en masse. The whole team that focused on next-gen design is gone. It seems like Yahoo!, amidst increased operation costs etc is trying to scale back its operation to just its core competencies… probably a good move from a financial standpoint, however also a move that will basically guarantee a takeover soon. If a portal as large as Yahoo! can’t keep its operation rolling enough to stay on the very cutting edge of innovation, it’s doomed to be rolled into a company who can. In today’s super fierce market place, its innovate or die. So, no “design innovation team” = no future for Yahoo. That is unless they get bought, seriously turn themselves around, or re-invent themselves (which would be kind of a cop-out…).On a lighter note, I’m still glad to hear that Yahoo! is supporting OpenID... although this is more of a help for the OpenID project than it is for Yahoo!. In any case, good going on (at least) that one. Update 2/23/08… More woes for Yahoo, as they get sued for rejecting the Msft takeover.. (Read on AOL News) -
>Moving…
>I’ve moved blogs! This blog is no longer updated.. check out my current blog, over at Jeffzilla.com
Thanks!
