Queen of the clickstream
Posted: Friday, March 21, 2008 5:49 PM by Will Femia
Remember
Qik? It lets you stream live from the camera on your mobile device to a Web site they host for you. Last month I met NBC cameraman/blogger/DIY media person
Jim Long who mentioned using Qik and Twitter to shoot a live interview with Bob Geldof while in Africa with the Today show's Ann Curry. Through Twitter he was able to see messages from the audience on the back of his phone while the camera on the front of his phone was shooting interview being shown live around the world. That is both cool and tight, but now
Flixwagon may do it better by combining those functionalities into a single service. Broadcast live from your phone, see comments, save your broadcast, upload to YouTube... all in one service. I haven't tried it yet but that's a lot of cool functionality. Handy summary
here.
Speaking of streams, apparently MyBlogLog does lifestreaming like FriendFeed does - sharing your online activity in what I can only describe as a
Web log. Not only that, but through tags they
regroup all of their lifestreams into categories. On the way to the Semantic Web this (topics pages) seems like a popular idea.
Speaking of taking content from a source and putting it in a new page to do new things, some Clicked readers may recall my complaint that link sharing on the Web has migrated from blogs to other formats, making it more difficult to follow Web trends through blog aggregators. A similar situation is happening
with online conversations. A blog item may draw no comments itself but its placement in Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc may draw plenty of discussion(s). And then there's what's said on Twitter and through Facebook notes. Sadly, the list of solutions to the problem of finding out what people are saying about your blog is no less overwhelming.
But while it may be challenging to track every bit of conversations about your particular blog entry, actual inter-site online discourse is doing quite well. This week saw Mike Arrington
speculate about the power that could be wielded by a unified organization of A-list bloggers, followed by
a battery of interesting replies.
Other worthwhile reading this week was this somewhat lengthy explanation of
the debate over Web standards. It sounds wonky but read as far as you're able and you're bound to come away with some new insight about (and appreciation for) how the Web is structured.
"This is what the
world's first Time Machine may look like."
"A German pensioner is taking a hospital to court after she turned up for a leg operation - and
got a new anus instead." A headline contest item if ever there was one.
Here's another one of those
extended clips of Reverend Wright. As a non-churchgoer I may not be qualified to judge but the characterization of his services as being some kind of indoctrination does seem right. Listening to this guy is more like a mental exercise.
File Dropper has a 5 gig limit and it's free. You upload a file to it, it gives you a link, you pass the link to someone else and they download the file you put in there. This could be the answer to the bowling pictures problem I mentioned earlier.
The Wall Street Journal's Web site is already (secretly) free - This may be a bit longer than you want to read if you're not specifically looking for the answer to WSJ's pay wall but the Firefox trick at the end is interesting. The idea is that while you can't get all of the WSJ for free, you can get at it if you're coming from Google News or Digg and maybe some other sites. So WSJ is reading what site is referring you to them and decides from there whether you should be allowed to read the article. The Firefox trick is to use a "referrer spoofer." You tell it what to tell the WSJ about who sent you.
I got some referral traffic from
this cool Flickr tag browser and ended up losing a significant amount of time exploring links
on the blog and poking through his portfolio links.
The fruit of that labor includes "
Add to friends" gear that displays a bar code (or whatever you call that) that can be photographed and sent to Facebook to add you as a friend. My first thought was that it would be cool to have this as a business card and have it feed something more general-purpose than a Facebook page. Then my mind wandered to the thought that a tattoo would save the trouble of having to carry a card... Boy, that was a slippery slope.
Somehow following that I ended up with
Sub-Studio on my screen and enjoyed the list of weird shoe photos down the left side there.
The peace sign turned 50 yesterday. I had heard that its roots were in semaphore but I thought that was just urban legend.
Even though it seems like every card trick calls itself the best card trick,
this one really is pretty good. Unfortunately no reveal here. I notice he shuffles off the top, which is usually a sign that the bottom card is a marker but that doesn't answer half the questions this trick leaves.
Listening: Hot French rockers
Neimo. I confess I listened to it with the window minimized but I think it's all safe for work. The video is of two people having sex but any exposed flesh is transparent so it's just clothes moving around. Some of it is pretty flagrant but still, no actual boobies.
Rock climbing robots (with video) - I generally think of rock climbing as a challenge rooted in the limitations of human physicality. To the extent that robot designers work from scratch, I'm surprised they'd follow the human climbing model so closely.
I should know better than to see a trend in a single instance but
this photo is just too great and
this photoshopping too funny for this to be the last we see of it.
In case you doubted the effects of global warming, this is probably
the surest sign yet.
In the wake of my tap water rant:
Salmonella outbreak linked to tap water - I forgot to mention that my new theory is not that the tap water stories are a bottled water conspiracy but that the shift to bottled water has led to neglect of the quality of tap water. So sort of a passive conspiracy theory.
