Remember last week? It was my birthday! Rather than post any photos from the birthday party, I’ll just show you photos from Flickr taken on June 18, 2005 that match the word “party”, ok?
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Gno[me]dex
I guess that Gnomedex thing is going on, but of course, I’m not actually there, so I don’t know.
My idea for the day though was this: I’ve got cell phone numbers for at least three people there, and could possibly even dig up a few more. I thought about calling some of them and saying “Hey, meet me at the Citizen Media session…” or whatever. (If you want to get really tricky scour Flickr for Gnomedex photos of places/things you can reference.) I would then hope that people would mention that I was there but failed to actually find me. One must be elusive, like the unicorn!
Obviously I’ve blown my cover by writing about this. None the less, feel free to borrow my plan…
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A Mention, A Mention!
Ha! Look at that! blood and mathowie discuss me… (I said “discuss” not “disgust” mind you!)
But if that were the case, then all the early bloggers would be well known. RasterWeb (b. 1997), Now This (b. 1997), and the Bradlands (b. 1998) should have much more traffic than you…
The funny thing is, it’s sort of like “Hey, they’ve been around forever and are still unpopular! Which happens to be just fine with me, as popularity has never really been a goal of RasterWeb! or a goal of mine either…
For the record (not that anyone will read this, since, you know, I am unpopular and have no readers even though I’ve been at it for nearly 8 years…) Where was I? Rambling again, maybe that’s my problem… Ah yes, To give back to the internet, to share what I know, to open ports of communication and all that, to discuss with like-minded freak, geeks, and nerds the things I find fascinating, to write, and rant, and make cool things… I love the internet! Creative people need an outlet. Need it! Without that they go insane. This is one of my outlets…
I also think that what Matt overlooks is that he created or was involved with some very high-profile web sites, and was employed by high-profile companies, and of course does not live in the midwest. I also don’t really go to conferences or hang out with the cool kids of blogging, so few people really know me that well outside of this site. Crap, I’ve known Dave Winer on mailing lists and the web for like 10 years now, and last fall he thought I lived in Denmark or something!
Highlight of my day, mathowie says:
I still read RasterWeb…
Thanks Matt!
(BTW, the proper spelling is RasterWeb! but I’ll let it go, as I certainly don’t expect people to remember such minute details… I truly will claim the title of “toiling away in obscurity longer than anyone else…” Foo!)
(Update: rebecca fixed the spelling, except for the ! but I’m all Yahoo!-like with that anyway…)
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Enclosures in Atom?
Being someone who has not followed Atom as much as the next super-geek, I’m clueless as to how enclosures are handled… I mean, I could have sworn someone was just namespacing in RSS 2.0 and using the <enclosure> element, but I find no docs on that… (And since Mark ain’t around to help with this…)
I guess there are “Atom enclosures” in the 0.8 draft…
Should I be using this?
<content type="audio/mpeg" src="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />
Or perhaps this?
<link rel="related" type="audio/mpeg" href="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />
I think they both pass the validator fine, but that doesn’t tell me what I should really be using or doing.
Searching gave no good results, and IM to smart people gave no solid answers… Argh… (Maybe in another 10 months I’ll have an answer.)
Oh yeah, it looks like the WordPress solution was to just use a function named rss_enclosure in the wp-atom.php file, which as you might guess, does the RSS 2.0 thing with <enclosure> in an Atom 0.3 file. I think I’d call that a bug…
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Ourmedia Archive
The videobloggers (and Freevlog) get my thanks on this one. I figured I should make a post on this since I’ve made two comments on it recently…
The Internet Archive will provide storage for your files, because they are “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form” and the chances of the Internet Archive sticking around seems pretty good… The problem is that the time between uploading a file and having it available can be 24 hours. That’s where Ourmedia comes in. Ourmedia provides “free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches” and your files are actually stored in the Internet Archive, but the time between upload and having your file available is much faster. How much faster? My last 2.4 mb upload to Ourmedia took about 10 minutes. Yes, in 10 minutes the file was uploaded and I had the URL for it from the Internet Archive. Sweet!
Ourmedia also makes it really easy to license your work, choosing a Creative Commons license, or whatever other license you might want. They’ve been working on improvements and even in the last two weeks I’ve seen things getting better.
So, the bottom line: free hosting for your podcast or videoblog files (as well as other files.) This sort of solves that bandwidth problem… (It works for tinkernet.)
Are there any downsides? Well, if you really like the raw log data and stats, you may need to do a little extra hacking to get what you need. In theory you could get the URL of your media file on archive.org, and then create redirects on your own site so that requests go to your site, get logged, and the clients get the file via redirect to the actual URL. I imagine a nice little web app or WordPress plugin could do that quite easily…
Update: See JD Lasica’s post on Ourmedia…