Justin.TV

After seeing this today I just had to post on it. So in class today, my professor shows us all a brand new site called Justin.TV
Pretty much this guy named Justin and his three friends have started a new company in which the want to show people how to stream live video over the net. So here is how it works. Pretty much They have a sight where Justin is streaming video of his life 24/7. He wears a camera attached to himself in which he has it attached to his laptop and publishes the video feed live due to Quicktime publisher. The site has been up live 10 days now and he is getting recognition. He has been mentioned on the news and today G4's Attack of the Show mentioned it. If you go to the site, you can watch the feed of Justin's life, chat with others view the stream in a live chat room, and keep up with reading the blog. He also already has sponsors and has accounts on Facebook and Myspace which have multiple hist already. This is just crazy. I mean this pretty much puts what I was talking about in my last blog true. All it takes is someone to find something that is already there and find a way to change it and make it theirs. I guess I'm going to have to re-think the use of video thing again (joking). After discussing this with my professor, we pretty much came to one of two conclusions. Either he will get his month or so of fame and fade away, or he we get money an start a new social networking site that will allow people to communicate through live video feed. Either way, it's going to be interesting to see where this all will go. Good Luck Justin!

Site Address: WWW.JUSTIN.TV

Six Apart...

This post is coming from the more and more I think about the company Six Apart. I'm amazed about how it got started. The owners of the company are a married couple. Ben and Mena Trott are a young married couple who reside in San Francisco. The thing that really gets me about them is that They are only a month older than I am. They are only 29 years old and already millionies, and then there is me who is in grad school still trying to figure out where I am going and still have trouble paying all of my bills. Now I'm not going to sit here and bitch about how life is un-fair, and be un-happy, because I'm not. In reality, I'm really impressed. I mean from what i can tell, neither of them has and educcation after high school (if they do I haven't been able to find any information yet) and they have this huge company. They just jumped in to the real world and are still going, where someone like me who has decided to go for his PHD and is continuly struggling with his direction. Another funny thing about Six Apart (which i foound out that they came up with the name due tothe fact they are only six days apart in age) that the reasons for their sucess isn't even something they are responsible for. The success for their company if due to blogging. Now Blogging was started by someone else, but both Brentt and Mena where with in the first wave of blogger, and weren't happy with what they had, so they decided to take current media and find a way to make it better and make it their own. Thus they created MoveableType with was blogging software (due to the fact that they both had a programming back-ground) and TypePad which is a blogging host like Blogger. After a few years of success, they acquired venture capital in which they bought the blogging host system Live-Journal, and now they have even broken into the world of social networking with their new system, Vox. Now I bring this all up, because we are all told to get an education (which I'm not knocking) and create something totally new, but that's how it's happening. People are find ways to break into the business world by taking something that is already there and find a way to either create something else out of it or make it better. It's amazing just what I've been able to find out. I have to ask though, when will it be my turn? I wonder if I might be able to figure out a way to take video and create my own and better version of You-tube. Who knows.

Hospital/On-line communities connection...

So this past Friday, i received a bit of unwelcomed news. After meeting with my parents for dinners, I came to fin d out that my father had been diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. Now good news is that it was caught in the early stages and and will be treatable. Still when you hear that someone close to you has cancer of any kind, it can tend to be a little disheartning. So I went with my parents to the hospital yesterday to find out just what would have to be done for my father. While I was waiting with the parents in the waiting room, i picked up an issue of a magazine called Inc. It is a magazine that basically looks at entrepreneurs and people in the world of business. Well as I started skimming the pages, one article drew my attention. It was an article about a company called Six Apart. I come to find out that this is the company responsible for Moveable Type and Typepad, software and hosting for blogs. Aparently the company had also purchased Live-Journal. The main purpose for the article was, even though Six Apart had already made it's imprint in the world of of Web 2.0 through blogs, they really hadn't made a mark in the area of social networking. With the popularity of sites such as Myspace and Facebook, the wanted to find out if they could break into that market also. Well that is just what they did. In October of last year, Six Apart launched a on-line community called Vox. Vox is basically a new way for people to blog, but with more of a sense of Myspace. The main focus is for blogging, but you are able up-load photos and video also, let along still connecting to other sites such as Youtube, Flickr, etc. It's still brand new, but the site has already broken the 200,000 user mark. I'd have to say that's not bad for a still brand new Social Network. I'm still not totally sure all that Vox has to offer, but I'm going to keep an eye on it (probably set up an account like i do on other sites) and see where it and Six Apart will go in the future. With a company like that, I wonder who else we will see step-up and and work to make their mark in the industry.

Cram sessions...

So this past weekend Atec had it's Game Development Weekend. Pretty much it is a 72 hour cram session in which to create a whole entire video/computer game. I've never taken part in any of the past ones since my focus isn't in creating video games, but I decided to actually par-take in a way this semester. I spent time through out the whole weekend shooting video of the large group of students that were forgoing sleep in the hopes to create a final product. I shot at different times such as 2-7 in teh afternoon and 12-3 in the morning. People came and went. Some only worked a few hours and others stayed the whole weekend. It really came down to what skills people had, and how committed that really were. I ended up gathering up to 4 hours worth of footage in the hope that I will be able to create a 5-6 minute pod-cast to publish to the net to show people just what Atec does in the hetic weekend. Through my shooting I couldn't help but think about the 24-hour video race that I and other students partake in each May. Pretty much Atec sponsers 2-3 teams of college students where we have 24 hours to create a 5 minute film. It's a lot of fun, but also a lot of work given how much work you have to due to lack of sleep. You really start to see how much work and time goes into these pieces of work. I have to admit though, after witnessing the game dev weekend and have worked through multiple 24-hour video races, that you start to realize the work that goes into the creation a real piece of work. I mean with the game dev and video race, you are done after that that short time period. For most, they will never go back to it ever again, with never having to worry about losing anything. With major production companies though, they have so much more to do. You can't just walk away after one weekend. Whether it is a film or video game, these people end up having to work multiple months and over 80 hours a week. Some will go without a day off for many weeks, because for many of them, there is so much invested into it financially, emotionally and physically that if it fails, that is it. It could mean the end of their job let along the possbily end of that company. It really makes me look at how different things really are when it comes to creating content for the net. I'm not saying that the people creating podcast don't put a lot of work into them, but with a lot of the ones that I have seen, these people don't have so much invested into them. I have their income coming from some where else. They just create these podcast in my opinion for one of two reasons. Either to see if they can create the next great show, or because they are board and just have nothing better to do. I think it will be interesting to see what it's going to be like when some of these podcast actualy make it really big and see where it will go from there.

Well I know...

that I said I was going to post for the two video's that I posted, but that was also before some unexpected circumstances happened. Two months ago I bought a new laptop. Well low and behold, my computer's hard-drives decides to crash on me.
Only two months and away goes my all of my data. So it's been a little hard to get work that I needed done. Well I broke out my old powerbook, which I have taken care of for the last 4 years, and luckily it's still running good. So hopefully I can get blog post done. Just wanted to give an update as to why this has been taking so long. Hopefully getting my new computer fixed won't take as long.

Sorry....

for the two video's not having a text. I was having issues with youtube yet again. Both of the post will have comments about them in the next couple of days. Sorry for the delay, but I just have a lot going on.

danah on O'Reilly Factor

So this post yet again deals with on-line communities. It’s interesting how I found out about the women on whom I’m writing about. I was skimming through the flickr account of the host of one of the pod-cast that I watch and I came across a few pics of people that she had interviewed. I decided to find out a little bit more about them. Danah Boyd was the one that really stood out to me. She is a PHD student and researcher that talks about social networking through on-line communities such as Friendster and Myspace. I found it interesting to find out different programs she has been on just to talk about her expertise. I did a youtube search and found this video where she is interviewed on the O’Reilly factor talking about Myspace and talking about on-line predators and them hunting down under-age teens. It got me to think not just about Myspace, but Flickr, Youtube and other social networks and wondering just how safe are they. As in Youtube, you can easily find porn on there. That same goes for Flickr. Now I know that the administrators of these sites do what they can to regulate and secure stuff like that from users who are underage, but just how secure are they really. I mean you hear about kids getting hurt and raped all the time in normal day society, but now people are using these social networks to find and I apologize for using this term, but prey on-line. I mean these sites are meant to create a new method for society to interact with one another, but now people are using to be destructive and find ways to hurt other in spaces that should be safe. I know it has to be hard to regulate and work to secure this different sites especially with people lying about their age just to get to media and people that they shouldn’t, but the more I think about it, is there really way to make it all that safe. It’s like computers and people creating viruses for them. No matter how hard you try to make them secure, their will always be someone to find a way to crack it. I just hate to see people using things that should be used to help society, but instead use them to hurt others.

It's A Wonderful World

Ok, so I've finally getting to come back and write for this post. I originally had a post for this video, but youtube with all of it wondrous glory, didn't get it published. Which in the long run is a good thing because the more I thought about it; I didn’t like what I had written. Ok now back to why I posted this video. Originally I was going to talk about the game a little, but I kept thinking about it and remembering what Dan had told me, I started thinking beyond the game. I’ve posted about other games before and that is not what I’m trying to get with this blog. So rather the game, I’m going to talk about the system that the game is made for why I think it has relation to this blog. The Gameboy DS is latest handheld system to come from Nintendo (or more so the second to newest since they now have the DS Lite). Anyone that knows anything about Nintendo is that they have been the king of the handhelds for well over 15 years now. Even their competitor Sony with their invention of the PSP have yet to out do Nintendo. The DS unlike its past versions is now dual screened with a stylus and touch screen. It even carries wi-fi capability in which the user can play other people over the net with certain games. The one thing that DS does not have like it’s competitor is the ability to surf the net or watch movies, but I can’t help but think how much longer till the decide to add features like that. It’s funny, even with those features added to the PSP, the DS is still able to out sell it. It also helps that the DS is cheaper and has a better game selection. So with more games that people want and a price people can afford, think what will happen if Nintendo finally decides add web browsers and download capability to the system. People will be able to update their blogs, listen to their MP3’s, chat with each other (which you can already be done between DS’s) and even watch their favorite pod-cast. In my opinion, the DS is the most under used device with the most potential for future use with New Media. Sure we have devices like the I-Pod’s, which don’t get me wrong, I love mine, but the DS is just more innovative and allow the user to interact with the data more. If and when the DS is given that ability, I could easily see it becoming one of the most used new media appliances.

Second-Life Graduate Art Show

Click to Play

So after my last post talking about my graduate art show in Second-Life, I figured I would show just what exactly I was talking about. After finally finding out how to record footage with SL, I went and recorded a tour of the Atec Island gallery with my show in it. The first two levels hold stills from my videos, and the 3rd floor is where you watch the videos. There are 3 different video feeds which each showing two different video paintings. The two on the sides are just visual, but the center video has audio with them. To hear the audio you will to log in to SL, but at least you will be able to get a little of the feel for what I was trying to accomplish. Let me know what you think.