digitaltodd » Hmmmm…

I’ve been tagged – 6 Things You Don’t Know About Me

todd — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 02:49:47 +0000

And probably didn’t want too, but since I have a hard time saying no to Zoe here goes.

First the rulez:

Link the person who tagged you
Mention the rules on your blog
Tell about six (6) unspectacular quirks you possess
Tag six (6) following bloggers by linking them (ah…the ol’ pyramid scheme!!!)
Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know that they have been tagged.

I. I used to have hair… long hair down to my butt, which I had permed because the girls liked it curly.

II. I can’t stand any kind of booze in a dessert. I can tell if there is even a drop in an entire cake, it’s wrong I don’t care what you say!

III. When I was 8 my Dad took a principleship in a remote northern Ontario town. That’s where I learned a lot about independance and survival.

IV. I am a movie nut, I own about a thousand DVD’s (not pirated) and lack the shelf space for all of them. I also wrote my own PHP, MySQL driven web database so I could keep track of them.

V. I quit my job after a decade and went back to school at age 31 to get a computer engineering technology diploma.

VI. In order to accoplish number 5 I had to move back in with my parents.

That’s it, now for the hard part, I don’t actually know many bloggers, so I am tagging these one’s that I have either had converstions with or have read and found intersting. CanadianDana, rants and typos, TheMadFatter, The Kansas Curmudgeon, MyMobileAdventures, MarkCarras.

digsby

todd — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:47:25 +0000

digsby is an IM+E-mail+Social Networking client. So far I have not found anything that comes close to its capabilities. It handles instant messaging for MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, AIM, Facebook, ICQ & Jabber. It will work with e-mail from Hotmail, Google, Yahoo & AOL/AIM as well as any POP3 or IMAP mail service. It also plugs into 3 of the top social netowking sites Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. That’s a lot of stuff eh? The best part is that it does it all really really well. Have a look at their screenshots gallery to see some of the configurations and to get an idea of the features that I am discussing below.

My favorite feature of digsby by far is the little balloon that pops up on your main screen with the info you have asked digsby to provide, the best part of this is that if someone sends you an IM you can type your response right into the balloon, no switching to the IM client window, this is really handy if you just need to send a quick reply back to someone and is much less disruptive. The other most excellent feature is the ability to combine multiple contacts into one, if you have friends on more than one network you can group them into one contact on Digsby and they show up with whichever service they logged in under but you only have one contact entry. It also has a great chat widget for Facebook or that you can embed in a blog. What makes that cool is that when someone hits your page you see a guest show up under digsby chat in the Buddy List.

There is also a Mac OSX and a Linux client in the works. I am hoping that they will add other social networking sites in the future as well as a mobile client that way I could use digsby everywhere!

Not approved for comments?

todd — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:46:09 +0000

I have been a lifehacker reader for quite some time, but I never bothered to get involved with the community. That was until a few weeks ago when I tried to get in on a discussion about Dropbox. At this point I didn’t have Dropbox and there where people in the comments offering invites. What better to get involved in the conversation than get an invite and try it out for myself, so I left a comment asking for one. That’s when I found out that the team at lifehacker moderates their comments, big deal right I mod mine to make sure they are real and relavant to the topic. It turns out that at lifehacker you have to be an approved commentor. How you become an approved commentor is a bit of a mystery to me, lifehacker Comments FAQ. Ok so it’s not that much of a mystery but who reads these things through right off the bat anyway. Well I guess I should have paid more attention becasue as a result of my asking for a Dropbox invite I have been banned from commenting, and there is no mechanism in place to change that either, no 2nd chance, no appeal, nothing. You can send an email but you won’t get a response, they make that quite clear with this disclaimer:

Please note that due to the amount of emails we receive, we may not be able to reply to every email.

lifehacker - posting comments denied

I know it says “may not” but it might as well say “don’t bother”. I have sent an email asking that my account be removed because I thought like other blogs they were trying to build a community but it turns out that they are just building a clique and I am not interested in that. So I will save my comments for other blogs that talk about the same things as they do and spend my time on them.

Oh and to make matters worse, they pointed out that I don’t have any friends… nice.

hurt my feelings too

The Social Networking Experiment

todd — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:49:39 +0000

It’s a busy time on the internet these days. Since the inception of hugely popular Twitter in 2006 we have seen an explosion in micro-blogging. There are now several micro-blogging services available and they are also integrated into the popular social networking services like Facebook. The list is getting really long http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites sufficed to say that if you use more than one or two of the services on that list on a regular basis you are probably a social media junkie ( or are becoming one like I am ). The micro-blog is an extension of the traditional blog and there are a fair number of A-list bloggers out there that use these social networking services.

I have had a great time meeting people, discovering services and learning the jargon. It’s a fantastic world out there and services like Twitter, Plurk, Indent.ca, Tumbler and Pownce are full of great people that have something to share. Sometimes it’s about breakfast and sometimes its about the more serious things in life. There is a fantastic amount of information shared, and it is being used to motivate people, like this recent blood drive in Austin Texas. This is the aspect of the social network that I find so fascinating. The idea that as you build a group of followers, that you interact with, share stories with or just listen to, you can wield a great deal of internet clout. An a-list blogger who undoubtedly uses most if not all of the aforementioned micro-blogging services and has a following of several thousand people can drive traffic to a website for the purposes of promotion or because they don’t like something that is on a particular site.

The addition of easy video services like Seesmic and Stickam will also change the dynamic of the web in a large way. Adding a face takes away the safety of anonymity and provides for a different type of interaction. Leo Laporte is an excellent example of this. He has recently set himself up in his own studio with some cool gear on a reasonable budget (from traditional TV production studios) and is broadcasting 6 days a week at Twitlive.tv. He is usually recording one of his many podcasts with other Twits who are either in the studio or who join him via Skype. He also takes live video calls through Skype and ooVoo as well as from Stickam users in between recordings and just generally talks tech.

It’s going to be really amazing to watch this evolve further over the next few years, but I think we will see a lot more indpendant production making headway over the major traditional broadcasters.

1st Social networking made film?

todd — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:09:50 +0000

Faintheart is billed as “The world’s first publicly generated movie.” by Jamie Kantrowitz, vice-president of marketing for MySpace. With a budget of $2.6 million the film was created with the input of MySpace subscribers. The MySpace group was asked to choose the director and the music, they also vied for small roles in the film and provided input on plot development.

This should be an interesting experiment and I am anxious to see it. I am a big movie fan, and I love films from all genres. I also spent a good portion of my career working in the film and television industry and I know that the more input a project has the more diluted it becomes. My guess is that making films this way will ultimately fail although the novelty of it will probably give it a good albeit short lived run.

Sorry there does not seem to be a trailer available for this one yet… but a Faintheart trailer Google search brings up a whole lot of auditions.