Vlogging and YouTube changing the world, sort of

It seems kind of weird that corporations and organizations with tens, hundreds of millions, or even a billion dollars would waste any time vlogging - creating video blogs. The same goes for posting videos to You Tube or any other social video web site.

I mean, if you can command the 36-inch HDTV monster in the living room, do you really care if you show up in the 4-inch window on the 20-inch little critter in the den or study?

Apparently, some of them do.

The YouTube Election - New York Times:

He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. %u201CWhat%u2019s happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,%u201D he said. %u201CIt%u2019s taken some richness out of the political discourse.%u201D

That is not the only example. I say on TV that a major US corporation was backing a couple young, photogenic, well-spoken mothers in northern Virginia who have their own show on the web.

Backing them to the tune of $60 K per year. Okay, they are not getting rich with that but it does let them stay at home and focus on their kids and their show. It is the kind of thing people mention when they say, "my dream is to...".

Personal digital video publishing was nowhere half a dozen of years ago.

What is interesting about the tremendous way video has taken hold is not how it has become progressively easier to shoot/edit, affordable to distribute, and consumable by the masses.

What is interesting is how digital multimedia maven Steve Jobs predicted well back in the nineties that digital video was going to be huge soon. Personally, I was thinking everyone tosses a clinker known and then at the time when I heard that.

Today, I am only thinking, how did he know???

Someone should ask Jobs in an interview someday, how is it that you are so good at predicting the future within your industry and everyone else so frequently misses the mark so wildly?

It sounds like a dumb question and maybe he has been asked before and I just never read it. But I would love to know what is going on in his head when he makes these predictions.

It is uncanny.

Technorati tags: blogging, vlogging

Microsoft Windows Live Writer

Writer Zone - Microsoft Live Writer team:

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.

Blogging has become very popular in the past couple of years.

Since 2003 we have seen some bloggers invited to political conventions, others reporting the latest technology news (and, unfortunately, product rumors) - plus their impressions on gadgets and software they have used, and what is going on in their little part of the world.

Many have augmented this written information with digital photos.

Lots of blogging software is not at all easy to use. I can attest to that.

I frequently enter my blog entries in raw HTML, typing in tags, entities, and numerous other things you do not want to know about.

I have also tediously typed, cut, and pasted together lots of things to make the sidebars of my blogs look attractive, informative, and useful (at least to me).

My reward for that is that I have a few blogs that look pretty good, provide a whetstone for me to sharpen my vital web authoring/development skills, and practice writing prose.

I know I am far from perfect at all three of these things. So I am really grateful for the chance to get hands on experience with all 3 at once.

On the other hand, sometimes I just want to write a little prose. I went to do it fast, well, and without stress. I just want it to be easy and look really good.

Microsoft looks like they are going after that latter market with their new product for Microsoft Windows, Live Writer.

Judging from the screen shots, it looks really nice.

It has its own API for writing plugins or extensions or whatever in also. Some people will be delighted to hear this. Others will be less than thrilled. It all depends on the character of the people programming them, and what they do.

Though it sounds like it is not going to run on my Mac, Windows Live Writer at least will talk to a number of different popular blogging services.

Perhaps even more importantly, it has a WYSIWYG interface. My brother and mom are probably never going to learn HTML. Most of the friends I have now and most of the coworkers I have had or ever will have will not learn HTML or CSS.

So it is pretty cool that a major company has recognized this and plunged into the fray with something they can use to create blog entries that look the way they want them to look.

I am not sure how many will actually bite. Eh, but if they want to, they can - right?

It is not like they literally have to learn another language to do it.

I had to learn HTML and CSS myself ages ago, for other reasons than blogging. I got pretty good with them before I knew much about blogging. In fact, years before I even realized blogging was really going to catch on and become yet another mainstay of the Web.

My family and most other people I know are not in the same boat, though.

Now, Live Writer, which is free, is not without a fair number of existing products that do similar things out there. Like Live Writer, many of them are also free.

iBlog

Apple's commercial WYSIWYG blogging application is included with the iLife '06 software suite which retails for about a hundred bucks. It only runs on the Macintosh and requires Mac OS X.

Flock

This free Firefox-based social web browser includes built in blogging software and social photo management software. It also supports RSS newsfeed-reading, bookmarking/tagging, and yes - the blogging editor is WYSIWYG. Like Live Writer, it supports a whole bunch of blogging services.

There are others, but this list shows that Microsoft is not coming too early or too late to the party.

I cannot run it but then there are lots of people out there who cannot run the scores of Mac-only applications for my Mac that Apple writes and gives away or sells as accessories.

Earlier today, I learned that Google was increasing the power and ease of use of its own Blogger/Blogspot service. Less than an hour ago, I learned this new program which was on the horizon a few months is ready to try out now too.


Now that email has been mostly co-opted by spammers, miscreants, and companies rolling out annoying advertising campaigns who are completely oblivious to the fact spam plays a role in it - blogging+RSS might become the new email.

In a sense, it could work in a very similar way to email. However, unlike email - it would be very, very difficult to spam.

It will be interesting to see what direction blogging goes in.

Technorati tags: microsoft, blogging, software, tagging, programming

new version of Blogger site in beta

This week Blogger made available a beta of a new version of their site/service.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger in beta:

With the beta you can:Categorize your posts with labelsControl who can read your blogChange the appearance and content of your blog with your mouse instead of HTML

In addition to that, they also published an improved version of their API which includes support for GData (Google Data).

The new API sounds interesting but I think I will wait to change my blog itself over to the version that is in beta now.

I have invested a total of at least a few hours here and there to get the appearance of each of my blogs on Blogspot.com to look the way I want them to. That includes all the fancy stuff in the sidebars.

Technorati tags: google, blogger, blogging, blogspot, tagging, styling

Mastering Blogger

Three of my goals for 2006 were to:

1. Master CSS
2. Master Blogger
3. Customize My Blogs

I feel like I have really done that.

Last weekend, I fixed a bug in the template in one of my blogs that leads Blogger to insert a completely spurious HTML/XHTML syntax error in the page. Not a teeny one but a pretty egregious one.

I will be applying that fix to my other Blogs' templates soon, I recckon.

This morning, I fixed a problem in the sidebar of one of my blogs. For some reason, the template author had omitted the Recent Posts section. It simply was not there.

So I added it.

I recently bought a very handy little reference book named Publishing a Blog with Blogger by Elizabeth Castro. It is very handy.

I just followed the instructions in her book.

At first, it did not work.

I immediately went and checked the templates for my other blogs, to see how that part of the template was written for them. Looked the same as in the book.

I went back, checked the template addition I had just typed in. Spotted one insignificant but interesting difference. There was a space between the end of one of the Blogger tag names and the right angle bracket at the end of the tag.

Should not matter; that is perfectly legal in HTML, XTHML, XML, and so forth. In fact, it is common practice - almost as common practice as not having the space there.

Anyway, I removed the extra space. Voila! It worked!! My Recent Posts for that blog then appeared in the sidebar.

Pretty good feeling.

And with that feeling, I realized that I had finally mastered Blogspot templates. I understood how they worked, how they were parsed, how some were expanded into text and some were executed as loops or conditionals.

Although I have known HTML since the first year it came out - something like a year or more before Netscape first came out - I did not quite feel like I had completely mastered what in my mind were some secondary aspects of it.

These aspects, however; were rapidly growing in importance to the people who used public websites and intranet software - and the people who paid for them.

One was CSS. I got that one checked off my list a few months ago. I knew it since 2002, but I had not mastered it. This year, I mastered it.

Another was Blogging. I wanted to be able to do more than just pick a template, choose some settings, and click the Add button over and over again to simply create new posts.

Well, I can totally control the shape and appearance of my blogs now. I am really comfortable with the templates that control the presentation of blog posts for blogs on blogspot.com.

In the process of achieving these goals, I can tell I am a better web developer.

Things that I would have stumbled over two or three years ago, are now pretty simple.

I use the latest tools, know the latest rules. I know how to make a page look just the way I want it too.

I can also make web pages do things they were not especially intended to do. I can not only highlight but filter information entered directly into a web page. All kinds of crazy things.

For the past few months, I have sort of been thinking it would be nice to create some kind of a blogging tool.

There are a couple kinds of tools that would be useful for blogging.

One is a WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing posts. Extremely useful. Flock and other free tools have recently filled that void at the freeware level. Shareware tools to do it have existed for some time. Microsoft has announced features coming in Office 2007 (working title?) that will bring these features to the commercial software tier.

So that one is already done.

Another thing that would be nice is a tool for automating, or at least simplifying, the creation of the templates. Particularly the ones that are used by Blogger.com blogs by blog authors over on Blogger.com. Thatis where the blogs have their genesis.

I have not seen someone do that yet, so I am going to mull that idea over some.

It seems like such a tool would be popular, if done well. It would have to be easy to use, require no user manual or explanation to use beyond the tool itself and a tiny bit of online help. It might be necessary to require some knowledge of CSS to fine-tune things - but not to create/customize the template in basic ways.

And construction of the custom template, from scratch, should take no more than 5-15 minutes - depending on the user's familiarity with the tool.

Anyway, that is my working idea for the project.