This site is not live yet but you can get email notification. Assume the convicts won’t be tweeting directly. I’m trying to imagine how this won’t be a bit of a downer.
Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps
A “teaching moment” or Big Brother?
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YouDiligence.com is the brain-child of Kevin Long. According to a blog post on ESPNB’s Jock-O-Sphere, the service works like this:
“…for a small fee — $1,250 a year for 50 athletes or less, or $5,000 a year for 500-750 athletes (described as pennies a day for each athlete) — schools are essentially given a broad-scale monitoring system for their athletes’ Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages. Enter in the keywords you’d prefer not to show up in your student-athletes’ stream — these can range from curse words to alcohol and drug references to just about anything; it’s entirely customizable — and the instant any of these buzz words are posted to a student-athletes’ social media stream, administrators can be alerted via e-mail and a detailed account of the instance is added to a spreadsheet log … instead of online a few hours later on a blog or newspaper’s Web site, which could be potentially damaging to the program.”
This is a really interesting post (by Ryan Corazza, a freelance writer and Web designer based in Chicago), whether you’re in the world of college athletics or not. Would you (would I) be okay with your company monitoring what you post on social sites? Are you sure they are not? Would it make a difference in what you post?
Disclosure: At least one of the schools mentioned in the post is a “university partner” of the company I work for, Learfield.
For the record, I don’t see anything wrong with schools keeping an eye on what their student athelets are saying/writing. I mean, it’s out there. You should assume everyone is reading every word you post.
If you feel that your school is censoring your freedom of speech, then it’s decision time.
Google Buzz
I’ve been noodling around with Google Buzz a bit and my early impression if very positive. Now, I’m not going to even try to explain Google Buzz. You can watch the video below if you’re interested. And I’m not going to encourage you to “follow” me on Buzz. Or try to sell you on social media, or anything else. This is one of my “for the record” posts.
I will say that more and more of what I find interesting is going to my social media streams, which will now mostly show up on my Buzz profile page. If you have a Gmail account you have (or soon will have) Buzz.
Streaming video of committee hearing
I took the little BT-1 Bluetooth webcam back to the Missouri capitol yesterday for a hearing. Used twitcam to stream. The audio was poor to marginal and the video about what you’d expect from a $150 camera. It was basically a final field test and I was pleased.
If you look closely (red arrow) in the top left corner of the photo above, you can see the aluminum legs of the small tripod holding the camera. I was about 20-25 feet away. The camera was very unobtrusive and it was convenient to be untethered and out of the way.
One of these days there will be a high-profile news conference we’ll want to stream live and I’ll just grab the BT-1 and the MacBook Pro. We don’ need no stinkin’ satellite truck.
PS: I have no idea why Wilfred Brimmley is on the committee (top center)
MacBook Book
Irresistible.
BandMaker.com
I think we can all agree that the hardest part of having a successful rock band is coming up with a good name. You can always find a drummer or a lead singer but a good band name… very difficult. Fortunately, there are no shortages of websites to help with this critical task. At BandMaker.com you plug in some words and get some recommendations. I think you can do the same thing at WORDLAB but I got distracted browsing their list of 4,000+ names for rock bands. A few of my favorites:
- Adjustable Waistbands
- Viral Bunny
- Twinkie Spore
- Turd Cribbage
- Tim Tation and the Quagmire
- Stool Patrol
- Sandy Muff
- Rock Paper Sisters
- Nuclear Winter Squash
I wanted to try my hand at some names but came up dry. So I pulled a few from my tag cloud (sidebar)
- Anonymous Audio
- Blackberry Brush with Near Greatness
- Coffee Zone Consciousness
- PowerPoint Prison Santa
- Smoking Spam Tattoos
Let me know if you decide to use one of these.
twitcam
Streaming live video has never been easier. Ironically, the bigger challenge is coming up with something anyone would care to watch. Which I clearly demonstrated this morning at the Coffee Zone.
In the photo above, you can see my BT-1 wireless webcam atop the Rocket Fuel storage tank. I was sitting about 25 feet away and never lost the signal.
Instead of uStream or qik (which works with mobile phones only, as far as I can tell), I used a nifty site called TwitCam. The screenshot below is really all there is to twitcam. And, yes, it’s free. For now. You just log in with your Twitter info and go. TwitCam records as it streams. No option for live stream only, as far as I could determine. I don’t see how video can get much easier than this.
As soon as I can come up with something worth the bandwidth, I’ll take this back to the state capitol.
The art of the tweet
From a thoughtful –and useful– post by Tammy Erickson (@tammyerickson) on how to make Twitter fun for your followers:
- Don’t report banal details. Unless you’re observing a true breaking news event (and note: this term does not include what you or your child ate for lunch), skip it.
- Do interpret your experiences. How do they make you feel? What do they mean to you?
- Do share the oddities you observe. Look for things that seem unusual, out-of-place, surprising.
- Do share things you love – quotes, phrases, descriptions of events that brought joy to your day.
Her conclusion:
“Slow down, enjoy. Listen to the world’s music. Share the best of your experiences, but remember, 140 characters is a unique format — more like poetry or Haiku than news reporting.”
Stephen Fry on the iPad
British wit and tech daddy-o, Stephen Fry, on the iPad (just a couple of snippits from lengthy but excellent review):
“Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.”
“How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.”
Ahem. I confess to all but the dribble. I try not to dribble.
From my lips to WordPress
One of the reasons that most folks don’t blog from their iPhone or mobile device, has to be the difficulty of typing a paragraph or two. With Dragon dictation, it would seem that I could simply dictate a post and paste that into the rather handy WordPress iPhone app.