educating eric

I'm sitting here in my den, putting off going to bed, and thinking that I really should get out a podcast before we're in 2008. But Candela is literally three feet in front of my face, separated from me by only 1/2" of drywall, 3 1/2" of dead space, and another 1/2" of drywall. So, I don't think I'm going to try recording anything tonight. But that got me thinking about podcasting, and the fact that, at least for me, right now, insert other qualifier here, it's somewhat difficult to pop out a quick podcast. There's recording, then assembling the different sweepers and phone clips, then compressing, then normalizing, then saving, then uploading to the server, then writing and publishing the blog entry to populate the RSS feed... at which point I remember that I left out "update the ID3 tags" from the process and wonder whether I should even bother. There's got to be a better way, right? So, that got me thinking about what used to be c...

Thanks to a tip from a blog reader, I've now got a new interactive video site to add to the toolbelt: Asterpix Interactive Video . It seems to fall in that Click.TV or Mojiti or Viddler category, but also seems to feature a "tracking" function so your clickable "hotspots" will stick with objects as they move on the screen. Awesome for home movies or any long shot that has an object of interest; I'm not so sure it's a good fit for collaborative commenting on a produced video, but I'll have to play with it more to get a good handle on its strengths. Three cheers for the blogosphere and the answers it can provide! :)

I'm not sure people beleive me when I say in presentations, "Here are some interesting third-party online services... but be careful, because they could disappear at any time." Well, that's what happened to Mojiti, which was AWESOME (and now rumored to have been bought out by Hulu.com). So I went on the hunt for an alternative. I think I found it: Viddler.com. Here's a sample from a project we're working on right now: Augustine test video . I'm not embedding the video here (though that does indeed work) because, to have it show up, it has to be "public". What I included above was a "secret link", as they call it -- security by obscurity, which is totally fine for these purposes.

Someday, there'll be a good balance of reasonable DRM (after all, intellectual property is worth something) and fair use. In the meantime, we can read things like The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark] and hang on for the ride. P.S. Yes, I'm back to blogging! We'll see how long it lasts this time 'round.