Ever since I took my very old and tiny television apart last month I have been out of the loop. I like being out of the loop for the most part since I don’t care if Brittney shaves her head or if Lindsey is in rehab or who Paris showed her skivvies to. I get occasional doses of news from Washingtonpost.com or OrlandoSentinel.com and that keeps me up to date on local, national, and international events. However, one news story completely bypassed my radar.
Since I deconstructed the box of moving colors down to a box of circuitry, which I fried with the hair dryer just for fun, I have been catching my favorite shows on the internet. I am too lazy to install and deal with bittorrent programs so I have stuck to legal viewing avenues like the Weeds blog on blogspot and the shows made available on network sites.
Last week, after watching the latest Family Guy on Tuesday instead of Sunday on the Fox website, I found myself chatting on the phone with my younger brother. He is an aspiring writer and he was jazzed up about the writers’ strike. Uh-oh, sounds like I might have missed something important. If you haven’t read/heard/seen anything about the writers’ strike then click here for the Washington Post’s take on the story.
I’m not going to lie. I am used to being part of the problem when it comes to regulating e-commerce and the flow of intellectual information. I used Napster back in 2000 when the RIAA was working towards alienating music consumers everywhere. I used Kazaa before I realized that most of the files available were corrupt and virus infected and I have settled for just not buying music over subscribing to pay services. But if you but the CD, oh won’t you please burn me a copy? The only time I buy CDs now is when I’ve paid good money (at least Pearl Jam tried to stop TicketMaster from ripping us off at the gates) to go to a show and the band/group is selling their merchandise directly to the crowd. It makes me happy to cut out the middle person. I really don’t have an ethical problem with any of this. If you can’t figure out how to use the internet to make money then you are a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them. Artists are now using forums like MySpace to disseminate their music and band/group information.
But my take on this situation with the television writers and the evil corporations that are exploiting them should be pretty apparent from the way I worded this sentence. However, that didn’t stop me from watching the Simpsons before writing this (it’s research!). Watching the Simps (we are tight like that) on the internet has only two drawbacks to watching on television. One, they don’t load the program on the site until one to two days after the first airing of the show, and two, the screen is small. Very small, like 5 by 5 inches small. There was a three, the buffering wasn’t very good last week, but they have since addressed that. But, on the upside, I only had to watch about fifteen seconds of commercials throughout the entire episode. This in and of itself is indicative of how “new media” is rapidly evolving. The week that I talked to my brother I endured about two minutes of commercials, which was actually the same stupid thirty second Papa Johns commercial played four times. This week, the Toyota Yaris sponsored the program with four commercials that were four seconds long. Once again it was the same commercial every time, but it wasn’t nearly as annoying as the long drawn out Papa Johns commercials or even the stupid yet well funded commercials I used to be assailed with as a television watcher.
Fox isn’t the only network making their programming available online. I caught up with 30Rock on NBC.com and Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com and…well I don’t really watch anything else but there is certainly more out there.
So am I part of the problem or am I a consumer that is creating a demand which is allowing the broadcasting companies to exploit their staff because of a very old labor issue, contract negotiation? I suppose that I’m just happy that for once my digital consumption is in alignment with what is legal (if you want to give me guff about my former career as a MP3 pirate I will be happy to send you a quasi-legal brief I wrote with a dissenting opinion concerning how copy write law has been interpreted by the courts).
Anyways, I am not above blatantly soliciting reader opinions, so PLEASE comment and let me/us know what you think about this writers’ strike and the state of E-TV.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Socially bookmarking my way to fun
What with all the coverage that social networking has been getting in the media, social bookmarking hasn’t gotten a fair shake at the limelight. Social bookmarking is somewhat like adding a website to your list of favorites; except your list of favorites can become very long and unmanageable. To mediate this you can create a system of folders and organize your favorites according to groupings that make sense to you. What always happened to me is that the groupings I created made perfect sense, unless I need to find a site three months later and I can’t remember if the website for that hotel in Killington is in the Snow folder, the Travel folder, or the I Wish folder.
Social bookmaking has enabled me to fare better at managing my site of interest. I use Del.icio.us although there are lots of sites out there; Blue Dot, Simpy, and FURL just to name a few. Since I am a Del.icio.us user I will use that site to discuss social bookmarking.
Once you register I suggest installing the small and unobtrusive application that puts a del.icio.us button in your browser. Now, let’s say that you find a website that you want to come back to. You click your delicious button and tag the site. The tag is essentially a key word or a series of key words that will group this site with other sites that you have tagged with the same word or words.
My friends are going to the snowboarding world cup in Quebec in March of 2008 and want me to come. I tell them I am going to look into it; after all there are a lot of factors to weigh here. So I start by cruising over to the U.S. Snowboarding Team website and navigate to the events page. The exact date is posted here and since I don’t want to forget, I tag this as “snowboarding world cup.” The world cup will be held in Stoneham so next I go to the Stoneham resort page because while I’m okay with being a spectator, I’m still going to want to thrash while I’m out there, so I need to know what runs the public will have access to during the competition and how much lift tickets are. I tag this page “snowboarding world cup Stoneham.” And as I continue my research for airfare, vehicle rentals, lodging, maps, locations of grocery stores (because if you have been to a resort town you know you can’t eat there for less than $25 a day), and all sorts of other information. Each page gets tagged “snowboarding world cup” and then another keyword.
A different set of friends is encouraging me to visit them in British Columbia this winter and get some serious crazyness on at Whistler. So I do a lot of the same sort of research: airfare, lift tickets, and mountain maps being the big three priorities for me here. These all get tagged “Whistler 2008” and some other descriptive keyword. The different airfare options get tagged “Whistler 2008 air” for example.
Even though the trips both involve the same subject matter; snowboarding, travel, and fun fun fun, since I have given them distinctive tags, I can easily keep the information separate and extremely easy to access.
What I have described above is just one step up from the antiquated favorites system. What really sets social bookmarking apart is the social aspect. I can click on any of the key words I have selected and a new page will load; this one displaying all the other pages that del.icio.us users have tagged using the same keyword. All of the sudden I realize that the hotel I was looking at was cheap, but someone else found a hotel in Stoneham that is packaged with lift tickets, which is almost always a better deal. Plus I find a great site that provides a behind the scenes look at what the world cup will entail and what sponsors will be there, it even speculates on what freebies will be given away. Yay free Spy goggles!
Both these sites came from the same user so I click on the user’s name and a new page loads with a list of all the pages that this user has tagged. This user has tagged different snow resorts all across North America and has links to somewhat esoteric pages where some resourceful shredder has layed out good runs over a topographic maps for different national forests. This equates to free back country snowboarding, which also means no lifts = lots of hiking. But the page has a link that lists back country outfitters in close proximity to the forests that rent snowshoes and snowmobiles.
This is the good stuff! This is also information it would have taken me forever, if ever, to find just doing random searches on Google. Every niche and interest is represented, and just like snowflakes no person tags the same pages. So get other there little snowflake and find whatever information you need to enhance your life.
If that extremely optimistic paragraph didn’t convince you, check out del.icio.us’ own blog at http://blog.delicious.com/ which has a video that illustrates the wonderfulness of social bookmarking.
Social bookmaking has enabled me to fare better at managing my site of interest. I use Del.icio.us although there are lots of sites out there; Blue Dot, Simpy, and FURL just to name a few. Since I am a Del.icio.us user I will use that site to discuss social bookmarking.
Once you register I suggest installing the small and unobtrusive application that puts a del.icio.us button in your browser. Now, let’s say that you find a website that you want to come back to. You click your delicious button and tag the site. The tag is essentially a key word or a series of key words that will group this site with other sites that you have tagged with the same word or words.
My friends are going to the snowboarding world cup in Quebec in March of 2008 and want me to come. I tell them I am going to look into it; after all there are a lot of factors to weigh here. So I start by cruising over to the U.S. Snowboarding Team website and navigate to the events page. The exact date is posted here and since I don’t want to forget, I tag this as “snowboarding world cup.” The world cup will be held in Stoneham so next I go to the Stoneham resort page because while I’m okay with being a spectator, I’m still going to want to thrash while I’m out there, so I need to know what runs the public will have access to during the competition and how much lift tickets are. I tag this page “snowboarding world cup Stoneham.” And as I continue my research for airfare, vehicle rentals, lodging, maps, locations of grocery stores (because if you have been to a resort town you know you can’t eat there for less than $25 a day), and all sorts of other information. Each page gets tagged “snowboarding world cup” and then another keyword.
A different set of friends is encouraging me to visit them in British Columbia this winter and get some serious crazyness on at Whistler. So I do a lot of the same sort of research: airfare, lift tickets, and mountain maps being the big three priorities for me here. These all get tagged “Whistler 2008” and some other descriptive keyword. The different airfare options get tagged “Whistler 2008 air” for example.
Even though the trips both involve the same subject matter; snowboarding, travel, and fun fun fun, since I have given them distinctive tags, I can easily keep the information separate and extremely easy to access.
What I have described above is just one step up from the antiquated favorites system. What really sets social bookmarking apart is the social aspect. I can click on any of the key words I have selected and a new page will load; this one displaying all the other pages that del.icio.us users have tagged using the same keyword. All of the sudden I realize that the hotel I was looking at was cheap, but someone else found a hotel in Stoneham that is packaged with lift tickets, which is almost always a better deal. Plus I find a great site that provides a behind the scenes look at what the world cup will entail and what sponsors will be there, it even speculates on what freebies will be given away. Yay free Spy goggles!
Both these sites came from the same user so I click on the user’s name and a new page loads with a list of all the pages that this user has tagged. This user has tagged different snow resorts all across North America and has links to somewhat esoteric pages where some resourceful shredder has layed out good runs over a topographic maps for different national forests. This equates to free back country snowboarding, which also means no lifts = lots of hiking. But the page has a link that lists back country outfitters in close proximity to the forests that rent snowshoes and snowmobiles.
This is the good stuff! This is also information it would have taken me forever, if ever, to find just doing random searches on Google. Every niche and interest is represented, and just like snowflakes no person tags the same pages. So get other there little snowflake and find whatever information you need to enhance your life.
If that extremely optimistic paragraph didn’t convince you, check out del.icio.us’ own blog at http://blog.delicious.com/ which has a video that illustrates the wonderfulness of social bookmarking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
