It is a "geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking)." The last event featured team popsicle bridge building and 25 speakers.
It's FREE
It brings together fun and interesting people in Seattle.
Bre and Brady are the organizers and they are the coolest.
Here the subject of my short talk, as listed on the site:
Lee LeFever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
It's my distinct pleasure to announce the appearance of a new podcast on the web. We are a group of three who share an interest in online communities in the context of business, plus all things related (and perhaps the occasional tangent).
I am joined by two talented and experienced fellows:
In our first show we focused on reputation systems, Joost and issues that businesses are facing in manipulating or remixing user generated content. (Listen to it now)
Our home is ClueUnit.com where you can listen the latest show, subscribe to our RSS feed and check out the show notes.
Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, the dynamic duo behind the web’s most deadly source of advice, Ask a Ninja, have struck gold with a Federated Media payday, which includes a $300,000 upfront payment along with 60 percent of ad revenue, according to our sources.
I'm excited for a couple of reasons. The first of which is excitement for Douglas. I learned a few months ago that he is the very same Douglas Sarine that was one of my best friends in college - he lived next to me in the dorms. In fact, we hung out with him in Hollywood in December and he treated us to one of the best Hollywood experiences we could imagine.
Second, it's exciting because he and Kent are out to challenge the Hollywood status quo and this step brings them that much closer. Go Ninja go!
New Tee Vee then added a couple of great tidbits. First, by transcribing Chad's words for those that prefer text:
In terms of paying users revenue against the content that they’re uploading, we’re definitely going to move in that direction, but we didn’t want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward, we wanted to build a true community around video. When you start out with giving money to people from day 1, they’ll just switch to the next provider…that’s paying more. So we feel that we’re at a scale now that we’ll be able to do that and really be able to have a true community around video.
I really appreciate his focus on community and they have done an great job so far, but I think You Tube's future is much more based on being a video-ad host than a video community. You Tube will continue to be the biggest and most prolific video sharing community, but its size causes dilution. In the future people will use You Tube as a host and then take their video embed code to other sites, blogs, video sharing groups to participate in more focused, personal and niche driven communities on the web.
Fictitious example statement: "No one on You Tube wants to see my China documentary - but my friends over at ChinaDocumentaryLovers.com are going nuts over it."
The question is if these niche communities will drive enough views to warrant the ads in the videos. Here's one way the money will flow in the future:
Hosts may ask this person, as they upload their video: Do you want to make money by placing an ad in this video? More views = more $.
The person will say 'yes' and once the video is uploaded, the site will spit out the embed code for the video, including the ad.
The person will understand that the code enables them to share that video wherever they want.
The big question is: where will this video (with ads) get viewed the most?
Given the choice, do you think video creators are going to just leave their video on You Tube, or are they going to find communities that truly appreciate their work (and drive views)? You Tube has the member volume to financially reward the video creators that produce the type of content the You Tube community values. However, it is only one community and many will be turned off of You Tube simply because it is so big.
My bet is that we're going to see an amazing growth of video sharing communities that don't actually host any video at all. They simply enable people to paste in their embed code from any one of these hosts.
The big questions for video creators who want to make ad money will be:
Which host pays more, has the best ads, the best relationships, best players, etc.
Where can I share my video (via embed code) to maximize the number of views?
In related news, Andy Plesser at Beet.TV got a look at a new Forrester report that says 7 percent of consumers in North America who use the web regularly are uploading videos at least once a month.
Robin Hamman just got new glasses and at the same time, had high-res digital scans of his retinas...
Today, about a month later, I've finally received an email with those images attached and they're really beautiful. Not just because they contain a view of my own eyes that I've never been able to see before or, indeed, because my eyes are in any way particularly lovely or different from the next person's. But from a "isn't biology wonderful" and "hey, check this out" perspective, I'd love the post the photos here and/or on flickr.
The question is, should I?
According to BiometricNewsPortal, retina scans have an error rate of one in 10 million in comparison to fingerprinting which can result in an error rate as bad as 1 in 500. The site also says that: "retina biometrics systems are suited for environments requiring maximum security, such as Government, military and banking. Retina biometric systems have been in use for military applications since the early seventies..."
...I'm thinking that, as cool as those retinal images might be, it could very well be a bad idea to post them online. In fact, I should probably be emailing the optician to request that they delete the images.
I can't say I've ever thought about such a thing, but I think Robin has a point. As much as I share online, I think something like a retinal scan could be a risk that could come back to bite you in the future.
I've had an issue with broken comments on this site that was related to MT-Blacklist (a now-obsolete tool that helped curb spam). Sorry about that. Instead of trying to fix it, I'm just going to turn off the Blacklist and leave comments open on the most recent posts.
What does this mean to you? It means that if you'd like to comment, please do so quickly, before I turn them off. I'll stick to this strategy until Common Craft moves to Drupal.
Thank you for your attention.
UPDATED: In a not-so-ironic development, the comments on this entry are now disabled thanks to repeated spam comments.
