Maybe its art, music, technology, or something community-oriented.

I recently joined the Awesome Foundation as a Micro-Trustee. We’re giving away $1000USD each month to people who want to do something awesome. It’s not an ‘investment’. We don’t want the money back. There is no catch.

Go apply. Do something awesome.

Better yet, do you want to encourage Awesome? Contact us information on starting your own Awesome Foundation spinoff.

We just released our first report, Iranian Election and Twitter: The First Eighteen Days, filled with lots of solid information on every tweet made concerning Iran. Hop over and check it out. There’s no registration/email that’s asked for, and we recently enabled comments as well. We’re releasing everything as Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA until further notice, so feel free to share and share freely!

• Drupal.org has 43 errors, 35 warnings.
• Plone.org has 1 error.
• Wordpress.org is 100% valid.
• MovableType.org has 25 errors, 1 warning
• Joomla.org is 100% valid
• PHPNuke.org is only HTML 4.01 transitional and still has 86 errors and 4 warnings
• Microsoft’s Sharepoint Site is only HTML 4.01 transitional and still has 52 errors and 9 warnings
• Tumblr.com has 18 errors, 5 warnings

On the Framework side:

• RubyOnRails.org has 2 errors
• DjangoProject.com is 100% valid
• Zope.org has 21 errors

All sites checked using the W3C XHTML Validator on May 20, 2009.

In this economy, your company/organization can afford to hire the best talent possible. Get some people that know how to write XHTML properly for the love of god!

The front page to site is 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict valid. I think a few of my inner pages have some warnings I need to clean up.

The iPhone is slow. What you see on the commercials and demos is all sped up, with the weird little glitches and pauses taken out. The typing isn’t bad, but if you’re in an overloaded website, then all of a sudden the response becomes dismal.

The earpiece is horrid. Maybe this is because some asshole dropped mine in ketchsup at one point, but it wasn’t ever loud enough. If you don’t use the headphones, then it really isn’t a great device to talk on. I’m constantly asking people to repeat themselves.

The nonstandard recessed headphone jack on the original one, which has since been fixed, is annoying as hell. I don’t honestly know what they were thinking. It’s not like this was the first device that had headphones that Apple had produced. They should have known better.

Some UI stuff is annoying. You should be able to adjust the screen brightness from the side button. And there should be some way to fix the screen orientation so it doesn’t keep shifting when you’re laying down and reading. Aside from some games doing the simple left/right tilt, I haven’t seen the tilt sensor used to its fullest.

The Wifi access sucks, or maybe Safari is just slow as hell on here. I don’t care about the lack of Flash, but even when I’m at home viewing and loading sites, stuff takes forever if it’s not been iPhone optimized.

Programs crash. Safari does this way too often and is one of the worst offenders. Apple doesn’t seem to want Opera or Firefox on the iPhone however, so we don’t have many options that I know of. The Mail and SMS programs are poorly executed and switching between all applications takes too long. The camera has a huge delay on taking photos, and we regressed compared with other phones in not allowing video to be captured, or Multimedia SMS’s (MMS) to be sent, or received properly. AT&T has some screwed up way for you to sometimes get the MMS’s using another computer, but its clunky and doesn’t really work well.

Making an iPhone app can be relatively easy and quick. Yet, most of the iPhone applications are totally useless and suck. Even moreso with the 1st generation phone.

It’s the best phone I’ve owned, but let’s face it… we aren’t there yet and Apple could have done better in many ways. I can’t wait to get whatever they put out next, but I disbelieve most rumors I hear in the Apple community these days. Why its taking them so long to allow different screen orientation on the SMS for example, is beyond me. Several gestural researchers have figured out good ways to do cut/paste, but Apple is slow to implement. Rather unfortunate.

A few quick facts about my current reach:

• This blog sees around 5000 pageviews/month, with around 3,400 visits. It has approximately 70 people viewing it daily via their RSS readers (Feedburner).
• I have just short of 1,900 followers on Twitter. I’ve made around 7,200 updates and 1,200 DMs. There’s much bigger people on Twitter, but I don’t follow back too much anymore and I’m not really trying to grow much.
• I have about 120 people on Flickr that call me a “contact” or friend. On Flickr I’ve had around 100,000 views of my photos at the current rate of around 200/day on average
• My YouTube channel gets around 80 views/day on average. I’ve had around 40,000-50,000 views on my videos (I deleted some that I didn’t like, so a few numbers are screwy)
• I’ve had my Slashdot account for around 8 years now. It’s sad that I lurked for so long or I could have easily had a 4 or 5 digit UID. I can’t find where it has the total number of comments, but I think I’ve made over 700.
• On GearSlutz, which is my Forum of Choice when it comes to music things, I think I’ve been registered since 2004 and have made around 4,000 posts. People on there seem to know me pretty well now.
• And on my Tumblr, I have a grand 7 people following me

This isn’t bragging. People have much bigger footprints nonstop, but I’d never taken the time to really put them all in one place. I’m sure this will be fun to look back on in 5 or 10 years and grin at. I occasionally find something that I posted 10 or 15 years ago online and it’s always too funny. Even looking back in my Slashdot journal its cute to see what I said 7 years ago.

Fast forward to 2009. The economy keeps tumbling. While banks are flush with cash, they aren’t doing anything with it. Even the most credit worthy companies have their credit ratings kicked down (GE), sending ripples through the investment community. Companies start laying people off left and right. Video game companies are in the same boat as everyone else! Sound recession proof?

I am still shocked at how long I heard the mantra of “recession proof”. I know I was hearing it still after The Sequoia Deck hit target and shook up the dust a bit. Earlier last year even MSNBC talked about the recession proof nature of the industry, although does anyone really trust television for financial advice? And yet Warhammer/Mythic, THQ,  Flagship Studios, EA, Microsoft, Turbine, Disney and Sony all have laid off significant numbers of people recently.

There are few truely recessionproof industries (miltary, emergency healthcare, utility companies and government), and during a real depression even those will feel the pinch severely.

Thinking in my time since GamerDNA, how many games have I bought? Zero. And I canceled my WoW account the day I got laid off. You know why? Because laid off people don’t need to be wasting time siting around and playing video games all day! You need to be out there looking for work.

But yet, the recession isn’t just about consumer behavior, which is the pitfall that many people in the industry were counting on. It’s about the economy overall, which effected by the investment and credit markets heavily. This is especially true for game companies. Few development studios have the cash on hand to develop and publish a game themselves and need backing of a larger publisher. But even if consumers want to buy, and you can develop your game there might be other things holding it up. Retail chains will be less aggressive in purchasing, as they’d rather sell out of something than have dead product on the shelf.

In 2008, companies should have perhaps been a bit more realistic instead of just chanting a pep-rally mantra to keep everyone happy and unworried. We don’t want pessimistic overlords, but being realistic is nice. And now there’s a disagreement in the IGDA about “Crunch Time” and people complaining about long hours. Stop complaining about the hours, and be happy that there are hours to work!

I was at the Official Google Meetup in Cambridge the other night where I had a chance to poke at the brains of the very people who work at Google who would know the answers to these questions. It ends up that what effects the search ranking of photos currently is far simpler than I had imagined.

The things that effect search rank are:

• Inbound Links: The number, quality of (via Pagerank), and of text (both of the link itself and the text surrounding) links pointing to a photo’s page effect if the photo ranks highly. As always with SEO, having links from multiple strong websites is better than having multiple links on a from a single strong site. So in short, the more people using your photos, linking to them with rich and descriptive text, the better.
• The Photo Title: The title of the photo becomes both the H1 and the title for the page, as well as the ALT text for the photo. Make this descriptive as you would any blog post. You want it to be not too long, and filled with strong unique words. “Sunset” is probably a poor title, but “Sunset in Winter over the Charles River” is likely far better. Under no circumstance should you keep the default name that the camera kicks out like, “DSC_0057″. Even if you can’t uniquely title every photo from an event, put up something that describes the event like, “ROFLCon 2008 at MIT” for all of the photos. Its better than nothing.
• Other on-page text. The group that your photo belongs to is an H3, as are any photo pools. From what I can tell, your description under the photo and tags are just viewed as normal text, but since there’s so little of it on the page it is taken heavily into account (although I could imagine that text in the comments could outweigh these easily).

That’s it. I really thought there might be more to it (and maybe in the future there will be). They said that whatever Google builds, they want to be platform agnostic and work equally on Flickr, Picassa, Smugmug, etc. The only other thing that will have minor effect would be the size of your photo, since people can filter on Google to search by photo size but generally as long as its VGA resolution then it doesn’t matter.

What doesn’t matter:

• Number of contracts you have via Flickr
• Number of groups the photo is a member of (except for the influence of the H3 text on-page)
• Number of tags (its just text on page, and the text overall is sparse so you aren’t going to really overdo it and dillute things)
• Number of internal photo views via Flickr
• EXIF Camera Data (currently Google doesn’t really read into these)
• Creative Commons vs Rights Reserved license
• Geotagging (might matter at some point, but doesn’t seem to effect things overall right now)

So my general optimization tips:

• Properly title every photo you put up there. Try to have unique titles for each one as much as possible. Include the name of the event in the title somewhere (ie, “Moot, Founder of 4chan, ROFLThing 2009“) because the group overall doesn’t attach well since its only an H3.
• Use groups and sets to help organize things. This is good practice overall.
• Use tags heavily
• Use a description when you can, filling out things that don’t really fit as tags
• Submit the photo to as many pools as possible. While the name of the pools, like your groups, is only an H3, it still helps massively for getting traffic and comments.
• Upload the larger resolution photos where possible (so that if someone is searching for a “large” image via google it will appear)
• Consider use of a Creative Commons license to encourage people to reuse and credit (linking to) the photo. More links = higher ranking and Creative Commons is a great way to get your content used and linked to.
• Encourage as many people to use the photo on their page (and link into the photo and use good ALT text), or simply to link to the photos (with good title text). Suggest to people text to use in, or around the links. The more consistent this text is, the more Google will understand “what” your photo is, aside from just your title. One easy way to do this is to send people links to photos of them, and encourage them to use the photos.
• From an event, focus on getting one specific photo promoted as much as possible. It might not be possible to get all of them highly ranked and promoted, but if you can get a lot of people linking into a single photo then that will be massively helpful. Start off by putting that photo on your blog, tumblr, etc and encouraging everyone to do the same. Getting 100 photos ranked highly from a single thing will be hard, but you can get one of them going well pretty easily.
• Search on Google for what you’re planning to name the photo. If a lot of other photos come up, consider tweaking the name a bit. If you get something unique, it will likely appear near the top.

SEO, Google and overall ranking is something that’s constantly changing. The Google guys suggested that one of the best places to contact them for up-t0-date information is in the Google Webmaster Tools Forums. All of my photos can be found on my Flickr page and are Creative Commons Licensed.

The world of HTML and web design has changed drastically right under our noses. What you learned in 1996, while it still might work most of the time, is rarely still considered best practice. Yet there are so many confusing and mixed messages out there. HTML 4, CSS, XML, XHTML all seem to blur together. Picking up a book on any one might seem a bit daunting or to even conflict with the others, leaving many questions unanswered.

This book is not only great in that it helps answer these questions, but it is quite suitable as an introduction to HTML/CSS for a beginner and also a great refresher for someone that needs to brush up on best practices and update their methods.

I learned HTML initially around 1996. Yet somewhere around 2001 I got a little lost. Things started changing, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I just mostly did what I always did, copy and pasted code between things until something worked. Now after reading this book I feel that I can write XHTML-strict validated code with ease and understand things much more than I did before.

Overall the strength of this book is that it is built for learning. This isn’t just a reference guide, and it doesn’t expect that you have a large amount of preexisting knowledge. It constantly reinforces itself and doesn’t just assume that you understood a topic completely because they mentioned something on one line. While it clocks in at over 600 pages, it is a very quick read and the examples are all accessible and even fun.

If know how to get it done, but aren’t sure the ‘right way’ then this is definitely a great book to pick up.

Disclaimer:

I did some photography for O’Reilly a while back. In return I received several books in compensation, including this one. I was not asked by O’Reilly or Head First for a review of this, let alone a positive review. I am recieving no additional compensation for this review, and these opinions are strictly my own. However I always want to be transparent with any potential conflicts of interest when recommending any product.

One of the most basic things that you need to figure out when starting a podcast is the format that you’re going to use. This is one of those things that you do not want to whip back and forth on, and you must make a clear decision. Let’s go over some of the considerations for a podcast in each format.

Audio

Audio, the older and more basic format (history of podcasting), is the easier of the two to produce and obviously non-visual. There are several distinct advantages to audio-only podcasts.

• Easier to edit. You can cut out phrases, words, and pauses without making it seem that a person is jumping all over a screen (as it would in video). Using “Strip Silence” or similar in a DAW can make a 10 minute interview easily into a 6 minute interview depending on who is speaking.
• Appeals to many listeners. Video you have to ‘watch’ but I can put on an audio-only podcast and the full content while doing the dishes or cleaning my apartment. Also, you have the ability of appealing to the millions of commuters in cars. Sure, more cars have LCDs in them, but you really shouldn’t watch a show while driving! Listening however is significantly safer.
• Consistent production is easier. Video requires lighting, perhaps makeup, most of the people being in the same room consistently, the same clothes from shot to shot, same location, etc. It’s a pain in the ass. Audio you can allows you to record the first part of your podcast first thing in the morning before shaving, the second part after lunch, and the third part from your friend’s house and it will all come out mostly the same and no one will know that it was done in three sections.
• Doesn’t matter what you look like. Let’s face it, we aren’t all photogenic. Have you ever met most radio personalities? Often they aren’t pretty people, but people love listening to them. Video however puts you (rightly or not) under the scrutiny of people’s visual judgement and we can’t all be awesome on camera like iJustine. Also it gives the bonus of recording in your underwear. I guess you could do that on your video podcast, with audio the listener doesn’t have to know about it.
• Cheaper. It’s 2009. Cheap is in. You can get a pretty killer audio podcasting setup for under $1000, if not significantly less. For around $1000 you’ll sound almost as good as NPR, if not better. With video $1000 doesn’t get you far and you still have to consider the audio quality.
• Longer episodes are ok. If I have to look at something for 50 minutes to get the content, that’s a lot of my time. However if I’m passively listening to something and doing other things then its mostly ok and I can deal with it. Few video podcasts can get away with being so long.
• Smaller downloads. While few people today in the US care about bandwidth, it still is a consideration. Distribution, storage, and portability are all easier with audio-only.
• Historically, The Bar is Low. Maybe you like the sound of FM radio, but honestly the over-compressed, over-bass boosted sound really doesn’t take all that much to beat. Modest gear and technique will give you truely pro-quality sound.
• Traveling is Easy. You get some killer mobile equipment, including all-in-one recorders that do a nice job at catching interviews.

The disadvantages of audio are few:

• Visual branding is harder
• People ‘think’ they like video better
• Some subjects are harder to cover with words
• Competition is fierce
• Advertising/sponsorship sales might be harder

You’ve probably figured out after reading those the strength and weaknesses of video but let’s look into them. Strengths first:

• Compelling video can be captivating. People do like seeing awesome things, and well shot video with solid content will appeal to people’s senses.
• Tutorials are easier, comedy too. When instructing someone how to do something, video definitely wins in most fields. Could you imagine Bob Ross on the radio only?
• Branding is easier. Your face, logo, office or whatever will be instantly recognizable in video format. Audio leaves the chance that someone who is an avid listener wouldn’t recognize you if they met you.
• Advertising and sponsorship sales are easier, bigger $$$. Likely obvious, but there’s more chances to bring in some income with video other than the “message from our sponsor” moment. Wearing a company’s t-shirt, putting in a trailer, something in the background, etc. Most of those aren’t effective with audio.

And finally the downsides of video. These are mostly flips of the upsides of audio.

• Consistent production is hard. People likely need to be in the same room, at the same time, on a regular schedule.
• High standards. We’re used to seeing HD video, with good lenses, multiple camera angles, killer lighting, teleprompters, makeup, and strong production. Revision3 dumped tons of money into making a studio that kept with the quality standards that people are used to seeing on TV.
• All the considerations of audio, few of the benefits. You still need audio production, but you don’t get many of the benefits, such as lightweight production, using a “strip silence” tool, etc. Bad audio will completely invalidate your killer looking video.
• Video is Expensive. Cameras, hard drives, lighting, sets, cases, etc. It racks up quickly. Cameras are getting relatively cheaper, but video is still probably 4x as expensive as audio. Are the benefits worth it to you? You can do 4 channels of audio production on a computer that’s 10 years old (or a netbook) with ease. Multiple streams of 1080p video and you’re looking at a new Mac Pro.
• More people are required. Ok, maybe not required, but if you’re shooting a good show you’ve likely got 1-2 technical people working with you or you’re doing karate to jump in front of the camera at the right time. With audio, you can do it mostly all yourself easily. See Howard Stern being in control at the soundboard.
• Post-Production is heavy. Audio takes little time for me to finish up after recording a podcast. Video takes time. Transferring the video, syncing the audio, color/exposure correction, editing, processing, compressing/encoding, uploading. You’re gonna be there for a while. Likely 4x as long to do the post-production than audio.
• Traveling isn’t fun. G4 covered ROFLCon last year, and they had a ton of equipment. Huge HD cameras, audio booms, lighting rigs, battery packs. The footage turned out great, but I wouldn’t have wanted to pay the bill for the airline to check that stuff, or carry it around (let alone allow the airline to handle the equipment).

Which is for You?

Its a hard call. It comes down to your budget, time, expectations and audience. If you have a podcast on wedding dress style, Photoshop tutorials, or sightseeing on vacations then those subjects alone probably dictate that you need to go with something visual. On the otherhand if you’re talking about politics, stock trading, or the merits of 17th century literature in France then you might be fine with audio. Larger budgets definitely leave more room for video, but workflow will still be a consideration.

There is always the possibility of doing occasional video production and mostly sticking to audio, but then you come against consistency problems and you’re still spending the money on the video equipment (and since its not a priority your video production will likely be subpar).

• Arduino Development Environment: Essential if you want to make your Arduino do anything. Arduino is an Open Source microcontroller that is perfect for DIY projects.
• Processing: A cool Java-based data processing, mining and analysis tool.
• Apple Aperture: This is the best RAW workflow environment for photography that I’ve found. The only serious alternative being Adobe’s Lightroom. Not free, but worth it.
• Apple Logic Pro: This is a great sequencing and recording environment. I’ve seriously considered going back to Protools a few times, due to the difficulty of editing audio in Logic.
• glTail: Apache log visualization software written in Ruby. I’ve had a hard time getting it working in Linux, but it seems to work pretty well in Leopard. Open Source/Free download.
• TweetDeck: This is the best Twitter client that I’ve found. It’s also a free download.
• Firefox: I like Safari, but Firefox is needed for day to day activities due to its extension and addon capability.
• CyberDuck: A great open source FTP/SFTP/S3 file transfer program.
• VLC: Open Source media player application. It plays stuff that Quicktime can’t.
• TextMate: Combined with Cyberduck, this is the way I edit a lot of HTML/CSS for this site. Not free, but one of the best text editors that I’ve found out there. Supports nearly every major programming language.
• Second Life: It’s free, it’s fun, and where else are you going to get all your furry enjoyment… uh, I mean, Magic Shows.
• Skype: The best VoIP option out there. The only way I call internationally. Plus, my apartment is a cellphone deadzone, so this helps a lot.
• Wireshark: Network packet analyzer. Useful for umm, diagnosing why the wifi at a coffee shop doesn’t work, or seeing what your friend is looking at.
• Google Earth: Because its just too cool.
• Audacity: Great little open source audio editor. Like Soundforge back in the day, but free and better. I only use it for 2 channel work, but I think it supports more.
• Boxee: The media dashboard that I’ve been dreaming of for years is finally here, at least in testing stages. Now public alpha!
• DeskLickr: Changes your desktop with photos from Flickr. Very cool.