Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin is now available. You’ll see it here on the site on the videos that I’ve been posting from vloggercon (i also updated the uncle leron movies as well). This allows you to leave time-coded comments on videos. Check it out, and if you do any kind of video (or even audio-only) blogging/podcasting, download the plugin and give it a try.

Lost fanatics.

Lost dominates the iTMSAnyone who knows me probably knows I’m a huge fan of Lost. And while I’m obviously not the only one, the image on the left is impressive. Of the top 20 shows on the iTunes Music Store, 16 of them are episodes of Lost! My guess is that a ton of people waited till the season was over and have just purchased the entire season all at once. In a way that’s the best way to watch it. It’s so bloody addictive that it’s hard to wait a week for the next episode, much less three weeks or more when there are reruns.

The good news is that Next season there will be NO reruns. They are dividing the series into (I believe) 4 chunks of six episodes; six episodes will air week-to-week, and then no Lost for a little while. They’ve taken their cue from 24, which is tend to run with fewer interruptions, though for a shorter ‘season’. This summer, FOX is even going to rerun the entire fifth season in 12 weeks with back-to-back episodes every Friday. Now might be my chance to start a new addiction.

Slomo got boing’d

Sweet, the slomo video fest just got boingboing’ed. In case you didn’t know, The SloMo video fest is a collection of 100 1-minute short videos whose main feature or idea is slow motion. I created (with the help of Mikey, Tania and Michael) one of those videos. I’m going to go to Oakland on Saturday to another screening (previously it showed at MonkeyTown in Williamsburg), and anyone who is interested and in the Bay Area should come buy, or look for it in a town near yours.

Beyond Broadcast

So I’m heading to Boston tomorrow morning for the Beyond Broadcast conference. I’m excited because I’m presenting the project I’ve been working on as a student researcher at ITP this past semester — a socially networked MythTV remote. I’m looking forward to meeting Wendy Seltzer, who will be talking about MythTV, specifically as it relates to the Broadcast Flag, and other issues

I’ll be demoing the MythRemote on the PepperPad, as well as the newest prototype which I’ll be showing on my laptop. The gist of the project is a remote control for your PVR with networked video commenting and chatting that is time-coded and tied to a particular program. One possible application is the idea of collaborative annotations, creating a wikipedia style commentary for a particular show. Sort of like pop-up video created by and for the viewer…

Anyway, I’ll probably be posting some more here about panels & discussions that interest me from the conference…

Click.tv does video commenting…

So a new startup called Click.tv is about to launch. And they’re working with the same basic ideas we’re working on for ITP Research: Video Comments and Re-imagining the Remote.

the main functionality will include: the ability for the creator and those who watch the video to add annotations anywhere in the stream, and others later to click on those annotations and jump right to that point in the video.

via TechCrunch

It’s cool to see some movement in this direction in the web 2.0 world. The click.tv people have addressed some of the issues we’ve discussed slightly differently. It seems there are ‘channels’ of comments which can be enabled or disabled. While this is interesting, it seems to be more appropriate for a moderated type environment (at least that’s what their demo shows). That said, they’ve addressed the situation with a nice clean UI and some interesting navigation elements.

Glowscarf: usage

[QUICKTIME https://uncleleron.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/glowscarf_usage_edit_3ivx.mov 320 257]

In an attempt to understand more fully cell phone behavior, and what our expressions our cell phones enable us to make, I’ve come across some interesting bits of research:

From this article, it seems Motorola commissioned a study called On the Mobile. One interesting (if obvious) finding:

Women see their cell phone as a means of expression and social communication, while males tend to use it as an interactive toy. Some men view the cell phone as a status symbol – competing with other males for the most high tech toy and even using the cell phone to seduce the opposite sex. The study found two types of cell phone users- “innies,” who use their phones discreetly, and “outies,” who are louder and less concerned with the people around them.

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