Monthly Archives: May 2009

Youtube’s unequal display rights

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While watching “Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009″ on YouTube, I saw two new buttons to the top right of the video. They allow you to dim the lights on the page and to open the video in a separate window.

YouTubes new features

YouTube's new features

The result is that all the noise is either turned off by the light dimmer or not shown when you open the video in a new window.

Reducing the noise

Reducing the noise

Having the lights dimmed around online videos is nothing new. A lot of services do that. On Reddit I read that this feature has been around for some months. I did check a few other videos, but did not see the features there. I got the impression, that only Google videos had these added possibilities.

Sure, there is a light bulb beneath all videos with which you can turn the entire screen either darker or completely dark. However, the video is darkened as well which the dimming feature does not do. It only blocks out the noise.

I like to dim the background because if the quality of the video is not sufficient to blow it up to fill the screen, I can still focus on the video only and not be distracted by all the other things around it.

Dance mob in Antwerp

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In late March / early April (is it really already so long ago?) a video started circulating that was filmed at the Antwerp Central Train Station. Unsuspecting travelers suddenly heard a song from the movie “The Sound of Music” coming from the loudspeakers. Not long after the first notes were heard, people started to dance. It first looked very random, but by and by, more dancers joined in and it became clear that a performance was under way.

It was a very creative performance with a modernized version of “Do-Re-Mi”. It could be called dance mob in reference to flash mobs for which a large number of people suddenly congregate in a public space, perform a pre-arranged action and disperse afterward very quickly. In Antwerp, 200 dancers came together to perform the song and went away. This dance mob was organized by vtm, a Belgian TV station and they filmed the preparations to the event as well in a Making of.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter for the last month. A similar ad by T-Mobile, “The T-Mobile Dance”, has not been so successful. The people in Antwerp seemed to have been better prepared and documented their efforts as well as the action in itself very well.

The dance was filmed from several cameras that were placed in the grand train station that was very well suited for the performance. It is great to watch the video even after the 5th time and look at the surprised faces of the passers-by. I wish I had been there for the performance, but incidentally, I was in Antwerp almost 2 months prior to the event.

The dedication of fans

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The “Lord of the Ring” enjoys a great following and it may have even increased after the release of the movie trilogy (2001-2003). Recently, on May 3, 2009, the fan movie “The Hunt for Gollum” was released to the world on the Internet. A tweet from Michael Wesch alerted me to this movie.

The Hunt for Gollum

The Hunt for Gollum

It is amazing to see that a 40-minute movie can be made with a small crew, a budget of just about 3,000 £, and a lot of enthusiam, dedication, and free hours to contribute. You do not learn about that in the movie, but in the Making of for which I am a total sucker.

This will not be the only fan movie about material from “Lord of the Ring” as the link to “Born of Hope”, a fan movie that is scheduled to be released in fall 2009, indicates.

Walls Optional: Livestream, live chat, live fun

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On May 1, 2009, the mini conference Walls Optional took place at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. Alec Couros was invited to give the keynote, A Tweet and a Poke, How Educators Can Harness the Power of Social Networks, at this one-day event. Luckily for everybody who could not make it to Canada, the keynote was streamed live. Unfortunately for me, I could not watch it because the stream would not want to come through without huge buffering problems.

Thus, I looked forward to the recording, but that also had problems. The only hope I had left was to contact tech support. Clint Lalonde, Distributed Education Web Specialist at the college, was incredibly kind and quickly replied that they worked on a solution to make the stream available somewhere else. Within a few days after the keynote, I received the link to the recording on blip.tv and could watch Alec’s presentation which was great. I had already downloaded the presentation file, read the notes, and knew what I was getting myself into watching the recording.

However, seeing the tour de force on video was something else. Time flew by quickly with the many examples of social networking and how we can benefit from it that Alec showed. He also dared to do a live presentation of Omegle, the chat-with-a-stranger, with which you never know what the stranger on the other end may say. The stranger Alec and the 120 people in the room chatted with was a good sport and actually wanted to get to know all the participants. ;-) He received the link to the stream, but it was never found out whether he watched it or not.

Alec made his point clear that building up a personal learning network is important and also very beneficial for learning and in particular for professional development.

Productive May Day

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Today is May 1, Labor Day in Europe, and thus a holiday. I used it to see if I could get my WordPress MU installation running and actually create blogs which did not work earlier during the week. I had run into trouble when I used sub-domains, but the sub-directories work fine.

The reason behind the upgrade to WP MU was that I wanted to create a second blog on my server to showcase my daily photograph. Of course, I could always link to my flickr photo set, but I prefered to use a blog. Well, that was not a novel in itself, as others had already done so before me, e.g. D’Arcy Norman and also Alan Levine as I realized very recently. From them I got the idea to use the Monotone theme, which displays the photos with an individual background that matches the dominant color in the photographs. Way cool.

After having solved my blog creation problem and having moved my regular blog (this one here) over to my MU installation, I started to tackle my photo blog. As Alan Levine describes nicely in his post “(Almost) Effortless Photo Blog”, I wanted to connect my blog with flickr as well to be able to post immediately to my photo blog from there. I had no such luck until I found out that I had to activate the XML-RPC publishing protocol in my blog settings under “Writing”. Once the checkmark was placed, I could link my blog to my flickr account.

Now I had the monumental task to add all pictures to the blog. That took about four hours for 119 photos (I had missed to take a photo one day) because my internet connection was uncooperative today and everything was rather slow. However, now that I am done, I really like the result, and I also found the “Page Links To” plugin to allow a tab in the blog menu to open my photo blog immediately.

Update: I changed the archive page to display 31 photos instead of only 24. That is particularly nice when the archive of an entire month is displayed.