Here's the whole thing for your listening pleasures.
It's Kid Koala's Scratchscratchscratch.
This particular false winter also makes me think about the new crop of TV programming, specifically food shows popping up with the new season.
'Spain... On The Road Again' is Spanish road trip that has more in common with soap operas on daytime TV than Kerouac. Just look at this synopsis:
"Mark's moods swings and insatiable appetite have the road trippers stopping often as they head north to Galicia. While in Ribera del Duero wine country, Mario grills milk-fed lamb in a vineyard. While staying at a traditional county inn, Mario's competitive edge emerges and he and Gwyneth race Mark and Claudia on the Camino de Santiago, a historic pilgrimage route. Back at the inn, Mario and Gwyneth cook dinner while waiting for Mark and Claudia to get back."
What works:
What doesn't work:
I like Alton Brown's Feasting On Waves for a bunch of reasons. Back in my youth I had my own Caribbean experience, so this show brings back a few memories.
What works:
What doesn't:
Let's see if I can borrow a scene (sorry about the autoPlay, can't seem to stop it)
Gourmet's Diary Of A Foodie has turned out to be my favorite show of the moment. Another Zero Point Zero production. ZPZ produces Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show. D.O.A.F. uses some of the same 'local experts' that have helped No Reservations get the inside scoop on foodie goodies.
What works:
What doesn't work:
Maybe I can borrow an episode for a bit:
I'm missing shows too of course. I haven't seen this Bourdain thing called At The Table. Yet. We're probably due for another excellent Top Chef series any month. Can't wait to read along with the amuse-biatch blog (often as entertaining as the episodes it covers). Of course, there hasn't been another installment of Daniel Boulud's After Hours (one of my all-time favs.). Chef Boulud, please return soon, we miss you!
Edit: Uh, so I stupidly forgot to mention on more great show that's started a new season. Stupid because this is probably my motivation for putting this post together.
Check, Please! Bay Area dished out a few new episodes to start its thrid season. This locally produced show's winning combination involves inviting 3 people to introduce and compare their favorite restaurants. The discussion and food porn are usually a lot of fun.
What works:
What doesn't work:
Hey look, they've moved all their videos onto YouTube.
I suspect someone will export this formula to the other restaurant-rich markets.
What restaurant would you bring to the show?
Seth just tossed a pile of acoustic recordings onto snocap. Some of these turned up on Little John records. Take a peek in the Songs, Volume 1 section:
The Snocap service (founded by Napster's founder Shawn Fanning among others) connects musicians with the marketplace. Seth's store is a perfect example of how an artist can market, distribute, and sell work directly to consumers.
Check out Seth's site: http://sethfreemanmusic.com/ and the obligatory Myspace page.
Where'd they film this first one? It's good to see that the youths of todays are capable of using their dynamites for a skate movie instead of the jihad. It's from a skate vid called Fully Flared. The explosions make a lot more sense when you read that Spike Jonze is involved in the production. He gives good boom.
I thought this one was interesting too. I thought I'd see if I could steal the player from the time.com video pages since I'm working on a really fun video project right now.
I got over it. I spent a day surfing with Chrome, Goog's new browser. Here are a few first impressions.
Starts with a 475k downloadable setup program.
Once it's in, you can import Firefox or IE settings (including cookies) then it starts GoogleUpdate in the background (not surprised).
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
Wow! It's nearly Safari for windows. It's using webkit, already in Safari and sounds like it's going to be used in android. Kinda makes sense to steer users toward a platform that's capable of making the leap to mobile devices.
As software goes, Chrome is handsome. In fact, Chrome is a pretty clever name since there is practically no chrome to the browser. Screen real estate isn't wasted on the borders, status bars, or any of the chrome-y bits that are likely ruining your browsing experience.
Under the hood, Chrome boasts separate process space for different operations. It's trying to get around the single-threaded way most browsers work (without clever webdev hackery). There's also a revved-up JavaScript interpreter... or virtual machine... or something. Need to learn a little more about V8.
The task manager is a nifty idea: show all the processes that are running: tabs, plugins. Kill a process if it's out of control. Be sure to hit the 'Stats for nerds' link on the Task Manager. Is that actually showing memory usage for IE (which also happens to be running on my system at the moment). Yes. Kinda neat. It'll show FireFox too (but not seamonkey!). Helps you 'place the blame where blame belongs' if/when things go wrong.
Are you on Chrome right now? Here are a few interesting views under the hood:
My day with Chrome has been a surprisingly upsell-free experience. I see the Google Gears integration, but nothing compelled me to use it. I expected to be directed toward Google Docs... it never happened.
Goog probably gets all of your usage data. Chrome logs everything in your browsing history unless you're in incognito mode. The Google docs describe a scenario where a user might want incognito-mode to order a surprise birthday gift, but I think they meant to say 'download porn'.
"To browse the web without keeping a record on your computer..." I love that. You'll clearly be keeping records on other computers.
Lots more info in the comic book. Allegedly, Goog printed up a bunch of these things and mailed them out. Anyone have one?
Overall I'm impressed. It's snappy, handsome, seems to handle all the torturous pages I drag my browsers across. No heavy upsells. Seems to have a lot of open-sourced projects under the hood. I'll check back in a few weeks.
October 15th, 2008: Blog Action Day, a great idea. Here's the deal: motivate a bunch of bloggists to write about a social issue (this year, poverty). Then, here's the kicker -- donate the earnings from that day's ad revenues. The Greacen Zone falls on one extreme (ly small) end of the audience size spectrum. But since all of netscrap.com is involved in this ad-revenue experiment, I'll donate all of the netscrap platform's revenue. Might even beat the minimum for a microloan on Kiva
What will I write about? At this point: no idear. Really. I've lived in cities. I've taken enough human geography, heard stories from peace corps veterans, and travelled enough to know at least a little about the average state of humanity in the world. But poverty -- specifically. Dunno.
I'll come up with something good.
Digsby is a multi-im client along the lines of Trillian, Pidgin, and the Meebo. Use Digsby to organize your IM chatter. Through a single application/interface, you can ping all your friends on the big IM services (AIM, YIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber). They kick it up a few notches by supporting Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace social services. They kick it up another notch by supporting email as well: gmail, ymail, msnmail, pop, imap accounts.
Updates and notifications from all these services arrive on the desktop in bubbly status messages that appear even if Digsby is minimized. You can even reply to a message by typing in the status bubble.
I love the way this blurs the boundaries between all these communication channels. A message could arrive from a person (who cares how it got here), my reply bounces back through the same channel.
Here's another way Digsby is pushing envelopes with their service. A few clicks will let you set up a widget that you can embed in your various web-hangouts, blogs, facebook account, etc.
Digsby does a stellar job of running their project with transparency and input from their users. They've managed to build a close relationship with an active user community by using all the social resources available. They go far beyond the requisite blog (even if they brag about the strange bugs that turn up in their public testing cycles). Users have a channel to reach Digsby via twitter, to get involved with an active developer community (also on twitter incidentally). The steady drumbeat of prioritization from regular public roadmap polls has kept Digsby on track to satisfy users. On top of all this, they've built in a great alert/warning system that lets folks at digsbyhq push status message out to all users ('twitter is having trouble today').
Kudos to their team involved with support and outreach. If I were running a customer-facing service, I'd likely use Digsby to manage the customer contacts. I wonder if they're eating their own dogfood over there at digsbyhq?
There are a few caveats of course. Because what software is perfect? Digsby does not yet support IRC or Skype chats. As far as I can see, the multi or 'room' chat features aren't supported on any of the IM services. All of these features are on their roadmap.
Digsby is ready for primetime and worth a try.
This reminded me of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco's attempt to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the "George W Bush Sewage Plant."
Don't you think both of these efforts will backfire in about 10 years? Stone's film will end-up glorifying W., his life becomes a redemption story blazing a path for future presidents to follow. The renaming scheme will seal W's legacy as an environmental crusader who dealt with the tough problems of sewage treatment and toxic waste.
Also, where's Will Ferrel when you really need him?
One neat thing I've been doing with this is setting it to run fullscreen on a computer in public view in the office. You'll need to change the settings so the tweets arrive slowly enough and display large enough to read. I've been throwing in search terms related to products or campaigns we're working on; it's a neat way to see what people are talking about right NOW.
Unless you search for something inane like 'greacen' in which case you'll see all my tweets.
Try it with something like 'sears' or 'pepsi' or 'gofish' and you'll see that folks are talking about these brands.
Though I enjoy writing these short-attenion-span notes, I certainly haven't published 1000 posts. Here's what's going on:
The greacen zone runs on the netscrap.com publishing system. Netscrap has a few hundred posts already, thus the high numbers.
The fruit blog also runs on this jalopey.
What's the publishing system? If you've been reading, you already know that it's heart and soul is zombie technology. The netcrap.com publishing system is buggy, but it's super- efficient. Check out this month's netscrap.com comscore numbers if you doubt.
Where's this going? No idea. Isn't that exciting? Just like several of the startups I've worked for. At this point I'm considering tossing the publishing platform's core onto google code under the MSL just like I did with bashWebTest.
some thoughts:
Thanks for reading!
Can you imagine that morning editorial meeting:
Note the similarity to the last time I came across this chilling visual on the web:
And of course the similarity to this guy:
I tossed the entire year's worth of blizzoggy posts from this site into wordle and this is what popped out (click the image for a larger image):
I removed the words from the GreacenZone's navigation (Fun, Music, Technology, Tagses, Leave, Category, etc.) and came up with this:
Lots more to see in the gallery.
One of the best parts of wordle is that the project seems to have come about as a personal project sponsored by Mr. Feinberg's employer, IBM. IBM owns the code, we get to enjoy the fruits (for a while at least).
"In light of recent legal complications, NOTCOT will no longer be operating tastespotting.com"
What legal complications? From where will my next photo-food-feast come?
Neither of these are using a feed that contains the images. Which is a big bummer. I was just skimming the tastespotting feed and checking out the articles with the best pics. This way I could digest large piles of the posts.
Anyway, holler if you have a better source.
Look, I even tossed the feed over there in the left column. I'll sacrifice a little ad-revenue for this test.
What's this all about? It's vaguely work-related. Gonna see what I can do with these info streams.
Look at the anguish:
Kinda neat looking in there. No stringer, just air. The aluminum honeycomb is a neat material too.
I was surprised to learn that he also plays a rippin' bass solo:
Let's hear it for Matt Freeman!
Take a peek at this dish from Providence on After Hours..
Kinda works, doesn't it? I couldn't reach Jeff for a comment on this thing.
Both events are on Saturday, 5/17.
Log Shop
It's time again for the Fourth Annual Surf Gear Swap Meet - Come Buy, Sell and Trade on Saturday May 17th from 8AM to 12PM noon at the Log Shop Parking - 640 Crespi - Pacifica.
Aqua Surf Shop
2830 Sloat Blvd., across from the SF Zoo
415.242.9283 aquasurfshop.com
Heita3 makes musical instruments out of vegetables and performs. Yes, vegetables. He's become my recent favorite food-warrior by mixing two of my favorite ingredients: food and music. He's taking the locavore thing to a new level. Watch all 31 of his videos and prepare to have your mind blown.
From The Smoking Gun.
Artichokes from our garden:
The first harvest from our artichoke plant was amazing. So tender, I need to use a lighter touch steaming our next batch.
Shrimps:
This was attempt number 2 of trying the tableside salt-baked shrimp that I saw on tv a while back. The salt-baking technique didn't work out too well, but they are SO tasty. That last picture is a bowl of the shrimp roe that we collected from some of the shrimp. My oh-so-brave daughter ate a bunch of the roe as an appetizer, saying 'mmmmmmmm'.
We got the shrimp live at Ranch 99 which is like an aquarium that does take-out to my girls.
I wish I had pictures of the waffles we made on Sunday morning...
April in Carneros is happening this weekend. We stumbled upon a few really nice wines when we went last year. The vineyards along Las Amigas in Los Carneros is turning out to be one of our favorite spots in the whole Napa/Sonoma area. Our favorites from the last April in Carneros included:
Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research
Hooman Radfar from Clearspring:
Kent Schoen from Facebook:
Jane Felice from ComScore
Ed Davis from ESPN
Folks agree that valuable widgets tended to be successful, but couldn't really describe anything specific about what tends to constitute value. Seems also like these folks are struggling to define ways to measure the elusive 'engagement' metric that folks have been writing about recently.
There are a few of his illustrations floating around the net too... take a peek.
Congrats Unka Charlie!
So if you happen to find something in your access_log that mentions GFSearcher, it's me. Apologies if this is a nuisance. I'm running some tests with Nutch on a small number of sites for my day job.
I'll follow up this post with some info about how everything works out.
No, not my dad. Robert Greacen was a poet from Northern Ireland. He had the same name as my father and grandfather. He lived in the part of Ireland my family left at the turn of the century. He died today. While studying in Galway, my sister had correspondence with him: a brief letter neatly typed on a card. My brother too, several letters. But Robert Greacen wasn't really family, just a familiar name.
Here are a bunch of poem excerpts on goog-books.
The plan was to run the Olympic Torch through a gauntlet of protesters along the embarcadero. The pro-tibet and pro-chinese folks were robed in flags and ready to meet for a chant-off. The two groups met, temperatures rose, men with shaved heads pleaded for nonviolence...
Then someone said that the torch was heading up Townsend St. The crowded headed off the Embarcadero.
Then someone said that the torch was being taken from McCovey Cove to the Ferry Building by boat, then a runner would run toward Bay St. The crowds turned and headed toward the Ferry Building.
THEN it turns out that the torch was whisked toward Van Ness by bus. The runner jogged unnoticed into a convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes and jogged on. All the protesters (and the unfortunate few who just wanted to see the torch) fell for it.
Paige & David got all the good shots.
Some fun things noticed along the way:
A few years ago I wrote (in my spare time) a little test harness around some simple command-line utilities. I wanted something to help me answer some simple questions about what was going on some large clusters of servers. Rather than clicking through a bunch of nicely formatted pages, I wanted something to make a bunch of http requests and give me a 'yes' or 'no' about the response. The trick (for me) was to try to run it on some server in the cluster which was running a really lean installation of Linux. No frills.
I could have probably compiled a jar & dropped it onto the server... but I couldn't edit & recompile a class on the server. I could probably have run a perl script, (geeze why didn't I just write it in perl?) but I think the WWW-Mechanize module wasn't installed. Who knows... anyway, I ended up stumbling upon curl and decided to write a wrapper around it using simple bash scripts.
Guess what? It worked. It was handy. Guess what? I used it at a few jobs since I wrote it. Guess what? It's still (somewhat) handy. So today (or yesterday) I give something back to the internets and interwebs that haz given me so much. I offer:
Tests are pretty simple. I'll toss a few test examples on this blizzog and onto the wiki on code.goog over the next few weeks. If you have any interest at all in using something klunky, and somewhat functional, please contact me and I'll help you get started.
Code.goog doesn't have a way to select it, but I planned on distributing the source under the 'MSL' license.
Anyway, enjoy!
Quick summary of the features I'd like to shoot for:
Our Raw Feed
Looks like I can grab a feed of each category. This might make for some handy intermingling of headlines. The downside is that it looks like I'm pulling a whole-article feed. I'll see if I can get this to just pull the titles. I'll set up a feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoFishCorp before using one of these doodads.
Yourminis
www.yourminis.com seems like a neat platform for building and syndicating a flash widget. They allegedly have some relationship with brightcove, I'll see if there's anything worth exploring there.
WidgetBox widget
This looks like a javascript/xhtml implementation. Kinda nice, but let me check it out in a pile of browsers first. Seems like the widgetbox is chock full of other presentations. Would be nice to find one that can handle a few feeds at once.
Some javascript doodad
It's a freebie, kinda simple: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php. Kinda simple, but it looks like I can style the output pretty easly.
Another javascript doodad
Nice javascript-only implementation, doesn't seem like it's working though.
Feed Sweep
Feedsweep is free for noncommercial use, handles a bunch of feeds at once, and is super-simple to put together. Creates a nice dhtml presentation of the title list. I think this
rss-to-javascript
Another freebie, not sure I can get this into the dimensions of the content area on the homepage.
What do you like? The other folks on the team here seem to like the yourminis the best. I'll put a POC together soon.
What is COPPA?
COPPA requires that web site operators offer the following provisions to its members:
The laws describe specific measures and remedies in order to comply. Even with the FTC-provided how-to guide they're not entirely black and white. There's a 'sliding-scale' for determining appropriate parental consent related to the type of engagement on the site. This grey-area, introduced in 2002, allows a less-thorough check for parental consent based on how the site operators want to use the user's private information.
Nick & COPPA
Nickelodeon describes in detail how they use this sliding scale to gain consent appropriate with their site: watching vids, interacting with Nick. characters, and playing games. For example, Nick wants to offer "points" or incentives to kids for playing games, this requires an account with a login, which can be created without any personally-identifiable information.
Additionally, Nick employs two "email exceptions" which say prior parental consent is not required when:
More information like the comment from Nick is collected on the ftc website, worth a peek.
Further reading...
I'll write more about COPPA in future posts and how it relates to specific features common to popular websites.
Though the beancounters will remind you that Saturday was really St. Patrick's day, celebrate it tonight if you haven't already.
We'll have a netscrap birthday sometime this week.
Social features aren't super-high on our priority list, but since I have a bunch of info on-hand I'll start with a quick survey of a few 3rd party social widgets. Subsequent posts will include more info on content syndication and other publish-y widgets.
JS-Kit: http://js-kit.com/
I installed JS-Kit on http://greacen.com and http://29.netscrap.com in about 15 minutes. I didn't do anything tricky with the styling, but it looks really easy. The admin is simple and clean.
JS-Kit is a "social widget" with these main features:
Can't beat the price or the ease-of integration though. Seems like they're open to white-labeling the feature for some undetermined fees.
All of these features seem COPPA-friendly since there is no requirement to provide personal information.
Intense Debate: http://intensedebate.com/
Another threaded discussion widget like JS-Kit's comment tool.
Does it play well with COPPA? Not sure, need to dig a little deeper.
Kickapps: http://www.kickapps.com/
A whole platform for widgety syndication. This seems pretty rich. I need to look at this much more closely. Looks like Brightcove's storymaker on steroids. I'll cover this more when I get into publishy widgets.
Tangler: http://www.tangler.com/
Another "social widget" whose main features let a publisher quickly integrate a forum:
Cocomment: http://www.cocomment.com/
Seems like a browser plug-in first, but it's integrated with their "social widgets". Similar features:
Kinda neat stuff, I'll get into Brightcove Story Maker, Kickapps, and some of the doodads I've seen on Widgetbox in a future post to this blog.
I didn't really make it to 29 songs as planned, but I'm ok with it. I have at least 10 (ok, maybe 6) decent songs to refine which is way more than what I had at the start of the month.
I uploaded a bunch of tunes from the wrap party to the 29 site (finally). I have stereo versions of the full band experience. Email me if you're desperate to hear those recordings (then please turn yourself in to the kookoo police).
Soon I'll lock down the files that make up the 29.netscrap.com site. Derek's comment about keeping the record of the month in tact is right on. I'll move those things somewhere else. The site will continue to work of course. In fact, it needs a few changes.... Gotta have better control of the player:
So what's next? I'll be spending some make-up time with the fam (and work) in the meantime. I also need to rehab my leg which was bonked one recent Saturday when I should have been finishing some songs. After that? I learned that I like recording tunes and I need to keep rolling with this. I learned that my main blockage with songwriting is more in the commitment department than the execution (except maybe the verboligization that accompanies the rock guitar). Even if it's just a slow simmer of experimentation, I need music to be happening. Maybe some 29'ers will get together to jam. Maybe we'll get to collaborate in each others studio to help get Greenberg's recordings recordings LOUDER... I DEFINITELY need to thaw out and finish a few blert songs that haven't been heard by many. Maybe I need to launch http://52.netscrap.com to be home of our new song-a-week lifestyle.
Who's in?
I REALLY had a great time chatting about music struggles & successes with folks. Couple of things I learned:
Here's everything so far.
Take a listen!
Why all the rock, Chris? In all, I think I'm taking a slight (I like creeps out) quality nosedive, but what I lack in quality (and variety for that matter) I'm trying to make up for with VOLUME. Also, that kinda comes easy to me. The wall of sound comes easier than writing a clever or pretty lyric.
Peter brought up a great idea about trying to get these tunes into the hands of similarly masochistic filmmakers for a 31 films in march marathon. Who do we talk to about that?