Author: Garrick van Buren

Saturday, 24 February 2007

First Crack 96. Jeff Williamson on St. Paul’s Flat Earth Brewing

by Garrick van Buren 8 Comments on First Crack 96. Jeff Williamson on St. Paul’s Flat Earth Brewing

As Jeff Williamson, co-owner of St. Paul’s Flat Earth Brewing Co. awaits kegs to distribute the first batch of Flat Earth Pale Ale, he and I talk about;

  • Getting a microbrewery off the ground
  • How a new child changed his the direction of Flat Earth
  • Flat Earth’s place in Minnesota’s beer scene.

Listen to Jeff Williamson on St. Paul’s Flat Earth Brewery [16 min].

Thursday, 22 February 2007

KRAFT Wants My Opinion on “Food”?

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on KRAFT Wants My Opinion on “Food”?

Listen to me read the actual email I received from a kraft.com domain.

I question its authenticity, but then, its from the place that brought us cheese food.

UPDATE:
I just received confirmation that the message did come from a Kraft “Senior Associate Brand Manager”, and I’m not the only one in PodcastMN land to receive the message. More updates to follow.

While it’s not astroturfing or splogging, it still gets added to the “How not to engage bloggers for marketing” pile.

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

What’s YouTube if Not Public Access?

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on What’s YouTube if Not Public Access?

This weekend, Dan Gillmor is doing a workshop on how to make public-access TV relevant. His thoughts echo those I wrote about in, “Add Cable Public Access to the Endangered Species List“. Namely, it’s an artifact of a time when publishing was hard and expensive for citizens to do.

My recommendation for cable companies to fulfill their community requirement: “offer bandwidth [to the community]. Lots and lots of it, with BitTorrent thrown in.”

Here’s some choice excerpts from Dan:

“In five years, cable systems will be free to abandon public access programming in every way. They won’t have to provide production facilities or channels.”

“In the meantime…help members of the community learn modern media production techniques.”

ELSEWHERE:

“I believe that the important part of Cable Access Television is access. Access to:
media production tools, media distribution systems, training to use them, media literacy education to understand them. And all of this should be within the context of the needs of the local community….Cable Access should not become Internet Access, it must become Media Access.” – Ben Sheldon

“Youtube is what it is. A very, very popular, traditional media outlet that provides its content on the net. It is video on the demand that is absolutely no different than the video on demand that comcast or any other cable company or telco offers, except that its user uploaded, limited to 10 minutes and the quality is awful” – Mark Cuban

QSPress – Quicksilver and WordPress Make Me Twitter

by Garrick van Buren 3 Comments on QSPress – Quicksilver and WordPress Make Me Twitter

I’m with Aaron, I don’t quite get Twitter. If you want to know what’s on my mind…read this blog. What I do get about is really, really fast publishing. The faster, the better.

So, I cooked up a little script (11 lines) to post directly to this blog from Quicksilver. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, or blog that understands the MetaWeblogAPI (though, I’ve only tested it on WP).

So, if you want to twitter on your own blog…download QSPress.

The posts look something like this and hey, no character limits. 😉

More on the QSPress page

LATER:
Eric, I say this script is proof XML-RPC isn’t dead.

Last time I checked, Flickr’s ‘blog this’ was XML-RPC. Copy-and-Paste and XML-RPC are two different things. C-and-P exists because video needs at least one ’embed’ tag and well, that’s hard. Add to that, XML-RPC needs an end-point url and a password, that’s a level of complexity above – ‘here take this code’. They serve two different functions – though the final product looks similar.