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

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.

Off the Couch

“The Long Tail metaphor helps old media people feel like they’re still in charge. So does the idea of Citizen Media, because old media people are cynics about citizens, they think we’re lazy couch potatoes who have never had a good idea or a noble thought…and our job is to consume, consume, consume — what they tell us to….Nice story, but that’s not what’s going on.” – Dave Winer

RELATED

“I don’t think of my what I do here as production of ‘information’ that others ‘consume’. Nor do I think of it as ‘one-to-many’ or ‘many-to-many’. I thnk of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers.” – Doc Searls

One Dime Closer To Carbon Neutral

Every gallon of gas equals 20 pounds of carbon dioxide and there’s a 12 gallon tank in the Neon and a 14 gallon tank in the Cruiser. So, every time we fill up, we’re responsible for another 240 or 280 lbs of CO2 in the atmosphere. (The Neon’s 10 years old this year…Ouch.)

On the plus side, I just got confirmation that 18,000 lbs of my family’s CO2 (69 fill-ups) will be neutralized thanks to TerraPass. Less than $100 covered our guestimated annual driving in 2 fairly efficient cars. (We’re also 100% WindSource in our home’s electricity.)

According to TerraPass’ “Around Towner” and “Cross Towner” pricing structures, neutralization is $.10 / gallon.

One dime per gallon.

So much carbon offset for so little.

Two questions:

  1. Have you purchased a TerraPass yet?
  2. Why isn’t carbon neutralization built-in to the Gas Tax?

The swag TerraPass sent did feel a little too much like I gave money to Public Radio. Are ‘thank you gifts’ the most effective use of the money I sent?

Speaking of GreenDimes.

Elsewhere:

“I’m wondering why they’re not also asking me if I want to buy a carbon offset [at the pump] and neutralize my gas consumption?” – J Wynia

2010 Sept 09

Prices for the carbon credits … have crashed to around 10 cents a tonne from all-time highs of over $7 in 2008, and trading volumes have largely dried up.

gPod Update: Joyeur replaces JoCo

There’s been a shuffle over at the gPod. Since JoCo’s Thing a Week project is over (go buy the discs) – I’ve replaced it with the equally geeky and entertaining Joyent podcast.

The banter between Dave, Jason and the others is almost exactly what I want from a technology conversation podcast – just that little bit over my head, and completely unserious – except when they’re completely serious.

Pipes v. Seeds

I’ve been asked if Yahoo Pipes is like FeedSeeder.

Sorta. Both merge multiple feeds and allow a level of filtering on the results within a browser-based interface. Though, that description includes quite a few other projects as well. So, I thought a Q&A would be a better way to compare and contrast [P]ipes and [F]eedSeeder.

Does it create really cool diagrams?
P: Yes
F: No

Is it useful to Garrick?
P: No
F: Yes

Is it free?
P: Yes
F: No

Is it live?
P: Yes
F: No

Behind the Blog: Norwegianity

The Wege goes in-depth on all the reasons Norwegianity is a must-read.

  1. Cursing:

    “…my policy on swearing – I’m for it.”

    So few people know how to effectively curse – The Wege does. Sloppy, ineffective, low-vocabulary cursing is so prevalent that his use of ‘fuck’ (as in “Fuck the new Republican party”) is refreshing.

  2. Music:

    “I know more about Ethiopian music than you do….I was listening to hip hop in 1981”

    The Wege knows music. Frighteningly so.

  3. Convoluted, multi-topic, verbose, heavily-quoted, posts:

    ” I throw in gratuitous obscenities to keep the mainstream media from linking to me, and I complicate my posts so pissed off wingnuts can’t link”

  4. Politics:

    “I know what conservatism is, and it ain’t got a goddamned thing to do with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, George Bush or Mitt fucking Romney. I respect Scientologists more than I respect Republicans. At least they had the gonads to join a real cult, and not some faux, whatever-Karl Rove-decided-to-call-it-this-week, fundraising apparatus.”

Just what an ‘about’ section of a blog should be – full disclosure and a manifesto.

Note to Self: Stop Using Eric Rice’s Brain

Listening to the Joyeur podcast on Twitter, I made a note to look into fictional Twitter accounts.

Then I see this post by Eric Rice:

“By setting up a character-driven, fictional Twitter account, not only can I do a sultry little dance on the fine line of ARGs (alternate reality gaming), but that 140 character limit is the BEST thing to ever happen to the creative process.”

The time between when I wrote this and he hit publish: ~30 minutes.