I’ve posted my presentation from Wordcamp Toronto 2009 on buddyPress/bbPress integration below. I will be making more posts in the next little bit about some of the content and going over my talk, but the presentation itself is in high demand, so voila!
Social media has brought about a lot of things; some good, some not so good. One of the things it has done is opened up the conversation. Just the other day we (b5media) encountered a rendering issue with Google AdSense on Webkit based browsers (specifically Safari and Chrome). So I tweeted about it to mattcutts who is quite well known on Twitter for helping people solve Google related issues.
On the flip side of things, it also allows companies to monitor what people are saying about them. There are a lot of companies (especially startups, but some well known larger companies) that actively watch social media services for feedback, complaints, etc. and many of them even respond in turn.
This is a tremendous advantage of utilizing social media tools. So why can’t everyone be a part of the conversation?
Specifically, I am working on a software project that would allow you to store all your movies in the cloud. Now, to avoid legal complications, I would love to talk to someone from the MPAA or the movie industry in general to find out what the guidelines are (for example, how to recognize rented DVDs, DVDs with copyright protection, etc.). But these major media organizations aren’t a part of the conversation. The only contact information they give is their address and telephone number (not even an e-mail address!).
Now anyone I know can tell you I’m not afraid to pick up a phone, but I wouldn’t even know where to start. E-mail gives me time to formulate my thoughts and answers to questions. And most importantly, my e-mails can be forwarded if necessary and can be responded to in due time, because nobody wants to play telephone tag with a major corporation.
These organizations need to be encouraging legal innovation in order to stop people from using illegal methods. I’ve said it before, you just need to make it easier, faster, more reliable, etc. to get your movies legally and people will do that. Not everyone, but a good portion I think.
Am I missing something? This my start of a conversation; is anyone listening?
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what the next big progression in online video will be… in terms of user generated content, it’s pretty clear that things are moving closer and closer to real time with UStream, Justin.tv and Qik.
But in terms of production video and movies, we’ve made little to no headway in a legal direction. Hulu is a huge step for content providers, but for the internet community it was simply the next logical step. But as has clearly been shown now, the ad model is extremely volatile and susceptible to downturns in the economy. Granted, every business is, but advertising is one of the first things to come out of most companies’ budgets when profit falls.
So where do we go from here? Torrenting is certainly popular, but since the industry has made it quite clear that is not an avenue they are willing to pursue, there have to be other legal directions we can go.
It is my opinion that the movie industry is going to go three directions for content delivery in the not too distant future, each one catering to a different market. So, without further ado:
1. Mail based delivery - These are the Netflix-esque companies who will do physical delivery, but it will be coordinated through online inventories as opposed to brick and mortar shops. Netflix is an amazing service, but there is a level of rapport that needs to be built before people will be satisfied using this as an option. However, this is the next logical step for those used to brick and mortar stores.
2. Set top boxes - The Apple TV and Boxee’s of the world are making quite a bit of headway here, but they don’t go far enough. Now, given, this is due largely to the fact that most households do not have the bandwidth to do total streaming video, but we’re getting there. This is where we really need to get the content providers on board. And that won’t be easy because as with the recent Boxee fiasco, content providers are not yet ready to have their digital/internet content appear on televisions. Which leads me into my third option…
3. Totally digital content - This is the content that can be watched anywhere. And it’s as simple as an AVI or MPEG file, but it needs to be readily downloadable and, more importantly, portable. I should be able to download a movie to my computer, watch it there, put it on my iPod, keep watching at the gym, etc. Essentially, what this boils down to is my ownership of what I purchased and that I can do whatever I want with it as long as I’m not giving or selling it to others.
The biggest problem is this: I am perfectly willing to go to the movies and see a really good movie (ie. the new X-Men Origins: Wolverine). But if I don’t really want to see it in theatre, I should have other options of seeing it. Maybe not right away, but when it currently comes out in a digital format like on a DVD, I should be able to open up my set top box or app on my computer and buy that same movie for a reasonably low cost (maybe $4.99 or $9.99). Make it REALLY easy for me to get to, make it easy for me to pay for and ensure that I can download it as fast, if not faster than I can currently torrent that movie and you’ve got yourself a business.
And enough with the DRM… People will ALWAYS find a way to get it for free if they really don’t want to pay for it. But if you can do it for a reasonable price, with faster delivery than torrenting, and make it easy for me to own that content then in my opinion, you’re going to get a majority of people willing to pay for that service. The ultimate goal is to make it easier to use your service than for people to get it illegally.
If there are any movie studio execs/content providers reading this, send me an e-mail and we can chat a little more 
Now that I’m doing Jeremy Wright’s new Twitter organized #10morepounds weight loss challenge, I needed to change the direction of my workout a bit. I’ve been doing 5 days a week and will continue with that, however, I was previously doing 1/2 resistance and 1/2 cardio each day to both lose weight and try to add a little mass.
Since my goal for the next 10 weeks has shifted primarily to losing weight, I’ve changed my workout and thought I’d share:
You may notice a few things… first, I’m leaving leg muscles to the cardio since it’s almost always based around legs (I sometimes throw rowing in there instead of one of the exercises). Second, my cardio levels are almost the same each day. On cardio days I’m doing a much higher intensity than on half and half days. Third, I’m not specifying any specific resistance workouts because there are so many of them and you need to find something you’re comfortable with. There are a ton of good sites out there for resistance training guides and walk-throughs.
My only suggestion is use free weights over machines. Machines are very focused, which isn’t really what you want (unless you have an injury). What you want is to be imperfect because you’re going to work a wider range of muscles burning more fat and getting a better overall workout.
This week, as per Jeremy’s recommendations, I’m also hoping to start eating grapefruit for breakfast and drinking a lot more water instead of iced tea (even if it is 0 calorie). I’m also going to try to kick my Starbucks habit but that’ll be even harder than losing 10 pounds.
Hope this helps you in your endeavours if you’re following along!
After one hell of a weekend of ups and down, I am pleased to say I am joining JeremyWright’s #10morepounds challenge. On Sunday I ate quite a bit of junk food, then I punished myself in the gym (which is normally a rest day for me) and as a result I was quite upset with myself and my body image. So this works out perfectly, since there’s nothing as motivating as a group of people coming together to accomplish a similar goal.
Jeremy has a great post here with a lot of helpful tips and I’ll be posting my few and far between insights on weightlifting. In the meantime, I’m going to try to post weekly photos of myself starting later this evening. Here are of my own as well:
Stay tuned (all two of you) to watch the transformation!
So this morning I am being assaulted on Digg and other sites with news that AIG is paying $160 million+ in bonuses. Congress is clearly pissed, and are all saying “Oh my god, this will never happen again.” Yeah… right.
These bailouts are turning into on of the greatest catastrophes in North America’s history. On the part of the auto-makers and their ridiculous unions and executives fighting to protect high costs that are (and I believe will) drive them out of business. Any so it should be; that’s capitalism, and no business is going to last forever. But where each of the big 3 fail, 100 others will rise to take their place.
Reid Hoffman (CEO, LinkedIN) recently wrote in a large number of places that start-ups can bail us out. Armed with innovation and creativity and the lack of executive red tape that makes implementation possible, most of the suppliers and people in the pipeline would remain in business and in the face of bankruptcy, would almost certainly offer better deals to fresh faces. And these startups could finally tell the unions to go to hell and renegotiate contracts that will help keep the innovation alive.
But back to the point of this article: on the part of the banks (and in part the automakers), where is the person who will tell the banks that THEY ARE GOING OUT OF BUSINESS? There must be enough people out there with the experience and determination who can take over as CEOs and make the changes necessary to restore the trust and turn around what has surely become the worst PR disaster in these banks’ history.
The government needs oversight in key sectors like finance in order to keep control over the nation and to prevent capitalism from destroying the entire sector. What is happening in the banks now should’ve happened long ago. But the government needs to take it one step further: they need to tell the current executives to fundamentally change and restructure the way things get done. Cap salaries, no more bonuses, and the list goes on. And if they can’t perform, then the government needs to go to the shareholders and tell them that they need to fire their disastrous management and bring in people who will make the necessary changes or they will let them sink into insolvency and will pick up the pieces after the fact.
I heard this morning that these bonuses were contractually obligated and that there was no out clause. First, that was a dumb move. But more importantly, why are these executives still taking their bonuses?? What we have here is a fundamental difference between start-ups executives and executives brought in specifically to make money for themselves and their shareholders who care nothing for their business. Any reasonable executive would’ve turned their bonus away, knowing it’s yet another PR disaster that they simply cannot afford and that their business is that much more likely to have to jump through even more hoops if they need more funds in the future.
Where are the people willing to make the necessary changes? Am I missing something?
Well, it’s been one hell of a last month. I’ve been working hard on some bbPress and buddyPress stuff, learning their code bases, and learning to write plug-ins to modify and build on their cores. I’ve developed what we’re thinking of releasing as bbPress Plus version which will come prepackaged with most of the functionality found in other forum software.
I’ve also been working hard to smoothly integrate all of the best features of the two. Instead of using bbPress’s built in profiles and plug-ins for private messaging, we’re taking that functionality from buddyPress. It’s challenging because both of them are pre-1.0 packages and neither have seemingly taken the time to play nice with each other (though they both integrate quite nicely with Wordpress MU).
At the same time, I’ve stopped working a “regular” job and have gotten into contracting full-time. This means instead of working for “the” man, I’m now working for a lot of different ones (and women too!). Hence, I decided to invest some time and money into a new blog design that would allow me to better sell myself and my services.
So by referral from a friend, I hired James MacDonald from Flockey Web Development and I am quite impressed with the new design. I didn’t have a lot of requirements, but I really wanted to create an equal focus on the blog and my services. The blog is a representation of me personally, an outlet for my thoughts and ideas, and since my personality is reflected in all of my work, it’s important for my to find an appropriate balance.
So if you’ve got a bbPress, buddyPress or any other job and are looking for a fun and creative programmer with a (very) tiny flair for design, feel free to contact me!
More to come on my most recent projects in the next couple weeks!
I’ve been reading A LOT of news lately about The Cloud. Haven’t heard of it? The Cloud is this revolutionary concept of all your data living on the internet in distributed services in services like S3, dropbox, etc. From my understanding from recent articles and hype (which we all live and swear by, right?), it’s a fairly new concept propelled by Amazon and other companies to make it so you don’t have to store data on your own computer. This concept has been applied to documents, e-mail, and even web sites!
So I thought: wouldn’t it be great if the whole internet lived in a distributed, cloud computing environment? Where we no longer had to host our own websites on our own machines? Could you imagine if we had the ability to host our websites on other people’s servers 10 years ago? And add more servers by clicking a few buttons and then setting up a custom image, just like Amazon does today? We would be so much farther ahead of the curve!
So welcome to Web 3.0: where you no longer host your own your documents, and eventually you may not even host your own websites. And as more websites move to The Cloud it will be even easier for people to host them elsewhere and scale them, with just the click of a button and the installation and customization of your software image (EC2 in this case). It’s a whole new world we live in, and I can’t wait until the entire internet lives in The Cloud.
/s
Sorry for the lack of ideas lately, I’ve been working hard to get another version of Jaxified out and haven’t really had any bulbs go off. However, while lying in bed before I got up this morning, this gem came to me:
Product photos are tough, especially when they need to be modeled on a person or manikin. I think this could fairly easily be moved into a cloud application. Make a manikin model, and have the user upload a front/back to the t-shirt. If you have a t-shirt model as well, you could simply texture it with the uploaded images and automatically get a rendered model wearing your shirt.
I’m sure this could easily be applied to other products, and would need to be in order to build a successful business, but the cost savings in a down economy like this could be huge if you sell it right.
As always, thanks for reading and feel free to leave feedback, additions, etc. in the comments.
This is the time for PPA advertising to come to the forefront, when people really want to see results for their advertising dollars. Now AdSense has PPA, but I think it’s time for a good startup to come out with a dedicated PPA system that’s easy to use.
The difference between my idea and what’s out there now comes principally in the ease of use. You could create a system to allow the user to actually navigate through their own site and track their actions. It’s difficult, but doable. Then, when users click an ad, they would also need to complete one of the actions on the account before the advertiser pays. This would of course result in less actual completions, but advertisers would be willing to pay considerably more for actual results.
This is actually one of my more interesting posts for the reason that I’ve already built a system like this, but didn’t have the time to pursue it, nor do I now. So if you’re really interested, let me know and I can get you into the system to try it out and we can work out a deal. It’s written in PHP and uses MySQL on the backend (with S3 to store ad images). There isn’t a publisher section but the ad display code is written. There is also no payment system, but those are relatively easy to implement.
As always, thanks for reading. If you’re interested, e-mail me at terry [at] icedteapowered [dot] com.