Born On The Web

I suppose that all people that read this blog have a good life. I know I do. I’ve got people that love me, live in a stable environment and get all the chances to develop myself socially an culturally. But off course millions and millions of people on this globe live in much worse conditions.

The bridge is big a charity effort that wants to unite people in a creative way to build a better future for others. Everyone can help build a mile of a virtual bridge around the world and for each mile companies like Adobe will give one dollar to a charity that you care about the most. It’s a great initiative and there are already pretty beautyfull creations and words added to the bridge. Currently there are 585 miles built and 24317 to go. So, get creative, let your heart speak and contribute.

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

And on a professional note: the site is very well executed and the concept is strong.
We cannot speak of consumer generated content here, but a better term could be carer generated content.
Good use of audio and video. The messages that welcome you speak immediately grab your attention and make you clear what it’s about on a very personal way.
I like the visual style to, but it took some time. The colours are very strange, even somewhat ugly. This could be deliberate so the site looks more spontaneous and from the hart then it would when the site would look very clean an over styled. This style makes the barrier for posting graphics yourself a bit lower.

It’s also worth noting how they integrate MySpace. The Bridge organisation has their own Myspace and user are invited to link to their own Myspace pages and most notably to download backgrounds and banners for your Myspace pace.

The bridge – building a virtual bridge around the planet

“There’s a revolution going on in rec rooms, offices and classrooms around the world. A revolution in which 15 million people are taking part [..] through a computer network called “internet”.

Hihi. A pretty funny tv report from 1993 on the emergent internet. Who could’ve guessed back then that it would get this big?

Dabble beta just launched after a year of alpha and beta testing. It’s a very handy community site you can use to gather and organise videos from all over the web. Currently they index more then 240 sites, including youtube, google video and the internet archive.

Dabble allows you to make your own playlists or to subscribe to ones of friends.
It can’t wait till some people with excellent taste and lots of time on their hands start making über-cool playlists so I can add those to my rss feeds.
The use of ajax is pretty good with the playlist interaction. A little ajax form at the side of the page lets you add new playlists and easily add videos to it. Very good use of ajax, it would’ve really bothered me if the page had to refresh several times in order to go through these steps.

There’s a section for requests where you can ask others to help you find video you’re looking for. For example, right now someone is looking for 10 seconds footage of and exploding catsup bottle. Anyone? :)

Another handy feature is a bookmarklet that enables you to easily add media from other sites to your Dabbler user page. It seems that Dabbler analyses the content of the page and automatically fills out the form for you so you just have to submit the form to add the video to your own collection. Killer feature!

This definitely is a must for online video enthusiasts since so many new video sites keep popping up that it’s getting harder to find out where to go find info or to remember where you saw a clip. This seems like a winner!

Dabble

I just came across a great photo documentary about life of youth in London. For two years the photographer submerged himself in the Grime culture, aggresive hip hop-inspired music from the streets of East London. Beautifull, raw photography with a voiceover of the photographer.
The essay is part of Magnums new wesite Magnum in motion, featuring plenty of thought provoking photo essays.

You can see from the style of the site that it’s made by the peeps at group94.

I’ll be gone until the 31st of June, Frits will keep the bar open.

• YouTube – Behind Family Guy
  I like the animation serie Family Guy and it always strange to see the voices behind the characters.
  (tags: familyguy humor video fun)

Alice & Irène podcasted my presentation at Barcamp that I did almost 2 months ago. I should have prepared my presentation better, I’m a bit embarrassed for my bad English. But it was a great exercise and I got some interesting feedback, so it was a positive experience.

- The podcast (mp3)
- The presentation (pdf)

More on the subject in My Thesis category and of course the paper itself.

Thanks Alice and Irène !

• Burning Questions • Feed for Thought
  Feedburner has some interesting taughts and graphs about how RSS is used. They provide a feed for a massive amount of websites. So they probably know what they are talking about.
  (tags: feedburner RSS syndication atom feeds feed adoption)
• Crisscross – News – Cell phone makers to unify charger specifications
  Finally, now see how long it’s going to take.
  (tags: cellphone recharcher standards)
• Mark Jenkins: Street Installations
  (tags: arts cool design Images photo Photography streetArt sculpture art)

During the worldcup we played a game over at Pickdee. You had to predict the score of each match. At times it was pretty exciting and made a match more fun to watch. In the end a good friend of me, Frank (rkid006) won the game. Congrats.

I mailed the guys over at Pickdee if they were going to expand the games. And good news, they included the Belgian Jupiler League in their games. It would be great if a brand like for example Jupiler would support Pickdee and make their own minisite around the Pickdee Jupiler League. For Pickdee I suggest providing some RSS feeds for the scoreboard and the matches, so their data can be integrated in other sites. Jupiler don’t need to provide any functionality just a minisite to drive traffic to their Pickdee Jupiler League game.

I believe strongly in the power of good partners in a WEB 2.0 environment.

• :: Reboot bbc.co.uk | reboot_gallery | BBC Malkovich ::
  This is a really nice redesign of the bbc homepage. I really like the slider you <--> everyone.
  (tags: bbc redesign design web2.0)