Monkey in The Middle

Brian took this photo of Noah, me, and Ev at the Odeo office in San Francisco's historic South Park district.

Cool Gig!

Marie-Chantale Turgeon aka m-c of Vu d'ici - Seen from here was hired to event blog the Cirque du Soleil from under the stage.

What's event blogging? "Event blogging is about many things: the place, the people, the event, the blogger itself, his written impressions and chosen photo and video content. The result, a media rich content, is published on the web in an original, personal, lively and artistic way, creating exclusive and animated stories to which people can contribute. The blogger immersed in a context is taking part of the story, becoming an active and influent character, sharing facts and thoughts with his online audience."

Wow

TEDTalks Podcast on Odeo and TEDTalks video at TED.com.

The Blogosphere Is A Hurricane

Does anyone else think this new map of the Blogosphere looks like a hurricane? Or has seeing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth this weekend rattled me such that I've got hurricanes on the brain?

Monday Morning Email

Hey,
In an attempt to get links to my site i went through blogger looking for people that display emails in their profile.

My site isnt really a blog but more of a forum for people that are depressed.
I have a blog but i dont think i will use it because its very one way apart from the odd comment.

Please could you link to my forum from your sidebar or somewhere on your blog please?

If you would i would like links with the word "Depression Forum` over them.
This is my forum.
http://www.beatmydepression.com/forum/

If i have annoyed you by sending you this email please dont send anything nasty back and just delete it please.
Thanks, Mick

There's good comedy in this unsolicited email.

Seeing The Truth

Today I watched An Inconvenient Truth and it was good stuff. Love the Al Gore.

TiVo Search Widget

Searching my TiVo for stuff to record is slow because there's no keyboard. How about an easy way to use my networked computer to do a quick search for stuff my TiVo already knows is coming on in the next two weeks? Maybe it's a widget or maybe it's part of TiVo Desktop. Either way, it would be good.

The Dunkin' Code

This is a good idea. Dave wants Dunkin Donuts and other companies to offer easy-to-blog pictures of their products. What they could do is offer code that renders a photo or flash movie or something like YouTube and Odeo do near the bottom of every page. Then they could make that code self-propigating so it would be easy for others to use it too. Mad codes!

Jack Black on Video Podcasting

Interview: Jack Black Gets Serious: "I'm glad we did that, because now I look at them and laugh looking back. It's like a video diary. Wish I had a real video diary of my life, kind of. I should have been doing that podcast for myself, every couple days for the last f***ing 36 years. That'd be unbelievable.” "

Some Subtle Odeo Updates

Ray rebuilt the Odeo flash player so it's entirely in flash but looks exactly the same. It's like that old Steven Wright bit:

"Somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with exact replicas."

Also, the PlayNext/Scan feature that helps you find interesting audio at Odeo now has some fine tuning capabilities in the form of a drop down menu. You can use it to play through your Odeo Inbox and such.

How To Add Starred Audio

In case you want to put your Odeo Starred Audio on your blog or MySpace, here's how I did it.

1. Go to your Odeo Profile and copy the url of your Starred Audio RSS feed
2. Go to Feedburner and paste the feed url in the field and click "next"
3. Go to the Publicize tab and click on the BuzzBoost service
4. Copy the code from BuzzBoost and paste it in your blog or myspace

I think you have to sign up to Feedburner somewhere in there too. It works pretty good as you can see.

Easy RSS Rendering

I just put my starred audio in this blog's sidebar by using RSS+Feedburner's BuzzBoost. It made me realize something we should have put into Blogger back in 2004 with the big redesign: a template tag that renders an RSS feed. So you would just have to paste a feed or feed url into your template and wrap it with RenderFeed. That would have been cool. But there will be better ways of doing that sort of thing than tags.

Music to Gaze at Shoes By

Odeo: Zombieberry's Podcast #01: "I won’t annoy you with the sound of my voice, which I’m sure you’ll find is a nice change from other broadcasts. What you will get is just music, nothing else, and lots of variety. The first installment is an assortment of great music; rock, alternative, pop, psychedelic, metal, and shoegaze."

Shoegaze? I've never heard of that genre of music but I like it!

Xanga Launches Internet Safety Site

Xanga Safety: "We've built this Xanga Safety site to make it easier for everyone to get the info they need to stay safe (and help others stay safe) on Xanga and on the internet in general."

The site features tips for teens. tips for parents, and an email hotline for law enforcement professionals. Also on the site is this Intro to Blogging and Social Networking by the head of WiredSafety.org.

The Odeo Scan Button

We just added a scan button to Odeo. It works like a car radio scan button. Click it once to tell Odeo to cycle through a bunch of podcasts. When you hear one that sounds good, click it again. Maybe even star it and keep going. Nice.

This Makes Me Laugh

The first three minutes of this podcast (quoted) crack me up. I just keep picturing a SNL character doing a skit about a lady who has a podcast about bell collecting.

eBay Blogs

eBay Blogs "are a great way to connect with your friends, family, and trading partners." Interesting.

It's A Bug, Not An Un-feature

Have you noticed the mysterious disappearance of the "download mp3" link on audio files recorded using the send me a message feature of Odeo?

Rest assured, we didn't un-release this feature, David Gray found a bug. We're werkin' on it.

Scoble and the Playable Web

In this article over at Web Pro News: Podcasting not a Good Name Huh, Robert Scoble explains that you have to download a podcast to hear it. I think he's trying to make a point about services with the name "pod" in them and that's why he didn't mention Odeo where playing podcasts on the web is the main event and downloading is secondary.

It's Only Thursday

This week at Odeo we spruced up the profile page, added starring of audio (beta!), enabled audio quoting (no UI yet, beta!), announced mp3 uploads for Odeo Studio, and fixed our OPML file output so it works with Dave's SYO project. Also, from last week: New tags page. And it's only Thursday so we still have time to do more stuff. Nice.

GmailThis! Is Great for Me

Did you know that there is a bookmarklet that makes it super easy to rock out a Gmail on the fly? Well there is, and it works: Add a "Gmail This" Bookmarklet to Your Browser. Holy gefilte fish Batman. The folks at work are gonna get a lot more email from me now.

Sideways Socializing

I'm starting to form a theory of why sites like Last.fm, and Dogster are such great ideas. It has to do with the fact that there are plenty of people who really want to connect socially to others obliquely through a shared interest rather than straight up. It narrows the beam a bit but there's still such great variety in the selection of "people who like dogs" or "people who also like these seven bands" that you're bound to connect with a few different but interesting-to-you people. More thinking needs to be done here but I like what I'm hearing. In my head.

Might Catch Some Sketches

Livy has to work all day tomorrow at WildCare which leaves me to my own devices. Last Saturday I did lots of work in and around the house. I might do more of the same tomorrow but I may also sneak out to catch Sketches of Frank Gehry down the hill at my local Landmark Movie House.

I love architecture, especially modern architecture, and really enjoyed my visit to the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao several years ago. Also, this film is directed by one of my favorite directors, Sydney Pollack—it's his first-ever documentary and he knows nothing about architecture so it should be good.

Update: I arrived five minutes late to watch this movie and the guy in the ticket booth told me it had been cancelled. If I had been early they might have screened it just for me. Darnit.

Neat!

This Splatter project is so fun. I wish it was an application like Gmail. Sit down, make a painting, and send it off to a friend. That would be more fun than email.