Category Archives: General

iDive updated

Idiveicon100iDive is a Mac OS X application for managing your digital video, that I wrote about previously. The kind folks at Aquafadas Software just wrote to let me know there’s a new version 1.2 out. New features include:

  • new support for the capture of DV footage from the camera
  • new compression capabilities for the captured footage using any of the installed Quicktime codecs.
  • new clip splitting functionality, both on sampled clips or clips with associated footage.
  • support for the display of footage/samples/thumbnails with 16:9 aspect ratio.
  • seamless integration with iMovie, Final Cut Express/Pro through the ability to drag and drop clips from the catalog into the editing application itself.
  • ability to edit clip dates and aspect ratio
  • many UI enhancements, in particular when navigating, changing views, changing sort orders,….
  • …and a new icon by Bryan Bell
  • FYI, Bryan Bell also designed our BlogHarbor logo.

    France opens tallest road bridge

    40628935 Millauclouds Ap220-3 CNN: Piercing the sky above the verdant hills of southern France, a stunningly modern roadway bridge hailed as the tallest in the world was officially inaugurated Tuesday.

    Podcasting Tips

    Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year…

    You guessed it, Blog is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2004. Their definition:

    Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

    Yuck. You figure they would be able to define the word a bit better. Hyperlinks provided by the writer?

    iTunes is now playing: Reelin’ In The Years (Live) from the album “Alive In America (Live)” by Steely Dan

    Blog reposting networks will snowball

    A few days ago I noted that Law.com was creating a Blog Network, re-publishing selected law-related blogger’s posts. Along similar lines, Steve Rubel’s excellent Micro Persuasion blog is now going to be re-published within WebProNews, and Steve has posted an insightful article about the pros and cons of this arrangement:

    …WebProNews immediately augments their high-value, professionally written articles with more folksy contributors who live on the edge of the content tail – all at no cost. In return, I benefit from more visibility, in-bound links and traffic. This is a harbinger of the partnerships we’ll see many big media construct in the near future.

    Prediction: You’ll see a lot of this blog network/re-publishing/aggregation from big media in the next few months, then this will snowball as bloggers figure out how to do this all by themselves… RSS and the MovableType/MetaWeblog APIs make it easier to than ever to aggregate content, and bloggers will figure out very quickly how to self-assemble their own blog networks. And once they do, you thought cross-linking and blogrolling was an effective way to increase page rank? Watch how fast bloggers game the system again with reposting networks…

    Blogging by numbers, 1 2 3

    The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to Technorati.

    Technorati’s chief executive David Sifry says the current number of blogs is now more than 8 times larger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. They are seeing 15,000 new blogs every day…

    Check out this article for more interesting stats on the blogosphere.

    Law.com Launches Blog Network

    Law.com launched a new blog aggregating content from other blogs on legal topics. The new Legal Blog Watch is an example of what will surely be a trend for brand name content provider to aggregate blogs on related topics.

    Podcast Research

    Podcast Research is a blog by graduate students from the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo which examines the podcasting phenomena and studies it with an academic eye.

    There are various themes the study is interested in such as whether it can be considered a serious medium as blogging has become, and whether commercialization (like it or not) has to happen before it can reach critical mass.

    ComputerWeekly: Google sees benefits in corporate blogging

    ComputerWeekly has an interesting article today on Google’s use of blogs internally. The article notes that Google started blogs for staffers in early 2003 and has seen these internal blogs put to a variety of uses:

    …people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they are thinking about and what they are up to.

    “There is a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It is going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years,”said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

    Read the full article.

    GigaDial: It’s like a radio dial, times a billion

    Andrew Grumet is amazing. His latest creation is GigaDial, which he describes as follows:

    GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters.

    It’s kind of like a web-based podcast aggregator. Or an audio bookmark list. Or something…