Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2007

Come on CONCACAF, do a better job!

It is June 24, 2007, and all I want to know is what channel today's Gold Cup final between the U.S. and Mexico. It's on at 3:00, and I know they're showing it at the Shebeen, but I'd rather just watch it at home if I had the option. So, I want to know if it's on ESPN or the Fox Soccer Channel. So, I go to the CONCACAF website to find out. Of course, the CONCACAF site is not using video very well at all. There's a very small video box on the left hand side of the screen that plays a video announcement of what teams are playing in what divisions. That's all well and good, except it's the final day of the tournament. They've not even updated the video. What's more annoying is that as you navigate the website, the video plays from the beginning. It's very annoying. This should be a major tournament, and it could be if they would simply use the web matter. Why are they not selling live streams of the matches? Why are there no archives of the matc

Video builds the radio guy

I'm watching the tail end of the debut of Max Headroom, one of those shows from the late 80's that seemed so amazingly different, refreshing. The premiere revolves around an advertising conspiracy that's killing people. When I was a kid, this seemed so futuristic and somehow important. A television show was critiquing television practices. Now, the irony comes in because I'm watching this show on Joost , which is a new service created by the makers of Skype and KaZaa. There's advertising, of course, but it seems so seamless, you hardly notice it. A friend of mine sent me an invite today, and there's a ton of content here that I can watch legally, as often as I want. And, the picture is pretty darned good, full-screen. Everything is changing, and changing fast. Steve Safran of Lost Remote was recently a guest on Coy Barefoot's show and continued preaching the gospel of convergence, and Joost is so far the best (legal) implementation I've seen. It lacks

Reason #62 why Coy Barefoot's show is awesome

As you know, I produce the podcast for Coy Barefoot's show. At the moment, I'm watching the Daily Show, and Jon Stewart has Alan Brandt, the author of Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. The cool thing is, Coy had him on his show in early May. He gets so many great guests on WINA's Charlottesville--Right Now, and it's well worth listening to, either on WINA from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM, or on the podcast courtesy of the Charlottesville Podcasting Network . Now, if I can only find someone to help us produce Coy's show. I have ten files sitting waiting to be produced and uploaded. I'm almost done with a major project producing U.Va's Reunions Weekend 2007 podcasts, so I can hopefully get to some of them. I'm willing to train anyone with an interest in multimedia experience.

And with that, it's back to normal

This is what I've wanted for a year and three months - a draft of Spaten at Court Square Tavern. I'm sitting at the bar, where I've sat many many a time before late at night, and this time I'm just a customer. A paying customer, even! This doesn't really feel real. The place is mostly the same, though it's completely different. It's certainly not going to win awards with the young hipster crowd, which is probably why it's so enjoyable for me to be here now. The major difference is that I'm here at night and Bill Curtis, the owner, is here. I never saw him up here ever in the old days, except occasionally late at night, or maybe at the beginning of a shift. Now I have a sense he'll be here an awful lot. And that's not a bad thing at all. I'm so happy to be here. I've ordered my second Spaten. I think I'm going to really enjoy it here again. It's not like any other Charlottesville bar. I don't know what it is, exactly. I nev

BlogNetNews goes local - what does it mean?

BlogNetNews is another group that seems to be trying to make some money off of aggregating local content. They're now aggregating the same blogs that cvilleblogs.com collects. But will any of this actually correspond to higher amounts of traffic? I'm now part of two organizations that use local blogs to reach people. I created the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and now work as program officer for Charlottesville Tomorrow . Both entities would benefit from extra traffic, as it would be good to reach out to new eyes in our attempts to increase public participation in civic and cultural society. But, I worry about groups that suck up feeds without asking for permission. I hope that it will be easy to determine if this does result in extra eyeballs, or if it will just mean the eyeballs currently engaged are just shifting the way in which they receive the feed.