I want to clone

I write a number of blog posts that are often very similar - for example I write up the five songs my iPod played to me on shuffle each morning in a feature called 5Tracks.
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I’m pretty big around here!

When will I, will I be famous - I can’t answer, I can’t answer that. Well actually now you can - you just need to add up all the unique subscribers over all your social media outlets.

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Playing with my Pipes

When Yahoo launched Pipes about a year ago I spent a LOT of time playing with it, in fact you could say I got a little bit addicted - but I managed to break the addiction and leave it alone.

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Give me my freedom

I don’t often get really annoyed with things, actually scrap that I DO regularly get annoyed at things BUT not usually THIS annoyed at things.

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Managing my virtual life

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my addiction to social networks before - I’m signed up to dozens of them and am even active on a few - but keeping track of them all takes more time in the morning than email!

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Wordpress as a CMS

Over the last decade or so that I’ve worked in New Media I’ve either used, developed, customised or researched dozens of content management systems for a wide range of end users. Wordpress is by far the easiest to use.

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10 things to do on a rainy lunchbreak

We all love lists, they’re the mainstay of the blogosphere and pretty much the sole type of content on the DIGG homepage (or at least it often feels that way).

I’ve made lists before, I’ve put together lists of the people I’d most like to have dinner with, the people I’d like to run my fantasy magazine and others - this is my first top ten list.

It’s the list of things to do on a rainy day during your lunchbreak.

1 ) Read a book
Reading is fun and I like to keep a book in my bag at all times - that way I can quickly pull it out and read it. Although reading at your desk in an open plan office isn’t much fun - you need ’spaces’ in your workplace for this to work.

2 ) Eat
Just gourge yourself on nasty fatty snacks to kill time.

3 ) Listen to podcasts on your iPod
What it says on the tin really, just find a quiet corner, put the buds in and listen away to anything from TWIT to the Friday Comedy Podcast from BBC Radio 4.

4 ) Catch up on TV
If your in the UK you can visit bbc.co.uk/iplayer or itv.com and catch up with last nights television that you might have missed. It’s also a great way of knowing what people were talking about on your office facebook group or even around the water cooler this morning. I haven’t included 4OD as it requires a download and probably won’t work in most offices.

5 ) Read blogs
Just go to technorati.com and read blog posts on a massive range of issues from Britney and her kids to the cost of a loaf of bread in Brighton!

6 ) Annoy workmates
Find different ways of pissing off the other people stuck in the office during a busy lunchbreak. This could be another list on its own but for example you could:

1) Shout out the results of last nights footie match so that anyone that recorded it hears.

2) Hum really loudly an annoying tune so nobody can get it out of their head.

3) Talk about the ending of a TV show or film you know people haven’t seen yet and want to.

7 ) Play games
Go to somewhere like king.com or search the BBC for a range of games and get playing. See if you can beat your own personal best bejewelled score.

8 ) Get wet
Go outside and get soaking wet and then come back into the office and pretend to everyone that you REALLY LOVE THE RAIN and NEVER GET COLDS. Then spend the rest of the day sneezing and coughing.

9 ) Go virtual window shopping
Head over to Apple.com, Amazon.com, Play.com, Dell.com or any e-commerce site of your choice and make up shopping baskets of things you’d love to have but can’t afford.

A good game is to set yourself a budget (say £10,000) and see if you can hit that figure EXACTLY within a certain amount of time (say 10 minutes).

You could make it more challenging by setting certain criteria like it must include at least seven CDs with a folky-blues feel and a green label.

In fact you could involve other bored workmates and set each other challenges. (I might do a full post on the Virtual Shopping Game next time I’m bored at lunchtime).

10 ) Make a list
Think of something and then make a list and see if you can get everyone else in the office also bored and not able to go out due to the rain to join in - might start a fun debate.

Can you think of any more?

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Can you get too flash?

The headline doesn’t refer to flash in the Adobe sense but more - flash as in the over the top sense, the concept of doing something that looks striking and even works, something that looks potentially professional and slick.

The reason I ask is that I’ve been playing inside Photoshop to try and create a new look for Up Your Ego - the site as it is right now is basically an adapted off the shelf, free theme (U5) and it looks a bit haphazard - but it also looks like a blog.

Here is the design I’ve been working towards so far:

In the orange box you’d have a promos to key features or even adverts - it could even possibly have video clips or images.

Then underneath that you’d have another area (probably defined by a light grey line) that would have the top two stories with an associated image (side by side) with a headline, summary and (more…) link.

Then underneath the grey line you’d have the next five stories on the left - a calendar on the right and underneath the calendar all the usual blog sidebar objects.

Clicking on the story would offer a slightly different page - you’d get the green bar across the top and then a different body and sidebar to the one seen on the index page.

But is this all too complicated or professional for a blog? Do expectations increase with a complicated theme? Would I be better going for a more simple approach?

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iPlayer streaming

My blog seems to have been turned into an iPlayer love in lately - or at the very least a BBC screenshot fest. Well I might as well keep it up for a little bit longer.

Yesterday I brought you a screenshot of the iPlayer Radio - the integration of iPlayer with the old BBC Radio Player. Today, the first screenshot I have for you is the Radio button on the iPlayer website itself.

If you look closely at the screenshot above you’ll see that, instead of the usual small picture and download link you get with the iPlayer (well not in Firefox) you’ve got a big picture that fills the box and a Play button.

That’s because this is the Firefox friendly, streaming version of iPlayer - it’s basically using Flash and it’s not bad quality. Here’s another screenshot for you.

You can see above that you get a large flash video window, the network graphic (in this case BBC Two) and a brief bio about that episode and its duration. As this is in Firefox it tells me the download isn’t available. In IE it would give you a big download button.

You don’t need to install anything other than flash to watch shows on the iPlayer - this is how it should have been from the start. It’s now 100 times better than 4OD and ITV.com - I can just use it straight out of the bag.

The streaming is impressive, the flash video is pretty good quality and a good size as well (much larger than You Tube). You get the channel ident first and then the show itself starts. It takes a while to load properly but it must be a fairly large encode.

You can even share iPlayer videos - you can’t embed them but you can post the video to Dig, Facebook et al and you get a link to e-mail it to people or post it on your blog.

This is something the BBC seem to have been doing a lot on music based website lately - for example the Later with Jools Holland site lets you embed and share the link on social sites.

All in all this is a pretty good achievement - it’s what the Beeb should have done from the get go - I think the flash streaming is good enough that they could even just drop the download version. After all - why wait two hours to download something you could watch right now and will be there to watch anytime for up to a week.

The only reason I can see for downloading a show is if I know I won’t get to watch it for two or three weeks - the downloads will be alive for 30 days as long as you don’t start watching them.

It’s stream all the way for me - that’s why until now I prefered the 4OD and ITV.com - they basically let me press play and watch the shows straight away - even if Channel 4 do make me install their crappy software to do it. And the downside to ITV.com is that its Windows Media and requires me to install a codec or something first.

The iPlayer is now a thing of wonder - I go to bbc.co.uk/iplayer, find the show I missed, press play and watch it - that is how it should work, that’s the BBC working well. That’s brilliant simplicity.

UPDATE

Here is another screenshot of iPlayer working at full screen - just for fun.

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