I understand that content owners have licensing agreements around the world and feel that they can’t open up television programs globally to protect the financial investment of various regional licensees.
However, content owners, you need to understand that if you deny people a way to legally access your product simply on the basis of geographic location, they will get it anyway without you. [click to continue…]
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I recently wrote another guest piece for Sarah Perez:
Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.
Click through to read the rest of Google dropped the ball on Jaiku at Sarah’s site, Sarah in Tampa.
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I had the pleasure of corresponding with Thord Daniel Hedengren this week and the end result is yours truly is this week’s featured blogger atThord’s excellent Blogger Talks.
Woo!
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Note: this tutorial was for version 3.15 of JWPlayer. It is now up to v4.2. The customisation wizard may or may not work with v3.15. An older version of this post demonstrated the customisation by changing colors. However, that code no longer works and has been removed. Hopefully I will provide an updated tutorial soon.
While using someone else’s media player to stream mp3s hosted on your site can be fun (see the tutorials on how to use the Google Reader player and how to use the Yahoo media player), nothing quite beats the thrill of rolling your own media player and controlling it on your own server. Below are some simple steps anyone can take to use the free jwplayer from Jeroen Wijering.
The JW FLV Media Player is the brainchild of Jeroen Wijering. It is made with Adobe Flash technology and will play not only flv files but any other media format supported by Flash, including our self-hosted mp3. You can get the jw flv media player up and running with a few simple steps:
Configure the wizard as desired. I’ve included a screenshot of my wizard configuration and I’ve kept it very basic. The wizard lets you do things such as change colour, size, add playlists (if you have those set up already), add a stop button – stacks of features all up. When you’re finished configuring, click the ‘Update and preview code’ button to see what your player will look like and the code you need to cut and paste into your own site.As a quick explanation, the ’source’ option is where you have uploaded the media player files on your server and the file option is where you have stored your mp3. Also, the ideal height for the slim player is 20 pixels (the default setting) for a single mp3. Larger sizes are useful for when you have a playlist of tracks you want to display.
<embed src="http://techwhimsy.com/mediaplayers/jwplayer/mediaplayer.swf" width="440" height="20" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="height=20&width=440&file=http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3" />Embedded, the final version looks like this:
And If you are having problems with the embed code (for example, the code shows up as standard text in your blog), try removing all the line returns and replacing them with a single space instead. Also, for some reason that escapes me (but you clever bunch out there probably know), you need to have a space between the end of the code and the closing “/>”.
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With all the fuss surrounding the will they/won’t they merger of Microsoft and Yahoo, it has been surprising to see just how many cool and interesting things there are buried inside the Yahoo corporation. There is much more to Yahoo than search, directories, Flickr and del.icio.us. A quick scan of Yahoo! Everything reveals a whole bunch of stuff from the new social news service Buzz to online video editing with Jumpcut to the Zimbra collaboration and instant messaging service. However, what is possibly the most interesting to web geeks is the unsung Yahoo User Interface (YUI) and Yahoo Design Pattern Library, both part of the Yahoo Developer Network.
The YUI is a collection of cross-browser controls and utilities written in Javascript that are intended to be used in developing rich internet applications (think AJAX and DHTML). It is freely available under the BSD licence for anyone to use in commercial applications or otherwise. Included in the YUI is a collection of Cascading Style Sheets including a comprehensive style sheet providing a large range of different grid design options for page layout. The YUI has too many cool things to list here, but some of the cooler applications include a rich text editor, calendars and drag and drop utilities. The YUI is quite a technical collection and is essentially a giant repository of server and client side code.
The Yahoo Design Pattern Library is a practical application of the industrial strength code in the YUI. The patterns are an attempt to offer comprehensive solutions to a wide-range of interface design problems and pull together different pieces of the YUI code. There are design patterns for navigation options (things like tabs and indexes), calendars, page layouts and slideshows. Like the YUI, the Design Pattern Library is free to use by all comers and is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution licence.
To keep up to date on new additions to both YUI and the Design Pattern Library, keep your eyes on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog at http://yuiblog.com/blog/
Note: as far as I am aware, no part of techwhimsy.com uses either YUI or the pattern library. Now that I know they exist, there’s a very good chance some of the features will make their way into techwhimsy v2.0
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I’ve got a guest post up at sarahintampa.com (the blog of Grand Effect and ReadWriteWeb writer Sarah Perez) on the new Nine Inch Nails release The Slip and how Trent Reznor continues to lead the way in ‘music 2.0′.
Over the last few months, Sarah has quickly become one of my favourite tech blogger so of course I jumped at the chance to provide this guest post.
NIN does it again. Are you watching, Thom?
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Trust Australians to take a frivolous and whimsical web service that was starting to take itself too seriously and get really immature with it.
:D
Bless each and every ███████ one of you, you █████!
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Data portability is the idea that individuals have control over their data online and can determine how they and others can use that data (if at all). Some examples of what data portability could be include:
(more examples of possible use cases for data portability here)
There is no denying that data portability is a hot issue amongst the tech community. There is the Data Portability Project, Google’s Open Social initiative for widgets/gadgets/apps in the social networking space, uber blogger, PR machine and the loudest echo in the chamber Robert Scoble avidly pushing data portability at every turn before accepting that there are roadblocks to data portability and the recent announcement by Yahoo! that it is rewiring its network of internet properties for social graph and data portability. However, all this is for the geeks and the techies. What about the real world and real, normal people who don’t live and breathe this stuff.
Do normal people care about data portability? As always, when it comes to finding out the opinions of the tech savvy but not tech obsessed, I turned to my wife, who although she spends a lot of time online, she is very far removed from the echo chamber that many people find themselves in. She couldn’t tell you how much Google spent on buying the latest start up, or who Jason Calacanis is, what Twitter does, who Duncan Riley is angry at this week or any of the other things that fill the pages of Techmeme on a daily basis.
What my wife can tell me is what normal people (ie not early adopters) think. Her extensive network of online friends, although from large and varied backgrounds with wildly different views on many things, share a common thread – they use the internet as a tool, not as a game, or a money making machine or as a way of life.
I asked my wife, “Does anyone care about data portability?” I then had to explain about ideas such as exporting your Facebook contacts to Outlook, or moving photos from Flickr to Zooomr, or shifting a Blogger blog to Wordpress and so on. The blank, uncomprehending stare slowly became more focused as she began to understand what I was trying to say. “Outlook? Why would I want to do that? Flickr? Don’t most people just keep a copy of their photos on their hard drive anyway? I know you can move from Blogger to Wordpress fairly easily. [.....] did that and it worked fine” and so on.
Data portability. Do normal people care? Probably not. Right now, it just doesn’t affect them. Normal people don’t hop from web service to web service. Normal people don’t seem to have extensive collections of media online and even if they did, they’ve still got the original files floating around. Rudimentary services that work more or less good enough already exist for the bigger services, especially where there is a commercial imperative to make importation easy.
Is data portability important? I believe so. However, until data lock in has an impact on the online experience of the slow adopters, no one will really care.
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A nod of the head to Amit at Digital Inspiration for pointing me in the right direction for the Yahoo Media Player with his post “How to embed mp3 audio files in web pages”.
There are two versions to the Yahoo Media Player – a javascript based version and a Flash based version.
For the javascript version, first you need to link to the file. For example:
<a href=”http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3″>31_Ghosts_IV</a> which looks like:
Then, you insert the javascript for the media player somewhere on the page:
<script src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js" type="text/javascript"></script>
After that, a little ‘play’ button should appear next to your media file link. Click the button and the player launches.
This method has occasionally been reported to not work on self-hosted Wordpress blogs like this one. To get the Yahoo Media Player to work in Wordpress if the above method hasn’t worked, try inserting the script tag in your header file.
You will also notice that off to the left hand side is the miniaturised version of the player which you can also launch just by clicking on it.
Yahoo also offer a Flash player with a handy Yahoo flash player configurator at next.yahoo. You plug in the url of the page or file, choose some options such as colour, size, autoplay or rounded corners and it will generate the Flash embed code for you. My configured player looks like this:
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