Technorati has been fascinating me lately. The site tracks bloggers and other producers of independent content so that it can provide a live overview of the internet. I’ve been using the site to get feedback and learn what people are saying about our films and comics.
By typing akrobotics.com into their search I can see who has links to our content and often dig up some interesting posts about our films and comics.
YouTube launched a new video player that you can use to embed customized playlists or channels. This seems like a potentially useful tool and I’ve embedded it here to display all of our Alaska Robotics YouTube videos in one player.
The border colors are limited for no real good reason and the sizing is funky (I had to modify the code snippet to fit this page) but it’s a new feature and it will probably improve. Now I just wish the video quality were as good looking as what’s on Crackle and AKRobotics.
If you have a YouTube account and want to create and embed a custom playlist somewhere just visit the my players section of the site.
Lou and Aaron’s film, “Socks,” was featured today in the animation channel on Crackle!
Sony launched Crackle on Monday, a new video sharing site born from the ashes of Grouper and aimed at the minor league filmmaking crowd. They plan to use the site to find and develop talent in addition to creating a more upscale online viewing experience. The place looks nice enough but the flash interface feels a little slow and clunky sometimes. The quality of videos is superb though and many of the tools are well thought out.
It will be interesting to see if people actually migrate over to Crackle looking for better films or if they’re happier rolling around in the shit on YouTube. I have to say the grungy online video giant is growing on me but I’m enticed by the attention Crackle seems to be giving to their filmmakers. They could potentially build a good community around some happy and productive creative types and Sony has deep enough pockets that they can stand to spend money for a year or two while they build up their talent base.
The revenue sharing agreement isn’t too impressive but it’s better than nothing and maybe more notorious filmmakers are getting better deals than our crew. The payoff in our deal ranges from $150 for 50,000 views to $5450 for 5 million views. At best, that works out to well under half a cent per view. I’m not sure if filmmakers are going to see that as a kind gesture or an insult but I guess most of us just want people to watch our films.
YouTube is king for now but I still prefer the lines sketched out by the Participatory Culture Foundation and their Democracy/Miro project. I like the idea of independent producers manning their own tiny web stations and sending feeds out into the world to be picked up by a variety of readers. Broadcast television for the masses. UHF on the internet.
Many thanks to Arlo Midgett who got us mentioned in a Boing Boing post yesterday! Luckily our server didn’t buckle under the traffic spike and the ripples are starting to spread as more blogs are picking up on our proposal to buy back the legislature.
Despite the heavy traffic and linkage there haven’t been major spikes in the feed subscriptions and I can still hear crickets in our forum. We’ll see how the numbers are looking next week but I hope we can get a few more films posted before the end of the month and try to surf this wave a bit.
The coolest part of this flurry of attention was stumbling across a very comprehensive review of my Alaska Robotics comic on the Watcher’s Webcomic Reviews site.
I only scored a 60% but I can’t argue too much with the constructive criticism and it really inspired me to work towards a more dedicated release schedule. I’ve informally been shooting for Mondays but I think it’s pretty clear that I haven’t been producing that often or consistently. I think by the end of the summer I can get into the right mood for it. I have a few energy draining projects remaining on my desk but I’m trying to elbow out some space to make this comic artist/filmmaker life really work.
These past couple of weeks have been going really well, I feel a little exhausted and very encouraged. I suppose I should brace for the inevitable ten thousand pound anvil up ahead but maybe if I can build up some momentum it will just glance off.
I don’t really know what I’m talking about here but I’m not going to let it slow me down too much. I talked to this guy a few weeks ago who writes software for a living. It’s like the software assistants you can buy to help you play internet poker except his software buys and sells stocks for you.
Makes sense to me, the stock market is kind of like poker. You want whatever edge you can get when making your investments but what happens when everyone is using little stockbots to buy and trade? Does the market become more predictable or less predictable? Does reality matter anymore or will companies just surge and fall as robots pump money in and out of the rolling waves of trade?
When everyone is trading with robots will it be possible to game the system and play the robots to the advantage of a particular business? What if you know what parameters the software looks for when making investments? Can you spin a little robot net and use your startup to capture a huge amount of automatic capital?
I guess I just have a lot of questions about what the robots are going to want from us when they take over the world.
I find it interesting how little I really consider the whole of a person in my day to day life. After I learned of my grandfather’s passing, I spent time collecting my memories the best I was able, and building my image of the complete man. Putting everything about a person together like that just isn’t something I do, and I was somewhat surprised by the person who came out.
Orvil Slang looms large in my memory. In amazing contrast to his smallish, wiry frame, he had a remarkable strength. Even past eighty, he could carry milk cans full of sap with an unbelievable amount of grace that embarrassed my early twenties physique. But beyond his physical traits towered his good-natured joy at life, loving companionship, appreciation for stories, resourcefulness, and of course, his unyielding tenacity.
One of my favorite things was to do with him was play smear, the mighty mid-west card game. He and Erik would fight a never-ending battle at the kitchen table against Grandma and me. Unafraid of being set, he would bet with a wild flair, and I was a bit jealous of his ability to throw caution to the wind and open with a bet of five without an ace. Grandpa played with a sparkle in his eye and a laugh for my dismay at how he could consistently outbid me. He was always having fun, win or lose.
I will remember him riding high on Dear John the John Deer in his Gillett Cement jacket and brown hat, steering more with the breaks than the wheel. Whenever he would duck low to get that great green tractor that always needed tinkering back into the shed, I always thought he would hit his head on the building. Of course, he never did. He had been putting that tractor away since well before I was born.
As a child, I had a fascination with his left hand. As I remember the story grandpa stuck his hand in a fire and grabbed some glowing red coals. The resulting burn left his hand with a somewhat unique appearance. While it functioned correctly, his finger nails had somehow morphed into dark, oddly shaped outcroppings on the end of his fingers that quit growing, yet never fell off. Whenever he would tell the tale, he seemed as fascinated by how his hand looked as I was.
About two months ago, my grandfather entered a nursing home, leaving the house he was born in and lived in his whole life. His failing body and mind had become too great a burden for my Grandma to care for by herself at the farm. Grandpa never really adjusted to his new home, and indeed showed his mischievous spirit in his attempts to return to the home he knew so well: scooting his wheel chair out the doors when no-one was looking, pulling the fire alarm, and finally in refusing oxygen by removing the tubes and tying them in knots. I’m sure those that were dealing with him didn’t enjoy the antics at all, but I find a comfort in them. He was claiming a sort of control in the new life that must have seemed very constricting compared with the 87 years he spent as his own master at the farm.
Grandpa’s body finally gave out on him this morning, and he passed away with his wife of more than sixty years at his side. He lived well, loved well, and he will be missed.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I’m messing with the structure of this site and hope to move our commenting system into a bulletin board format. Things might get a little ugly around here as I chew on the project and inevitably get distracted by sunshine and comic books.
Right now I’m looking into phpBB3 RC1 and BBpress.
It has less features and I’ve run into loads of problems but I’m leaning towards BBpress since it was built by the folks who created WordPress, the software powering this Orphan Army project blog. I like that it the software includes RSS feeds and I have a lot of faith in the community behind it.
– Update –
I managed to leave the old comments in tact and experimentation begins with the forum. Currently there isn’t any way to comment on old posts but those mostly just collect dust and spam so I might not worry about it too much.
YouTube has RSS feeds. They don’t make them very accessible but they’re in there.
I’m not sure why these feeds aren’t more accessible or attached to their corresponding pages. It’s probably just a balance between providing useful technology and a fear that they’ll lose advertising revenue if people access the site less directly.