Pho­to­jojo: Photo res­o­lu­tions for the new year.

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Steve Rubel declares that social media is “dead” — because all main­stream media have become social. Which comes as news to a great many of us who’ve come out of the main­stream media. Brian Solis of PR 2.0 tells why Steve is off the mark this time.

Just last night, I held one of the great­est con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had in a long time on the sub­ject with Greg
Narain, where we con­cluded that social media is part of the greater
land­scape of social tools, which is redefin­ing the way peo­ple
com­mu­ni­cate – and its oppor­tu­nity has only started to materialize. …

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Vaam Yob has writ­ten a plug-in for Word­Press 2.0 that lets WP users show­case YouTube videos on their own blogs in a video gallery. Nice. I was just think­ing today that I wish there were a bet­ter way to show­case mul­ti­ple videos on my blog. Hope­fully some­one will extend it to apply to video sites other than YouTube, and some­one else will write a plug-in for TypePad.

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Wes­ley Fryer: Empow­er­ing cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists. Excerpt:

The more I expe­ri­ence blog­ging and the poten­tial of dia­log in the
blo­gos­phere, the more con­victed I become that dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies
like blogs, camera-phone web­posts, web­videos, pod­casts, and dig­i­tal
social net­works are tools of unprece­dented power. …

We live in an era of unprece­dented com­mu­ni­ca­tion poten­tial, but the scourges of injus­tice, cor­rup­tion, poverty and even geno­cide
still per­sist. It is up to each one of us, equipped with dif­fer­ent
skills and gifts, and placed in dif­fer­ent con­texts, to advance the
causes of jus­tice, respect for human rights, self-determination,
lit­er­acy, and trans­par­ent as well as account­able gov­ern­ment. Putting
blog­ging and pod­cast­ing in that con­text makes the work many are
advanc­ing with web 2.0 seem remark­ably important.

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NY Times: Look­ing for the next Google.

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NY Times: Google brings some Sil­i­con Val­ley cul­ture to Man­hat­tan. (A good thing.)

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I’m still tin­ker­ing with the look of this blog. I can’t see design­ing for the small­est mon­i­tors out there, so the min­i­mum screen width I’m opti­miz­ing for is 1,028 pix­els, though 1200p or wider is better.

A cou­ple of anom­alies I’ve spot­ted: In Safari on a Mac, the dou­ble row of Flickr badge pho­tos (a script) I’ve cre­ated turns out to be the same pho­tos in both rows. That doesn’t hap­pen in Fire­fox on a Mac or Fire­fox or IE on a PC.

Also, the stream­ing music player in the right nav calls up my 10-song playlist just fine in Fire­fox on both the PC and Mac, as well as in Safari on the Mac. But in Inter­net Explorer 6 on a PC (I haven’t down­loaded IE7 yet), the player ignores my playlist and calls up 200-plus songs in the XSPF Web Music Player I uploaded to my server. Not sure how to fix that, since I used the code pro­vided on Source­Forge.

Finally, today I finally fig­ured out how to add feeds for spe­cific cat­e­gories, or top­ics, for this Type­Pad blog, and I added them over there on the right.

If you see any odd browser behav­iors, let me know … thanks.

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NY Times: What’s Online:
The Lazy Top 10 Anything.

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New York Times: Sad­dam Hus­sein is hanged.

Good rid­dance. His death still doesn’t make the U.S. inva­sion war­ranted or wise. Here’s Juan Cole’s arti­cle in Salon on Saddam’s execution.

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San Jose Mer­cury News: New cul­ture enabling users to con­trol enter­tain­ment. An inter­view with MIT’s Henry Jenk­ins, author of Con­ver­gence Cul­ture: Where Old and New Media Col­lide. Excerpt:

If you want to cre­ate a fan frenzy around con­tent and ulti­mately around
a piece of hard­ware, you have to under­stand the audi­ence, Jenk­ins said.
Then you “open up a play­ground for them to exper­i­ment with.” … If you crack down on fan cre­ativ­ity, you run the risk of los­ing them to
more tol­er­ant media/hardware owners. …

The design­ers of the Xbox 360 at Microsoft antic­i­pated that fans
would want to take their own cus­tom music lists and insert them into
the sound­tracks of video games as they played them. Chip maker Texas
Instru­ments, far removed from the fans, antic­i­pated that transcod­ing –
con­vert­ing video from one for­mat to another — would be a key fea­ture
for its chips, said Greg Delagi, a vice pres­i­dent at TI’s DSP divi­sion.
Transcod­ing is now at the heart of what hap­pens on pop­u­lar
social-networking sites such as YouTube as they sim­plify the process of
con­vert­ing video from one form to another.

Younger con­sumers have come to expect this kind of think­ing about
their needs. The music indus­try had its chance to under­stand them,
Jenk­ins said, and blew it. They will watch con­tent such as “Lost” on
all sorts of devices, and they don’t want to have to pay for that right
more than once, if at all.

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