From the monthly archives:

June 2009

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Firefox 3.5 Threatens Adobe Flash with Video Tag

by Jorge Escobar on June 25, 2009

I have been waiting to upgrade to the new version of Firefox. Yesterday I decided to take the plunge and download it. As expected, some of the plugins didn’t work, including Firebug and Alexa’s Sparky (although I then got an update that Firebug does now work with 3.5).

Upon restarting my machine and opening the new browser client, I got into a welcome page where a lot of the bells and whistles are explained. But what caught my attention the most was the fact that the new Firefox supports the new native video tag from HTML 5 which I had read about in the past. The video looks like the still above, which renders a basic video player with a play button, a scrub bar and a volume widget. The video looked fantastic.

I immediately went to look at the page source and peeked at the code. The tag has the ability to switch to different versions of player based on what browser and support you have, but the simplicity of the whole thing is a welcome sight.

ff5-code

Click image for full preview

Of course of all that code, only the first three lines are necessary to render the player on Firefox 3.5. The rest of the code is for legacy purposes.

I tried to open the page on Chrome but only got the YouTube version of the video.

I took a new look at the specs of the video tag, and I have to say, working on a daily basis with video embedding and SWFObject will be a thing of the past. Best of all, the rendered player is fully JavaScript aware, so you can tie events that happen on the player to whatever you need to trigger based on those events. I don’t know how much you can style the player, but I can certainly see a big threat to Flash’s ubiquity on the video player front. If I knew all ExpoTV‘s users supported the video tag, I would switch without a beat, and say goodbye to the technically complex code of our ActionScript player.

On a side note, when I tried to add the <video> tag on my WordPress editor, it kept disappearing upon save. Looks like TinyMCE doesn’t support it and erases it after its HTML cleaning routine.

I’ve included the YouTube video below. Hopefully, sometime soon, I’ll just use a video tag.

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Careful Everyone Using Facebook: Your Data is About to Become Public

June 24, 2009
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There is word today on the blogosphere that privacy on Facebook is about to make a huge turn towards openness.

The company announced today that it’s going to offer a more granular control over who sees posts that you publish on your newsfeed, which is great news for a lot of us (in my case and my wife’s we have bilingual followers, so this is a great addition).

Today, we’re launching a beta version of an improved Publisher—the main place to add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. The new Publisher has been streamlined a bit, and its most significant improvement is the new Publisher Privacy Control that gives you the opportunity to answer the question, “Who do you want to tell?” as easily as you answer the question, “What’s on your mind?”

However, Marshal Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb points out that by default all your status updates, photos and shares will be public unless you change your privacy settings by default.

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Social Media is a Personal Support System

June 24, 2009
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I’ve seen it several times and it’s not mentioned enough.

Social media can be a very important support system for you and anyone who’s going through a rough time. It doesn’t have to be a serious disease, some days you’re just mildly depressed or can’t see yourself out of a situation.

In the past three days I’ve seen the FriendFeed community wrap their arms around fellow users. From Drew Olanoff’s #BlameDrewsCancer initiative, to the exchange between Kol Tregaskes and his FriendFeed friends included above, I find more and more how these small supportive comments can turn any of us around.

Twitter doesn’t have this same effect, but I can see Facebook being a support system as well.

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An Audience is an Audience, Be it on FriendFeed or Anywhere Else

June 20, 2009
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I almost had a heart attack on Thursday night when I went to check my Feedburner Stats. I had been hovering around 60 subscribers with one or two added every week. But that day Feedburner announced that suddenly I had 354 subscribers.

What had happened? Did my blog get recommended on some influential blogger’s list? Had my blog been mentioned on the New York Times?

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The Importance of a Blogger’s Voice

June 17, 2009
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In Sean Penn’s Oscar winning performance on Milk, I remember how he walks to a street where everyone is walking placidly by and he starts a speech with the following words:

“My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you!”

A powerful image that came to my mind when I was trying to think about the process that we, as bloggers, go through when starting a blog. People are just surfing the web, reading headlines on an RSS reader and here you are, trying to catch their attention. Your promise to them is that you will become their leader or mentor in an area where they have no experience or are not able to learn by themselves. But they all want something for sure: a person to guide them.

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Facebook’s (And Other Social Platform’s) Preferential Treatment Should Not Be Ignored

June 11, 2009
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t paid your Internet provider or don’t have a Facebook account (that leaves about 2% of you out there surfing the web) you already know about Facebook’s announcement to finally give users the option to have a vanity URL, i.e. www.facebook.com/your.username

According to the blog post, there are some rules:

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

I remembered a while back that Oprah had gotten a vanity URL before a lot of us. But that’s fine because she is Oprah.

But then yesterday on FriendFeed I read that Allen Stern was asking Gary V. how he’d gotten his vanity URL. Some of us weighed in saying that Gary’s page, like Oprah’s, was a not a username, but a Fan Page vanity URL. Allen asked how you could get one and I thought I’d read that anyone can get a Fan Page, but you must have at least 1,000 followers to get the vanity URL.

But shortly after, Jesse Stay chimed in. He has 1,000 followers and has never been able to talk to anyone in Facebook to get a vanity URL. Wait, what?

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Google’s Wave Doesn’t Look Like a Tsunami

June 4, 2009
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I expressly waited a week to write a post about Google Wave. I knew that if I wrote about it right after seeing the demo presented on the I/O developer’s convention, I was going to be drunk with thoughts of what the future of communication looks like.

But after watching it two days later, further reading and analysis, and explaining what it is to colleagues and non-technical friends, I believe the product could be welcome in certain circles but will be largely ignored by the general population.

Bear in mind that I base this anaylsis on what I’ve seen and read. I haven’t actually tested the product. Am I awaiting eagerly to have it? Yes, absolutely. I think it’s one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in a long time. The main issue for me is that the tool is trying to be everything at once, but it’s not clear why that is an advantage.

Here are some of the pitfalls that I could see become an obstacle for the adoption of the tool.

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Are Your Children Addicted to the Web?

June 3, 2009
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I’ve seen my twin nieces grow from zero to thirteen in what seems to be a very short period of time. I still remember when they would enjoy a wild ride in their uncle’s back, pretending to be horse riders and laughing at every little hop I took.

These days they are inmersed in computers a lot of time.

I want to think they’re not addicted to the web, but then I didn’t know what the official or medical definition of that would be, so I went and searched around for some information.

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