David Emery OnlineYouTube in MP4 via QuickTime Plugin!
A simple bookmarklet that magically turns a video on youtube from low-quality Flash into high quality quicktime. Doesn’t work on all videos apparently, although it’s worked with all the ones I’ve tried.
Visit ➔Causer of controversy
Have we got to a point where we’ve now pushed past our boundaries – in music specifically, but other art forms as well – leaving us with no ‘edge’ and nothing to push against?
We have progressed slowly but surely through the rise of popular music with more and more becoming acceptable. Rock and roll (a quaint term, now, isn’t it?) was once the causer of controversy – you shouldn’t listen to that – and now the very same musical style is about as staid and middle of the road as you can get.
Obviously this is just the march of an ever more liberal culture and society and specific examples will, when given 50 odd years to simmer, obviously loose their edge, but I think the real question is what edge do we have left? Racism – in its many forms – is the obvious example, but I think is hardly an edge worth pushing up against. It’s also an inverse of many of the other controversies – really the boundary that has been pushed against is people being racist (as opposed to pushing for being racist).
Offensive language is no longer an issue – yes, it’ll get bleeped/muted on the radio...
Read more ➔Video Comments on WordPress Blogs
Another takeaway message is: video is coming, and it will be everywhere.
No, it’s not; video is not going to ‘take over’ from text anymore then podcasts took over from blogs (which lots of people were claiming would happen at the time). Yes online video is important and will get increasing use as the technology becomes easier to implement, but the web is primarily a text based medium and is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Visit ➔Facebook Chat Now Works For Everyone
I’m actually very impressed with Facebook Chat – while it’s obviously not revolutionary they’ve done it right. Of course, what I’d really like is Jabber support so I can use it in Adium/iChat, but I’m not sure if that really meshes with Facebook’s strategy of keeping everything on site (hence no RSS feed for the news feed, for example).
Visit ➔Embed your data- in HTML 5
This looks very useful – while you can sort of do this already in xhtml using custom namespaces that’s a bit complicated; this looks far easier. Also, it could also be used nicely for microformats and the like (and get rid of that darn abbr pattern).
Visit ➔Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business
I think the concept of streaming and embedable music (that is paid for by either direct advertising or a royalty structure) is definitely the future of music on the web. However, it’s worth noting that I think this is a companion to traditional digital retailers, not a replacement.
Visit ➔Sonific Heading To The Deadpool: Record Labels Blamed
Note to startups: don’t base your entire business model on other peoples content that you don’t have the rights to use.
Visit ➔Status
As well as the rise of the ‘News Feed’, we’ve also gained another feature from Facebook that is slowly seeping into popular culture:
Status.
David is writing about status updates
Of course, most of you have just thrown your hands up in the air and gone “what are you talking about – we’ve had status updates for years in instant message clients!” and I’d agree with you – we (the freaks and geeks) have had this particular form of ambient social interactivity for years. However, while IM has a pretty high penetration rate outside the geek crowd in my experience ‘normal’ people don’t update their status on IM much more then to say they are having lunch or in a meeting – in fact, a quick glance at my buddy list (which is pretty geek orientated anyway) only shows one custom status message.
Of course, post IM and pre Facebook we got Twitter – a whole online community built around the concept of ‘what are you doing?’. There is no doubt that Twitter brought the concept of status to a much larger audience, but its time has already come and gone, I think; the general population thinks it has no interest in telling people...
Read more ➔No CSS Reset
I completely agree – I don’t ever use a CSS reset style sheet. It seems like far too much hard work putting back in all the styling you’ve overridden, not mention that if you’re using a CMS you’re going to have to make sure that you’ve got everything that someone could enter (uls, dls, blockquotes etc) covered.
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