Recently I started using Democracy player again to watch video blogs/podcasts, its interface is nicer than iTunes’ and as I do not have a video iPod I don’t want to put the videos on my iPod anyway. One nice feature that Democracy player has is that it contains a BitTorrent client. So if you have a feed with torrent enclosures it will download those too.
Then I started thinking, why aren’t people making such torrent feeds for TV shows on BitTorrent sites yet? Some torrent sites allow you to generate an RSS feeds based on search terms (maybe even with .torrent enclosures) but these often contain duplicates. What I would want for example is a feed I could subscribe to that contains the Studio 60 torrents on some torrent site. That way I could just subscribe to this feed in Democracy player and it will start downloading new episodes as they appear. It’s not very legal, but also not much more illegal than what there already is now.
Or are there already sites that do this?
Denis Krukovsky sent me a link to yet another tag board: tagBoard. At its first look it looks a lot a group blog, but let’s be honest tag-based forums are not that different from a group blog other than that eventually the group of “bloggers” can grow into the thousands. It’s all a matter of how you present your data.
Of all the tag boards I’ve seen so far, this probably is the most basic one. There is no tag cloud, no social digg-like features. It’s just a place where anyone can post and comment on posts. Instead of categorizing the posts into boards and categories the discussion starter adds tags to his or her start post. I’m not very much impressed with tagBoard yet, let’s hope it will improve and the developer(s) will come up with some unique features.
Yesterday I talked about plagiarism. On that same topic, have a look at this: tagBoard about and Blogoforum about. Hmm?
I’ve been thinking about glorum a bit more and got quite fascinated with its approach to moderating the posts. People vote posts up and down, if you like it you vote it up, if you don’t (for example because it’s a flame or spam) you vote it down, if enough vote it down the post disappears. I really like this concept of social moderation. They are already being used on some news websites, such as as slashdot I think.
As I feel more people are starting to develop these kinds of tagged bulletin boards I think we should come up with a proper name for them. I myself sometimes use tag board, tagged board, tag bulletin board, tag-based board. What do you think?
For my current part-time job I’m at the moment investigating plagiarism scanners. Students submit their papers and reports and before being handed to the teacher this software checks what the student turned in with previously submitted papers but also other sources such as the internet.
To get started I thought I’d just copy a piece of text from my own website and put in a Word document and submit it, see if it actually worked. I decided to copy a piece of my podcasting tutorial. I submitted the document and waited for a couple of minutes. As expect it found the document to be 100% plagiarism, good!
However, it found two sources of plagiarism. One at my own website, one at another. Have a look at that page, scroll a bit down to the “How to prepare a great podcast!” section. Looks familiar? Kinda. Well… more than kinda. It’s kinda completely ripped including all the images, and without any credits. Granted, the guy made a couple of improvements, but still.
Anyway, I e-mailed the “author” a couple of days ago, no response so far. Still, a funny way to find out. These pieces of software really are plagiarism detectors. It would be interesting if somebody developed an open source or free version of such software. At its core it’s not very complicated. You extract the text from a document, and do a phrase search for each sentence on Google or another search engine. There’s a bit more to it than that, but this is the main idea.
It would be great to have a tool that you could just run on your website and that would check if anybody has plagiarized any of your stuff.
For about the last ten years my mother’s mother (my grandmother) has had Alzheimer’s. Over the years it has become worse and worse. The past month she also ate less and less. Two and a half weeks ago she collapsed in the bathroom and soon thereafter she was brought to a care home. My grandfather took care of her before that but it was becoming too hard for him. He’s not very young and vital anymore either and my grandmother hardly could do anything herself anymore.
Only a few days after she arrived in the care home she got a bladder infection, soon followed by a lung infection. Last Monday we were informed that she probably would die at the end of this week. Yesterday afternoon I got a call from the home. She had died.
We spent the rest of the day with my granddad. As soon as the busy times end in which things such as her cremation have to be arranged I think he will realise he no longer has a wife. After 52 years there’s nobody there when you get home. To me personally she has been dying slowly during the past few years. She didn’t know anything anymore. Didn’t know who we were, hardly knew her own name. She became more and more silent.
Now the ultimate silence has come.
Probably everybody already heard about it already, but I’ll post it again: Google purchases Youtube for $1.6 billion. Youtube is the immensely popular video site that since february last year has grown spectacularly. I remember that I tried it out probably soon after it launched. I was looking for a flickr for video. Youtube was not a great site back then, it was written in crappy PHP and I got lots of PHP error messages as I used it. Now it’s sold for $1.6 billion, who would’ve thought…
Some sources say Youtube has a bandwidth bill of $1 million a day, which sounds crazy to me, other sources say it’s a couple of million a month. Still quite a big number. In that sense Google is a good buyer, they have plenty of infrastructure and are used to these amounts of traffic.
Much more on the deal can be found on the different posts on TechMeme.
It has been over a year ago since I first posted about discussion boards that use tags for message categorization instead of the traditional category/board structure. Since then a number of such boards have been built, some of which have died. But recently they seem to be a small revival. At the moment there are three interesting projects trying this concept out:
- Blogoforum, that uses tags to categorize messages. It has some interesting ideas. My main problems with it is its lay-out. I often find it quite confusing to read threads. Blogoforum has recently launched a topic list sorted based on topic popularity.
- OneLobby, this project, as I understand it will be a piece of software you will be able to download and install on your own server. It also uses tags for forums. It looks very promising to me, also because I know the authors are working on some other radical new features. Plus the lay-out is clean and simple.
- Glorum, which was brought to my attention yesterday (thanks for the e-mail Mario). It combines tag based boards with a digg-like feature. You’re able to vote topics up or down. I suggested this idea a while back too and I hope it will work. For the rest this board seems pretty early in development. It’s very basic and clean.
These forums look very promising. Much more than the last wave of these tag-based boards. Not any of them are have lots of users and large amounts of discussions yet though. When that happens I wonder if they can cope. The mass is the challenge here. It will then become clear if tags are indeed a good way to categorize topics and messages.
I’ll continue following the development of these kinds of forums closely.
A couple of weeks back Manuzhai recommended a new drama series on American television called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It’s produced and no doubt partly written by Aaron Sorkin. Aaron Sorkin is the guy that wrote my favourite American drama series The West Wing. And I can tell you off the bat, if you liked The West Wing it’s likely you’ll also enjoy Studio 60.
If you know The West Wing a bit you will immediately recognize the Sorkinesque style of Studio 60. The spaces, offices, are generally dark but lit from the ceiling. Episodes have named chapters, presented in that same West Wing white on black screen. Once again the story is about a busy organization, this time a studio that produces a weekly comedy show called, surprise, surprise: Studio 60. It’s a show that very much resembles Saturday Night Live. Sorkin also took some actors with him from the West Wing, most notably Bradley Whitford who played Josh Lyman in the West Wing for seven seasons. Aaron adds some other excellent actors: Amanda Peet, Matthew Perry (Chandler in Friends) and Sarah Paulson. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry play two guys that get hired by Studio 60’s channel NBS, just as a new head of something (I’m not entirely sure what) Amanda Peet starts there too.
If you get the chance, I’d watch this show. It’s probably not on TV anywhere else than the US yet, but I predict it will be. Until then there’s the torrent sites.
