A little late thanks to the holiday, but why not stop by for a listen anyway? You can check out the best business podcast by just clicking through!
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Category: Geek Stuff
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Happy Holidays!
To me that means Merry Christmas, if that’s not the case for you I hope you enjoy whatever your celebration of choice is. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who celebrates Kawanzaa, I hear a lot of people mentioning it to be PC but I’ve never met anyone who actually celebrated it.
It’s been a great year again for the Podcast, especially with PodCamp on the scene. The blog has already been a lot of fun, I was surprised to see over 100 uniques today on a day I expected things to be totally dead. The past year has been incredible, if 2007 is even half as interesting it’s going to be great.
I’ve been posting daily but I may slip a day or two here until Wednesday (unless I get bored (usually every 2 hours or so)).
In other big news Carin scored with a killer Geek gift, I got the tricked out XBox 360! HD Games here I come!
So I thought I was pretty clever earlier this week with my Rule of 2 (don’t waste your time with social networks that you only hear about once), then Chris Penn, of The Financial Aid Podcast weighed in with a brilliant comment – who gives a damn about the 2 minutes it takes to register, join every network out there to lock down your namespace (protect your brand in Marketese), and he’s absolutely right. He also pointed me towards some other crazy crap Google is trying.
The thing is, this is not the first time he’s dealt me a brainbuster. He’s doing crazy stuff all the time over on MySpace and he’s always experimenting. He’s also good at scripting, and I’m not, so that makes me jealous.
You may ask “Why only an Honorary Ronin”? Chris is actually a ninja, so calling him a Ronin would be an affront. I’ll let him correct my limited understanding if necessary, but the Ninja work for the emperor, sort of like Navy Seals (but you never see them and if there was a movie about them with Charlie Sheen in it, everyone involved in the film would end up assassinated). The Ronin is often without a master, usually because they have been disgraced – basically mercenaries.
In other words it’s sort of like how Colin Powell would be Sir Colin if not for that altercation we had with the kingdom back in the late 1700’s.
I also salute him for working at this place that, for some unknown reason, he’s the only one there that’s not a supermodel (actually I just checked Flickr and for some reason there were some other guys at the holiday party this year, maybe they took some heat for discrimination or something).
So Chris, this sangria’s for you.
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Brain Busting Dilemma
This just happened and I had to sneak over here for a quick post. My plan this morning was to go to a holiday gathering of former co-workers from DCI. I just heard about Crayon’s holiday party in Second Life… I’m actually considering passing on the real world event for the virtual one.
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The M Show – Game On
Live from Boston! It’s Sunday Night! That means there’s a hot fresh M Show waiting to be loaded on your iPod. If you don’t have one, get one for the holiday – you need it, you know you do!
The only stuff newsworthy involved the gaming industry so that’s all we’ve got, that and some field recording with some people who slept out outside for a shot at a Nintendo Wii. Tomorrow it’s back to work.
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Big Bumpin’
I was a the local Burger King this week feeding my junk food addiction with one of my favorites – the Burger King Chicken sandwich – basically the chicken equivalent of a hotdog, rolled in batter and deep fried. Add a toasted bun, mayo and lettuce and I’m ready for the defib to zap my rapidly hardening arteries.
BK has a great campaign going now where if you buy a value meal you can get an XBox game for $3.99. The games run on both the new Xbox 360 and the original Xbox. Always a sucker for a novel campaign, and a card carrying gamer I had to try one out. I immediately had to laugh as I asked for a copy of “Big Bumpin“. Am I just being too Beavis and Butthead or does this seem outright blatant:
The lit marquis on the game cover says “Big Bumpin'” and you’ve got the king, known for slinging the meat, and his huge (game) cock right there with him. I haven’t actually had time to try it out myself but the reviews on the gamers sites I hit now and then say that this is the best of the three and not bad, especially at the price. So if you hear that 70’s scratch guitar theme later these week, you know I’ll be busy in round of Big Bumpin’ with the King and will deliver my verdict.
Ok, so I thought that last post would be easy… how hard could it be to embed a YouTube video into a post? One hour later…
Thanks to this dude, Viper, and his WordPress video plugin, it rocks.
So I got a demo of Brainshark about a week ago. The idea of a Multimedia-Content Management System was a bit of a brainbuster for me. To boil it down – now that anybody with a decent computer and the right software can create some kind of multimedia presentation, you need a system to manage these presentations, better yet make them simple to create and host. It was funny because I talked to some people over there a couple of years ago before I started working at MarketingSherpa.
I had to go with a hyphen to make it clear that this is not a Content Managment System (CMS) with a Multimedia interface, but rather a tool to manage media that includes audio and video. I was impressed with the system, but the content generators I am working with now are extremely technical so simplifying the process is not a pain point for me (yet). We are using Camtasia to generate video files and I’ve found that a Shure SM-58 mic into a Mobile Pre USB does a great job of capturing audio.
The UI reminded me of Macromedia Breeze, a tool I have not had a chance to try out. Last time I tried to get a copy it was around the Adobe acquisiton and it was hard for me to even figure out who to call to buy it, I just gave up.
Enough rambling, I’m off to bed… did you listen to the podcast yet?
I’m going to be talking in Second Life (SL) on Thursday as part of a CaseCamp. CaseCamp is when a bunch of Marketeers get together and talk about stuff they’ve been trying (at least that’s what I’ve been told, this is my first). I’m looking forward to it because I’d written off Second Life, it’s very cool but First Life is kicking my ass right now so I don’t really have the time to figure out how to get my Avatar to stop dancing or where to buy a shirt for a virtual person. When I heard about CaseCamp though, I jumped on it (it’s all about the content, yadda yadda yadda).
I’m interested to see how it compares to other online collaboration tools. Between the new version of GoToMeeting and a good conference call service that’s a combination that may be an overpowering heavyweight to a challenger like Second Life and Skype, but we’ll put it to the test on Thursday.
My prediction? Yes, prediction. Pain. (Sorry, just carried away with an obscure Rocky III reference, I may even see the new one.) G2M can handle 200+, SL’s servers aren’t in that weight class yet, but I’m only about 3 hours ahead of a SL n00b so we’ll see what I might be missing.
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The M Show – I hate the holidays
It’s Sunday, so yet again you can cruise over and check out the latest M Show, your favorite Business Podcast, which will be posted as soon as the upload finishes.
Find out why I hate the holidays, the government, and why I have to short change charities this year so I can bear my tax burden.
You can also build your own movie trailer here.