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January 30, 2008

Great diagram to explain the life cycle of a blog post

This is a good diagram that explains some of the online activity that happens when blog content is generated.

This via Wired.

You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You

Posted by Derek Leverington at 1:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2008

Kudos to MSN Video for Mac Accessibility

I'm done my fair share of razzing the good folks at MSN Sympatico over some of their apps either not being compatible on Mac or being released way after the Windows version.

So, I thought it's worth giving some credit where credit is due now that the MSN Video Beta is up and running. It works well on Firefox on my Intel MacBook Pro. It didn't seem to want to go on Safari, but if I was them I'd have looked after Firefox user first. It will be interesting to see if it does eventually run on Safari.

It's a bit surprising to see the use of Flash as the playback technology, given Microsoft's usual loyalty to use their own Windows Media platform as well as their rising star, Silverlight.

Regardless, the MSN video portal content is great, so it's nice to have access.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 22, 2008

Canadian Virtual Hospice Palliative Care Video

This is a video project I produced last year, but was just recently uploaded to YouTube.

Special thanks to Jessie Wallace, Ryan Latham, CJ Gibson, Colin Hubick, Roslyn Kozak and a great bunch of clients at the Canadian Virtual Hospice (the best Canadian palliative care site out there).

Posted by Derek Leverington at 9:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Facebook's havoc on my blog

I've thought on a few occasions I'd love to have more time to post things on my blog. Truth is, this is one of those things that you have to make time for but I realized that I definitely slowed down on posting after joining Facebook.

In some ways, there's very little overlap. I don't talk about my weekends on here or anything like that but there's only so much time in the day and I spend some some of it everyday on Facebook. So, the blog suffers...

We'll see how it goes but my only new years resolution is to try to post a little more often.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2008

Uploading Videos to YouTube

I was playing around with a number of different compression settings for uploading video to YouTube as I was disappointed with how the recompressed .flv files were looking. It worked okay but optimizing it was timeconsuming as each generation require compressing the video and then uploading the 100 MB file into YouTube and waiting for it to be compressed into a FLV before being able to preview its final output.

If you have access to it, I'd recommending using the new Apple iMovie software. It handles this kind of exporting and uploading to YouTube painlessing. I wouldn't use iMovie to edit anything professionally, but taking a finished anamorphic DV file into it totally simplified the hassle of getting widescreen content to playback with the correct aspect ratio correct in YouTube.

That said, I can't wait until Adobe adopts H.264 playback into their Flash plugin.

Posted by Derek Leverington at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack