The Ayman and Naaman Show

media lab’s take on markets: RED
Originally uploaded by leahbuechley

An ambient display gives a clear indication (maybe for the first time ever).

Quite a few Twitter-related items in the news today. Twitter themselves finally take the charge instead of playing catchup with people building on their platform. The Election Center brings together all election-related updates from all over Twitter and allows non-twitterites to participate in the discussion. Nice! I like the way the messages appear without the need to refresh (definitely a feature to be added on the Twitter account pages). That’s obviously some code and ideas they inherited when they picked up the formerly-unofficial-Twitter-API-provided, Summize.

Speaking of election, Twitter and Summize… In my Rutgers group we actually started crawling the election-related Twitter messages quite a few weeks ago using the Summize (now “Twitter Search“) API. We will probably have a decent dataset (which we will be happy to share) when this thing is over. Maybe, given more time, we can do something more interesting. Dog, please let it be over already. And while you’re at it, don’t make McCain the president (he’s definitely losing on the Twitter follower count).

While Twitter’s election center is pretty simple and nice, one additional thing Twitter could have used in their Election center is Practicalist Ben’s word-cloud visualization for Twitter. Yes, another word-cloud, Ben admits in regret. But a damn nice one. Better than the cloud Twitter are featuring on top of their page, and the idea of deriving a cloud for each keyword (try: Obama vs. Palin), and the higher refresh frequency, and the better visuals… I like Ben’s better.

I hope Twitter wrote the code for the “Election Central” generally enough so that they can launch an arbirtrary set of “centrals” later. Why just election central when you can have the Twitter “Hurricane Ike” central, the Twitter “Olympic Games” central etc. In fact, why won’t let the user set up those “central” sites that collect all the information about their topic of choice? People are already aggregating messages outside of Twitter, anyway.

[Update: Twitter founder said they might do just that to this NY Times reporter].

Bleecker Street

Originally uploaded by aymanshamma

Question to our readers (Frank, I’m looking in your general direction): How come HDTV broadcasts a good 4-5 seconds behind its analog counterpart?

While hanging out with Naaman on Bleecker St, we noticed the bar had both HD and non-HD sets playing a football game. Those watching the game were huddled around the analog screens as the HD signal was brighter, clearer, and 4 seconds behind the live broadcast analog signal.

It was fun to watch them turn to the HDTV for an ad hoc replay, but we were left wondering ‘why such a big delay?’ Is it from the station? Is it buffering packets? Enlighten us if you can…

That actually made me happy. For years I’ve been telling any Yahoo! who wanted to listen that Start Wearing Purple would make a great Yahoo! theme song. While my preaching did not, in all likelihood, have any influence on the matter, Yahoo! just launched a Start Wearing Purple campaign, sporting one of the most beautiful web projects I have seen recently. And the said song in many variations. And more, for example a geotagging-Flickr-bike which I actually had the pleasure to help with (brainstorming with the super-talented folks at Uncommon Projects) before I left Yahoo!. Oh, yes, I did leave Yahoo! a few weeks ago. But more on that later…

p.s. Two positive posts in a row. I’m losing my edge. Ayman, do something.

From about 7 days of use of the latest Microsoft Office software (I guess that would be Office 2007), on both the Mac and the PC (using VMWare), I have to say I am blown away. Didn’t think Microsoft can come out with such lovely software. I love the submenu grouping, the templates and auto-formatting (e.g., for Word tables) and layouts (for PowerPoint). There are some new PowerPoint features like snap-to-align and a set of quite beautiful presentation templates (unlike any of the old boring ones) that make it pretty close to replacing Apple’s Keynote (not quite yet). Just thought I’d say it.

Also, their Seinfeld-Gates videos are funny.

Still as evil as Ayman, though.

Work has me transcribing video footage these days. While the work is interesting, I thought to make a footswitch…makes the transcribing easier. Armed with an Arduino, a VOX amp pedal and a little bit of code, I made my first instructable.

This growing repository of procedural knowledge is pretty sweet. A happy stomping!

My grande latte friend likes to think in pictures. Most people tend to gravitate towards text…or at least its easier to build texty things over imagey things (where you apparently have a fight on your hands).

Thus began the hunt to mix text into video in a meaningful way. Nico Nico did something stunning with regard to design and implementation. Occlude the video - show the comments. In a sense, the video becomes a MacGuffin.

Really, it is quite something - the above video is someone cooking chicken. The sad thing is - there is no English version of the site…I did manage to log in by setting the language to Spanish. Running with the idea, Anodos decided to kick it up a notch (or back) over to the sofa:

The $2,000 prototype gives you that MTV4 SMS comment stream on any TV channel you might be watching…course its a hardware tv widget. I’m left wondering (and hoping) if this is becoming a style of virtual temporal graffiti.

Jim Wilkie Smiling politely

I always enjoy trying to think about new research methods or employing some innovative approach to different elements of the study. At Y!RB (RIP), we have even tried several new things, including one pretty successful “integrated” solicitation for a study on Zurfer (not RIP yet: use it!).

That’s why I greatly enjoyed running into the following call-to-action inside a simple Facebook display ad:

PhD Jim Needs You: Find yourself with time to kill? Why not help a PhD student by taking 3-10 min. online studies? You can win prizes for each completed!

Complete the ad with a picture of Jim smiling smugly from ear to ear, and I couldn’t help by clicking through to Jim’s Facebook group, where he collects participants and distributes studies. Help Jim Wilkie*, research czar, get a biased sample of the world**, right here!

* A Northwestern PhD student - Ayman, and I thought nothing good came out of Northwestern since the PhD student that graduate ahead of you!

** I hope his studies are not sensitive to this selection bias.

Frank reports on a bad experience with the NBC Olympics site - the 200m dash may have been the fastest ever, but NBC took their sweet time putting the footage on their site. I had the same experience a few days ago, when Bolt made a joke out of 7 other runners and the world record on the 100m dash (yes, I was going to write about it anyway, but thanks Frank for the trigger). I heard about the race (having taken place in some ungodly US hour) in the morning, from the news and from a friend that called from Israel. Immediately heading to the NBC website, I was disappointed to only find an article about the race and no link to video - not even “video will be published at XX:YYpm” that would have saved me a couple of minutes of fruitless exploration of their site.

Turning to YouTube was mostly useless - it’s too popular now and the copyright police patrols it often enough (I did find one low-quality recording that was almost enough to satisfy my curiousity). The savior? an Israeli news website that did not block non-Israeli visitors.

So, NBC is delaying posting of videos to rescue their prime-time coverage. But with alternative global sources, and various pirating methods that easily escape copyright, all they are doing is losing and alienating viewership. Great job! The most annoying bit in all this is that the prime-time coverage does its best to hide the fact that the races are pre-recorded and shown with considerable delay. Tell it like it is, NBC! Start getting used to a new media world.

Not unlike my other friends, Naaman decided to draw my attention to Omnisio’s acquisition.  Now its not like we all haven’t seen this before.  Google’s acquisition, well, it just follows the time.

At Yahoo! Research Berkeley, we investigated the hypercontexts around sharing and linking videos through social constructs.  Last year we claimed pragmatics are more important than semantics.  It was a pretty bold research move (but was typical of myself and my tall colleague).

The core of whats happening here (and hopefully Google knows their purchase is indicative of this) is we dont always consume media for content.  We watch videos to be conversational.  We watch videos to add or listen to commentary.  For example, violence during a soccer match can be conversationally funny—we saw the hilarity ensue. YouTube’s annotations were a start but I didn’t see much come of it.  Maybe Omnisio will help.  The tricky part is making something useful available to people, be it in sync or async. Oh, and you should checkout Andy Baio’s use of Viddler; its my favorite video tagging usage to date.