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photoshop album unlockFebruary 27, 2006
This NY Times article about musicians returning to New Orleans to play during Mardi Gras has some notable news for some of us who lived around the ninth ward (though in my case for a short time, years ago): the legendary Vaughan's has reopened, and Kermit Ruffins has started playing his Thursday night shows again. This story's mostly for my sister, and anyone else that would mean a lot to.
Posted by tshey at 11:41 PM
fear of myspace
Wired has posted a story on the MySpace backlash that may not have much news for anyone who's been following this story, but beyond being a good recap of some of the major MySpace incidents, much of the article's a measured digerati response to the spreading panic among parents and educators (not that one can hope many of them would read this article), complete with several quotes from danah boyd. The best point danah makes echoes something I recently realized about MySpace when thinking about why so many kids would hang out in a place with such bad decor, owned by creepy old Mr. Murdoch: it's pretty much the online equivalent to the malls, parking lots, and dodgy clubs my friends and I hung out in.
"It looks like a teenager's bedroom," says Boyd. "It's not parsable to most adults, because it's not supposed to be for them."
...
Boyd argues persuasively that MySpace is serving an important role for teens who need to interact with one another away from adults as part of the normal socialization process. "We all forget that teenage years are all about hanging out," she says.
Teens are doing this on the internet, in part, because there are fewer public places they can claim as their own, and safety-conscious parents are more reluctant than past generations to let their kids go out into a real world unsupervised.
"Let your kids go hang out down the street with their friends, and they won't spend so much time online," says Boyd. "But that's not happening."
this just in: I'm officially old. also posted today: details on Andrew's and Amanda's SXSW workshop.
Posted by tshey at 11:08 PM
February 26, 2006
great rocketboom interview with sen john edwards
also entertaining: the extra footage with scoble, israel and others from thursday's vidcast.
Posted by tshey at 01:15 PM
February 21, 2006
democracy: roll your own tv
The Participatory Culture Foundation just launched the Windows version of their internet video player (formerly called DTV) today, and renamed their platform Democracy, which includes tools for playing, broadcasting, and sharing net videos. Like FireANT, which also recently had a big upgrade, Democracy Player makes it pretty easy to subscribe to feeds and browse through videos you've downloaded. What's great about the Democracy solution is that it's very easy to create new channels for other people to watch. You can use their Video Bomb to make your own channel with links to videos anywhere - essentially allowing anyone to curate a found video blog like Rocketboom's (great and fun) Apollo Pony, or collect all of their own videos in one place, like someone at the PCF nicely did for the brilliant ladies of The Variety Shac. You can also use Broadcast Machine to host and create your own video blog or channel, complete with torrent creation to ease the bandwidth on your server.
The whole platform's so well-thought out and easy to use that it's a near miracle that this is an open source project by a non-profit foundation, considering the enormous amounts of money and attention lately focusing on this space, and on sites like YouTube and Google Video, and the Video Bomb front page already stands up very well against those sites in terms of sheer time wasting value (personally, I already prefer it).
It'll be interesting to read what people say about this over the next week or so; until then, it's definitely worth checking out on your own.
Posted by tshey at 02:09 PM
February 11, 2006
Good looking comic art show at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (thanks, Caitlin!)
Posted by tshey at 06:34 PM
Just read on digg that someone had mocked up a satire of all the web 2.0 design cliches. I thought immediately, of course! That's the explanation for tagworld! Disappointed, then, to click through and find they were just referring to this page.
Posted by tshey at 06:16 PM
February 06, 2006
updating
Keeping up with the reBlogging has been tough as late - the amount I post is pretty proportional to how many feeds I read, as well as how much time I have, and when either drops off, so does shey.net.
It doesn't help that I'm constantly on the road these days -- in this week alone, I'll be in DC twice, NYC twice, and LA somewhere in between.
That said, I'm going to make a last ditch effort to keep this page interesting. There's certainly plenty of interesting stuff going on -- what I'm doing these days includes a healthy mix of social networking, game design, broadband media, and mobile and handheld projects, and it's kept my head constantly spinning. So I may skew shey.net closer to my professional interests for a while and see how that works.
So, look out for posts. This one's to make sure I put some here soon.
Posted by tshey at 12:47 PM