Author: vanevery

Shelly’s on to something here..

Emmy Advanced Media – Television Business News: The WiMax Price Club

A nice idea…

From the site:
They’re popping up all over America — in backyards everywhere — it’s the latest do-it-yourself craze – the WiMax Price Club. Want free Internet access for life? No problem. Just go to http://www.WiMaxPriceClub.com and order your tower kit online. When it arrives, get your building permit (if required by local zoning laws) and erect your new 80’ antenna tower in your back yard or on your rooftop. Just plug in the included WiMax repeater and you’ll be online in a jiffy! Imagine over 70 megabits up and down, FREE for life! Nothing else to buy

Kent Bye from Echo Chamber Project has solved Skype recording on his Mac

Instructions for Recording Skype Conversations | Echo Chamber Project
Seems my instructions are a bit out of date and don’t work exactly right anymore.

Kent Writes:
After much experimentation, I’ve finally figured out how to record a Skype call on my Macintosh without having to use external hardware or hearing an echo of my own voice.

SMS signup via phone in

ChristDaily.com Television Commercials by Shelly Palmer
Content aside, the ability to phone in and signup for SMS is great. Such a simple idea, I am surprised that it has been overlooked till now. It would be easy to setup Asterisk to grab caller-id and pump out an SMS message.

Excerpt from site:
these two direct response television commercials show off a new way to subscribe to a brand new information service. The spots offer the audience an opportunity to purchase a subscription to an SMS (short message service) cell phone service via an IVR (interactive voice response) system. This is important because so many cell phone users don’t know how to send a text message – but they can easily dial a toll-free number.

Community Radio Toolkit (book with discussion forum)

Radio Regen, Community FM Toolkit for Community Radio

From the site:
What you will find here by the end of 2005, is a complete web version of the 212 pages of the book, complete with active discussion forums for readers. We will also have staff deployed to follow up information requests and extract the usable information from these discussions. So there’ll be information digests and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) too.
In the meanwhile, following the enthusiastic response from delegates at our Community FM conference, we’re posting samples of the book and launching an experimental forum for you to discuss what you think of the book. If this resource is to become truly comprehensive, and stay up to date, we need you to join in with the discussion on the forum to tell us what you think of what you’ve read and to share your experiences.

Ninjamonkey on Instant Mobile Social Networks

Ninja Monkey Party 411 : Instant Mobile Social Network Or; Listserv + Email-to-SMS Gateway = LOVE
Ninjamonkey describes a service he setup for his birthday party a couple of weeks ago using off the shelf components. Of course the magic sauce was that his crowd includes some tech savvy and highly motivated social drinkers.
From the page:
Social networks and mobile applications are obvious bedfellows, but aside from a few noteables like dodgeball almost nothing has been done to exploit them. The thing that many people may be missing is that SMS is pretty much like email, except with extreme size restrictions (160 characters/message) and controlled solely by the telcos (which is sort of like having a draconian ISP with terrible, terrible service). This means that as long as you can find a way to translate between email and sms (with, say, a publicly available email-to-sms gateway) you can pass messages between them.

The Participatory Generation

The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries – New York Times
NY Times is running an article about a recent Pew survey that is demonstrating that teenagers have embraced publishing media online. From myspace and the like to creating their own websites featuring music remixes, videos and so forth.

They have become the participatory generation.

From the article:
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online – about 12 million – create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.

That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa’s case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.

[Later in the article]

The Pew survey shows “the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”