vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Rhizome Rears Again

Cheryl E. Ball has used one of the rhizome templates, works a treat. I’m intending to reauthor all of the templates since there are some errors in the later ones, and I also intend to add a help screen explaining how to play each one.

Fashion

Blogs always travel in packs. Packs are not herds, packs are something quite different. Deleuze is very good on packs, and particularly on how packs are not herds.

I think of ideas (mine or others) as being vectors. They have a trajectory and a velocity. A single idea isn’t really an idea since it contains a multiple. Hence an idea is already ideas, and so trajectories and velocities. These vectors are more important than their destinations (sometimes, perhaps usually). It is these vectors that confuses all those commentators on Gen Y and ‘attention’, since these commentators keep thinking it is about where they vector arrives that matters.

Vogs should form packs. A vogs produce and participate in vectors.

The New Golf

OK, finally cracked. Have added cycling as a category because I’m doing a lot of it and it is a passion. In a previous life I raced, preferably on the road, preferably uphill. A roadie in the vernacular. Long enough ago that the only person I knew of with clipless pedals with Greg Lemond, and the ‘auto’ shift gears would be sneered at as something that those who didn’t know how to ride a bike properly would use. Got a second hand road bike off ebay about a year ago, and am doing regular miles. The changes in technology I find amazing. My old bike would be worth, probably $5-6,000 if I tried to get to a similar standard of gear, however this bike is a fraction of that price but is lighter, and better quality, than what my old bike could ever have been. Simply through new production technologies and materials. But the change I’m still intrigued by is the popularity of the sport, particularly amongst 35+ males who are happy to spend quite a lot of money on a bike, kit themselves out in lycra, and do a few k’s early in the morning. In my day (insert sound of rocking chair) the only people who wore lycra on a road bike were racers, and the vast majority came to the sport through family connections. It is expensive, and most seemed to have a trade. Now professionals dominate this new breed of recreational road rider. They generally don’t race, though do participate in the mass rides, but it is just odd to find hundreds, scattered across multiple bunches, training along Beach Road on a Sunday morning. Cycling, the extreme sport for the 45 year old professional male?

Unfolding Thoughts

Tara, who is now in her final semester of her undegraduate career, sent a trackback my way recently. Two things. A blog lets the unfolding that is teaching become known to the participants, and others. The other thing is that the history of the relationship should never be underestimated.

labsome

Labsome is the name of the studio that the Bachelor of Communications honours program has. It is also the name that I use to refer to the program. (Yes, I am now in the business of branding.) I’ve just finished a Joomla installation, and have migrated content into it. Still a lot missing from it, but it is now ripe for public viewing. By the end of the year I hope to have all of the research and projects made by the students archived here.

Why a ‘studio’? well as the homepage says, the program is interested in getting students to rethink their own professional and intellectual practice in the light of contemporary media formations. Not only rethink, redo. For the majority of my students, a studio is a big first step into that rethinking – the majority have come from a practice that remains, for better and worse, monastic, which does not translate very well into being a networked, wired, active participant in today’s media.

QuickTime app in Java

Amateur is a quicktime player written using QuickTime for java that lets you do most of the basic QT stuff that QT pro allows (edit, paste and so on). It is not finished, is open source, etc. This is the sort of thing we’ve been crying out for for years. QuickTime’s API’s are readily available and so for those who can program there is a a host of applications that could be written. Quick off top of my head rant:

• a free editing package (like this one)
• a tool that lets you easily drag an icon onto the image track, nominate entry and exit points (time) and attach a clickable url to that icon (so that it is trivial to embed partial time based links in video
• a tool that lets you easily drag an icon onto the image track, scale it, and set entry and exit points (time) and attach a clickable url to that icon
• the same again but set a transparency for that icon
• the same again and let users toggle the visiblity of these icons (like Mosaic used to do for html links)
• the same again but now the icons could be: web links, text popups, video popups (so that you could link to web page/s, provide textual annotations within the video, and video annotations)
• the same again but now the video annotations have a url attached so they could be from any url
• and a simple one stop publishing to a blog outcome
• and so on.

Get in touch if you want prototypes, etc. I can make them in LiveStage Pro, but what we need are apps that just do this. We need to stop thinking of video as a ‘whole’ container of a completed and closed object.