Jennlog

I’ve been a Twitter user since April or May last year. It’s a neat way of communicating with people in a “stream of consciousness” way.

Twitter released an API that allows people to create applications that improve upon (and sometimes not) the service users receive. Below are my top ten favorite twitter toys.

1. Twitter Karma by @dossy — a really cool follow/followed dashboard
2. Tiny Twitter by @kcbigring — A mobile twitter client
3. Twitter Stats by @dacort — twitter statistics script (see my statistics below)
4. Snook’s Twitter (snitter) by @snitter — An Adobe AIR-based twitter client
5. Twittervision by @davetroy — Google Maps + Twitter live mashup
6. Tweeterboard by @tweeterboard — a twitter conversation analytics site
7. Tweet Scan by @weex — simple Twitter search engine
8. Twitterverse by @emilychang and @maxkiesler — Tag cloud representation of the Twitter public timeline
9. Twitterholic by @tw_tterholic — Leader board representation of the Twitter public timeline
10. Jott — not an "official" twitter service, but this free voice-to-text service integrates with Twitter

Screen capture from Twitter Karma

Results from Twitter Stats

Edited to add: Yes I am aware of Hashtags. No, I’m not convinced of their utility over just searching on the public timeline on keywords.

Jenn’s Transpatial Office

I was looking for a photo to update my Twitvatar and found this photo in my photos directory. To the left is a Mackie mixer, audio and video processing and recording decks, the monitors on the desk are (from left to right) a Xing MPEG-1 StreamServer, SGI Indy (w/Indycam) and Windows 95 (w/Quikcam).

I formed Transpatial Media Corporation with Warp 10 Technologies to develop a distributed streaming management system that unified acquisition and distribution of media created for Multicast (MBone), the various “V”s (Vstream, VXtreme, Vivoactive, Vosaic, VDO), Progressive/Real Networks, CU-See Me and Microsoft NetShow platforms into a common interface.

Stream Studio

Due to the state of A/V, computing and Internet technology, we were forced to use a ton of equipment including CSU/DSUs, Routers, a Rackmount PC for each format and a rackmount UNIX server to interface to the Transpatial management system. The photo to the right was my first modular design for a Transportable Streaming Studio for distributing events via IP networks.

I was hoping to eventually connect the system to a fly-away satellite uplink kit, but the satellite operators weren’t going to understand IP until much later in the future.

I decided I’d try Second life today.

So as the designated “Last Person on Earth Who Has Never Tried Second Life,” I went to secondlife.com and filled out the new account form. On submission I was presented with a pop-up window linking me to the 90MB Secondlife client compatible with MacOS (as well as links to clients for Windows and Linux) — which I downloaded.

A few hours went by and I got back around to starting up the client and entering my login information.

My first task as a new Secondlife resident is download a new required client download of some huge size. (I just stopped it after seeing the bar at 1/3rd finished at 20 minutes).

I don’t know how they’ve managed to get millions of members. They must be really patient and unusually forgiving? Good for them.

I tried. I downloaded. I logged-in. I downloaded again. I gave up.

I opened the Chocolate Port I brought back from Australia last fall. A perfect dessert after a long day.

This morning, I had this note in one of my mailing lists I’m on. If you have one of those new shiny Sony Readers or any other eBook capable device, this seems like a screaming deal:

Give the world eBooks in 2007!!!
July 4 to Aug 4 go to http://worldebookfair.com
2/3 million free eBooks, 110,000 commercial eBooks
787,000 total eBook files available

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

100,000 eBooks easy to download at:
http://www.gutenberg.org [coming up on 25,000 eBooks]
http://www/gutenberg.cc [already passed 75,000 eBooks]
http://gutenberg.net.au Project Gutenberg of Australia 1500+
http://pge.rastko.net 65 languages PG of Europe ~500

Imagine what could have been.

Good times.

Something Awful for:

Seen while reading: The Art of Wikigroaning.

A link to presentation was in this morning’s hackers-l email digest. I think Monty Python did something like this, but without the aid of Microsoft products. This has got to be the best Powerpoint presentation I’ve seen this year.

And, the deck for Doug Zongker’s “Chicken chicken chicken”. Presented at the AAAS humor session, February 16, 2007.