Learning with the Fang

I have been helping out with the Wine2030 BlueSky summit and would like any of my readers who are interested in the Australian wine industry to join me either online or possibly in person next Tuesday. Here’s the deal – if you have ideas on how academic research in any discipline could possibly enhance any aspect of the wine industry and would like to spend a day working hard with a bunch of very smart people with a view to sharing those ideas then please get in touch with me.

Over the past few weeks I have been re-mixing some key messages from organisers of the event with highlights from some of last year’s presentations and an interview or two with some invited speakers for this year. They are all shorter than 10mins and are designed to give you some insight into why this event is a great catalyst for innovation – giving rise to several successful funding bids and collaborations.

Have a listen to:

• Call for participants (give an idea of the type of people we are seeking)
• Photonics talk (quite technical but lead to successful funding and potentially great outcomes)
• Andrew Jefford (keynote presenter sneak preview)
• Marketing talk (fascinating stuff which also lead to further research)
• Visual technologies (behind scenes ‘look’ at surveillance cameras and emerging video technology)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

So, you just read the excellent introduction to Google’s new Social Search by rww but can’t wait to try it out for yourself. You belt over to labs.google.com, opt into the Social Search experiment, do a vanity search but there is no ‘Social’ link when you expand + Options! Making sure you have logged in with your google account, you notice the familiar green arrows next to the top couple of results and the ‘more from SearchWiki’ at the bottom of the results list.

That was my first experience with Google’s new Social Search unleashed today. After a fair bit of hunting and pecking it turns out there is a conflict between the old ‘SearchWiki’ experiment (pretty sure I opted in as a google labs experiment way back) and the new ‘SocialSearch’ experiment which can be worked around by disabling ‘SearchWiki’ in my http://www.google.com/preferences page.

Select “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results” option under “SearchWiki” at the bottom of your google preferences page.

Having disabled SearchWiki a new search for my own surname yielded the usual gratifying result along with a link to ‘Social’ once I expanded the +Options. Marvellous – key members of my social network have been talking about me – and it’s easy to figure out what they have said. It also turns out that I was involved in some rather fruity dialogue with someone we shall call ‘Nick’ via comments on a blog post back in 2006.

That, my friends, is a perfect example of why we need to be careful with what we say online. Things previously ‘hidden’ will come to light in new and interesting ways as technology evolves. And I, for one, can’t wait!!! Bring on face recognition in flickr I say.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

I have just been handed 3×1 hour .wmv files of about 900MB, containing
some very slow 640×480 footage of a glass extrusion recorded to miniDV
tape. The plan is to turn into 5 minutes of fast moving extrusion
goodness.

I know I can set up FinalCut Pro to import the
footage, change the duration of each clip to 1:40 then paste the three
together and export to quicktime .mov. Trouble is it will be fiddly to
match frame size rate etc, then take ages to render and export. A quick
google search suggests QuickTimePro can do the trick via some clever
copy/pastery in QuickTime player.

Here is the secret:

• You need to have QuickTimePro (and Flip4mac to deal with the .wmv encoding).
• Open the first .wmv file and drag the start/stop handles of quicktime player to select 1:40 of footage
• Edit->Trim to selection then save as ‘OneMinute40.mov’ as self contained movie
• Drag start/stop handles to select all 1:40 of OneMinute40.mov
• In the first .wmv window, Edit->Select ALL, copy
• In the OneMinute40.mov window Edit->Add to selection & scale
• Window->show movie properties and delete all unwanted tracks (except the newly pasted movie)
• Quick as a flash you have compressed one hour to one minute fourty seconds
• File->Export (I’m exporting to quicktime .mov, original size, 25fps, Jpeg compressor). This is the slowest step at about 10 minutes to render each minute of final output.
• To join my 3 x 1:40 clips into one 5 min .mov I’m just pasting from one QuickTime Player window to the end of the movie in the other.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

boys and their toys!

Originally uploaded by mandyseyfang

This ‘Vocal Delay’ apparatus was made for Jamie by one of his band mates. It was used to great effect in recent gigs by ‘breakable things on the bookshelf’ – the latest band to grace our rehearsal room and the streets of Adelaide.

The ‘kludging’ of an old PC CD-ROM box is a great example of ‘Maker‘ culture, something of which lifekludger would be proud.

Imagine a world in which makers ‘kludged’ devices for livers using components from suppliers with funding provided by givers.

You may say I’m a dreamer…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Hats off to @garyphayes for his most excellent Social Media COUNT. I intend to use it in an upcoming presentation – which would be all the better if I could find / show similar figures for ye olde Electronic Mail.

Trouble is, I’m having a tough time finding data (especially historical) on e/mail usage. In addition to displaying e/mail messages sent on Gary’s COUNTer, I would love to be able to produce a chart showing the number of mailboxes on the planet each year since e/mail began. (Along with something like the average number of e/mail messages sent per day for each of the same years).

Fortunately for me, Gary’s blog post references some interesting data sources that have inspired me to make a second attempt to track down those elusive figures. I would be thrilled if y’all could help me with this. Here is a re-cap of what I have discovered to date:

My growing list of sources on delicious.

Looking thru Gary’s references we can add:

(I plan to work thru some of these to see if they have e/mail history stats)

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of
  2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill
  annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Any additional data sources, charts, suggestions welcome.

If somebody can find me charts like those above going back to Ray Tomlinson’s early e/mail back in the 1970’s I will open my cellar and send you a nice bottle of wine.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang