Where the heck did this year go?
I hope you all are having a great evening with your families.
But looking at Twitter and at my feed reader I can tell that some of you are still up. Maybe wrapping presents. But probably trying to escape last-minute chores like me.
There are a few things, though, that came through my feed reader that’s interesting.
1. LeWeb3′s videos are now online. Right now I’m watching some sessions I missed including one by a Google employee talking about the Web’s impact on corporate culture.
2. Paul Stamatiou is wondering if it’s time to start an HD startup. Paul: be careful here. HD video is too hard to deal with from a workflow standpoint. It’s a lot time away from going mainstream and sites like SmugMug have the best idea — they charge their users to upload HD. Even then they only let 10 minutes be uploaded. There’s WAY too much competition in the video space, too. Did you miss all the funding spent on things like Kyte, Ustream, Operator 11, Justin.tv, Qik, and others? Think they aren’t watching HD trends? Not to mention the already-existing HD sites like stage6.divx.com. But that all said, HD will arrive sometime and if you do it right you might be the next YouTube.
3. Gizmodo has the coolest Christmas decorated cube video I’ve seen.
4. Man, Google Reader’s new sharing features have people up in arms about their privacy. I told a friend “what part of “public” did they not understand when they started sharing feeds? He answered back that the feeds were obfuscated, so there was an expectation of privacy. Wow. This is going to be a debate in the industry over and over. I can see both sides and am itching to blog more about this issue.
5. LifeHacker shared a new tool that I’m trying out: Toodledo. It’s a list to organize your tasks. For those of you who want to get organized.
6. I’ve put a ton of stuff up on my shared reader feed. Chuqui, nice photos! I really am getting a lot out of the people who’ve added me as a friend on GoogleTalk and are sharing feeds with me.
7. “You don’t know jack about how your eyes actually work.” That’s how this video, aimed at website designers and SEOs, starts out. I usually don’t pimp commercially-produced videos like this but I made an exception here for a few reasons:
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a. Andy Edmonds is the guy behind this. He’s one of the smartest people I met at Microsoft and now is head of technology here.
b. Lots of my friends tell me that these guys helped them get more conversions.
c. They show off how people read web sites based on eyetrack research. I learned a lot and their new tool, called Scrutinizer, is an interesting one to use to look at your Website’s design to see if you’ve really thought things through. I’m not sure I like the corny videos, though. It’s my job to watch this stuff so you don’t have to. Dang, I thought my videos are long and boring. Well, the first one actually had some good info about how your Website is probably poorly designed. Their tool is only for people who do Website design, though. Ryan Stewart will be happy, though, cause Andy Edmonds used Adobe’s AIR technology to build it.
Anyway, that’s enough for the day today. I’m off to get some sleep before hanging out with family and then heading to Shel Israel’s house where, if he isn’t nice to me I’ll broadcast his little Christmas party on my Qik channel live. Damn, I live Qik — most of the videos I put up there are total wastes of time, but I’m having a ball. I’m not the only one, by the way. Steve Garfield was at a party with Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, today and put that live on his Qik channel.
Well, live or not, Merry Christmas!
