The post says it all

Burmese Refugee Children Love Macs from Joyce Kim on Vimeo.

Tags: Apple, Burma, children, Mac, refugee

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Tags: adium, client, digsby, IM, pidgin, trillian

For FriendFeed has become my replacement for Google Reader, which I only visit occasionally now to see if there are blogs I need to add to my feed.

But, if you are going to replace a reader with FriendFeed, how do you manage the flow of content. While tools will likely improve over time, I have adopted a simple strategy.

1) Scan for items with obvious links

As I power through the front page of my feed, I look for items that are obviously links to longer articles. I can then decide if I want click through to that article. But rather than opening it in a new tab right in front of me, I use the wheel-click option in Firefox and open these articles in a background tab. This allows me to scan through the fees and read the articles when I want.

2) Read Twitter/indenti.ca/Jaiku/etc. last

Personal conversations come second for me. If there is a thread I am interested in, I will wheel click the Twitter page for the person and pick it up that way…or use Twitter Search. Being the kind of person who processes personal communications last makes this easier.

3) Use the FriendFeed interface as much as I can

If there was a way to open posts in a frame such as the way that video and images are embedded in FriendFeed, I would never go to anyone’s actual site. While that may be a feature of the future, the storage implementation for the FriendFeed team is potentially enormous - unless they choose to retrieve the content on the fly.

And finally…

4) Gripe about TinyURL, etc. links and how I don’t know where they lead

A great feature of the future for FriendFeed would be to translate obfuscated URLs to their base URLs in a rollover

And there you have it. Not the world’s most intense primer on using FriendFeed, but it works for me!

Tags: friendfeed, google reader, optimize, strategy, summize, tinyurl, twitter, twitter search

Jeremiah Owyang has a great think piece on the idea of embedded content. [here]

The piece sums up the foundational idea that has been driving the debate I dropped my self into with regards to the NBC (or any old-tyme media network’s) coverage of the Olympics. The concept of content-management by the leaders online has moved beyond the idea of control, and towards attributed sharing.

It should no longer be a world where national media entries control what you see, but rather the best media gets the highest rating. Would people in the US like to see how other nations treasure their athletes? Maybe another network will focus on Football, Swimming, Diving, etc. more than your network does, so you will chose that content, and share that with your friends/followers/groupies.

If NBC allowed people to embed the content on their own site, they still get the eyeballs (How 1999! But I heard someone use it on NPR yesterday), and the cred that goes with “Joe/Susie says this is the best content and has decided to put it up on their site”.

Embedded content goes to the idea that the best content/presentation will always be the most successful. Controlling the content, as the NBC monopoly on the Olympics has pointed out, just motivates people to find ways to get other perspectives.

Tags: content, distribution, embeddable, embeds, Jeremiah Owyang, NBC, Olympics

In the community of voices I follow online, one of the continuing themes is the narrowness and antiquated coverage provided by NBC(I launched into a screed on the topic this weekend).

I have also heard that many people are using the tools at their disposal (open proxy servers being the most notable) to circumvent the geo-location tools of the providers to view coverage from other national providers. I thought I would share some of my experiences with two of the providers, BBC and CBC.

BBC

Finding proxy servers in the UK turned out to be relatively simple, and I was able to get to the BBC site and view, with substantial performance penalties, some of the video on the site. This was a tactic I have used before, as I am a fan of English Football, and need to use this method to gain access to highlights and match-day broadcasts.

CBC

I am, well, disappointed with the lack of success I have had with the CBC. I hear from people in the homeland that the coverage makes NBC looks like the US is the only country in the Olympics, where the CBC provides a true global perspective. However, finding a proxy server that can fool the CBC video servers has been impossible. Therefore, I continue to not watch any Olympics at all.

I am sure that there are other means (P2P, Torrents, etc.), but I am finding that, well, I don’t care that much. It is the events in South Ossetia / Georgia, Zimbabwe, and other hot-spots that I am finding far more relevant to my day-to-day life.

So while I appreciate some of the challenges posed by circumventing the monopoly of the mind that NBC wants to claim, once that was achieved with the BBC, I found that I was in a So what? position.

But before I give up, has anyone had any success with getting the CBC feeds to work outside Canada?

Tags: bbc, cbc, Georgia, media, monopoly, NBC, Olympics, South Ossetia, sports, Zimbabwe