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Back to regularly scheduled programming

Great post over on Venture Beat about a collaborative film making project using a community to help making a full feature movie without the big budget available in Hollywood, called Star Wreck Studios builds permanent community for collaborative movie making:

If you’ve heard of the movie Star Wreck, then you’re already familiar with Star Wreck Studio’s operating procedure: Take a community of thousands of online movie-making buffs, and have them collaborate on a feature-length film.

Star Wreck, a $20,000 film, is said to be the most popular internet-created feature film of all time, with eight million downloads all around the world. At first the film was distributed free online, and eventually it was distributed by Universal Pictures as a premium DVD.

But the folks behind Star Wreck — Star Wreck Studios, based in Tampere, Finland — want to be more than just a one-hit wonder. They’ve now built up a permanent community site for their movie-making collaborators. The community’s called Wreck-a-Movie, and it’s already hard at work on two new film projects: A science fiction comedy about Nazis on the moon, Iron Sky, and a horror film called Sauna. On Wreck-a-Movie anybody interested in film can join the community and make plot and music proposals and comment on scenes.

This is the preview of the Star Wreck movie - Imperial Edition:

And the venture beat post goes on with:

Star Wreck Studios compares its film projects to social networking and internet copyright-modifying movements such as Creative Commons. The intent is to create productions that are “clean” from a copy right perspective. That’s why the crew behind Wreck-a-Movie considers Creative Commons (CC) licensing to be very important, and Star Wreck Studios has John Buckman, one of the thought leaders on the use of CC in business, as chairman of the board.

Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. It expects to use mobile technology, not only to view the content, but to create interactive experiences for its audience. For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.
“Because of the connected nature of mobile phones there are a lot of opportunities to do things like that. AppleTV, PlayStation 3 and mobile phones are all connected,” says Peter Vesterbacka, a cofounder and board member. He is also a cofounder of the global networking event Mobile Monday and a serial entrepreneur.

Check out the project and films realized using collaborative film making and online community efforts to drive the production of films.

Today I installed a new Wordpress plugin from MyBlogLog called JusrForYou.
You see an example set of recommendations to the left (taken from the quoted blog post below).

Here is the blog post explaining a little more about it “Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog“:

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user’s profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog’s archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

A very interesting way of making suggestions for your blog visitors. In the comments you wil find some people complaining about some missing php extensions:

It seems your host is not supporting json data format. Please ask your hosting provider to enable json extension for php.

So, it remains to be seen if this plugin will work here on my blog or not. What do you think about this idea to provide recommendations to site visitors?

Data portability is a topic which is becoming more and more important, prominent example is OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial allows you to build apps/widgets for many big social networks out there, based on one API (OpenSocial). This helps the developer of an app to make it available for all supported platforms without the need to re-write it for every social network/online community out there.

A different approach is the one from Gnip. They want to act as a data stream coverter, providing you with data from many services in the format most appropriate for your app. Below you find the services offered by them (or what they will offer soon):

This is an basic overview of their service (from Gnip’s site):

They support many well known services, in which data streams you can hook into as an application developer, among them are e.g. MyBlogLog, Flickr, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc.

Chem them out at gnipcentral. Do you have some experience with this service or are you thinking about using it? Let us know and leave a comment.

Amazon.com has opened up the second round of the beta phase for its unbox instand video streaming service called “watch now”. The unbox service enables you to rent and buy movies and TV shows from amazon through a download to your PC without the need to get the DVD shipped to you, or going to a DVD rental store. The amazon-unbox watch now feature is an additional way from amazon-unbox to make the service more attractive, allowing you to start watching instantly (the video gets streamed to your computer). You will need at least a 0.5Mbps DSL (down stream) connection to be able to use the service.

As of this morning they are still alowing new sign ups, but space is limited. Just go to the Amazon.com unbox page and on the upper, right hand side you’ll find the link (picture to the left) to sign up for the test.

I’ll be testing the service and will post an update on my findings.I am very curious to see how it will work on PC AND (!) Mac, as it was PC, Tivo, Xbox only before. You need the latest Flash version (v9) for your computer to be able to use the new watch now feature. The good news is that you also be able to continue to download movies (e.g. after buying them, not only renting them for a day…) and store them locally on your harddrive (this remains a PC & Tivo only feature).

Check out the new amazon unbox service and watch now!

Have you been using the Amazon unbox service before, in the incarnation of a video download service?

You always wonder what will happen with your device if you have to return it.

Even more so if the device is an iPhone with a lot of your personal data on it (contacts, documents, web browser data still left in its cache, etc.).

Just found an older post about what the owner of a refurbished iPhone discovered and the data he was able to reconstruct, on zdziarski.com titled

“May 16, 2008: Refurbished iPhone Reveals Customer Data“:

[Photo from Wikipedia. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.]

A few days ago, I posted a discovery in that personal data remains intact (in deleted portions of the file system) following a full iPhone restore. As it turns out, Apple themselves may not have been aware of this. Thank goodness, otherwise identity theft might actually be, like, hard. A detective from the Oregon State Police, whom I’ve verified, notified me this afterrnoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased directly from Apple contained recoverable personal data. This included email, personal photos, and even financial information that he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. Needless to say, the original owner was quite surprised. He informed me that the device had been returned to Apple under a warranty exchange only a few months ago, suggesting that Apple has been using an insecure refurbishing process for the past year.

This shows that you have to treat your iPhone like a desktop computer in case you sell or return it, as the mobile phone more and more gets part of your (digital) lifestyle and holds a lot of valuable data!

I have been missing out on this completely, so for everyone who is in the same boat, check out http://drhorrible.com:

Aspiring super-villain Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) wants to join the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams, but his nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), stops him at every turn in this three-part musical.

I have also embedded the full episode below (it might be geo-restricted, and for US IPs only):


Everybody knows the famous counter from feedburner.com to show (off) how many people are (approximately) reading your blog. Based on the idea of counter and stats is a new tool called “twittercounter”, doing the same kind of counter for the advanced micro-blogger, or twitterer. The service is providing not only an embeddable counter for your homepage, but also some stats. Here are their current stats, about their own account on twitter.com:

We now track 277,753 unique Twitter accounts.

Yesterday we generated 284,821 counters.

In total we generated 16,524,230 counters since we started tracking.

And below you’ll see the counter preview (several display options exist) of the embadable counter for your webpage or maybe your Online community page:

And a little history of their followers of the last time:

Are you already the proude owner of a Twitter counter for your homepage? I am working on mine, mostly I still need 100000 of people following me to make it worth displaying on my site:)

Dev Process, from Chet Haase's Blog

A friend just pointed me to this older blog post by Chet Haase (his blog), titled Crystal Methodology. He is describing different methodologies of how to develop software and has some interesting twists added to every single one.

One example excerpt:

Scum

In the Scrum development model, the focus is on short iterations and constant communication. The Scum model, however, focuses on the individual. In particular, each engineer works completely on his or her own, producing code at an alarming rate. Changes are integrated and merged willy-nilly, causing untold breakage due to the complete lack of communication. At each fault, the offending code, putback, and engineer are indentified as scum and are tossed out of the project (this step is called “Hack-n-rack”). The resulting code and team are thereby better over time, having weaned out the weak members through natural selection. As it’s inventor, Dr. Feen Bookle, PhD, Mrs, QED, JRE, said at its unveiling at the Conference On Terribly Important Academic Philosophies and Theories on Software Process Methodology Discoveries (CTEAPTSPMD), “Scum will always float to the top. Skim it off and you’ve got just the juicy bits left. Plus the bottom-feeders.”

If you spent hours, days, week or years in the field of software development, so basically spent your life with developing software, you will really enjoy this read!