Tripp Fenderson

I haven’t spent much time in front of the television in the last few years. Lately though, when I am watching something, I’m also sitting with my laptop, a digital camera, and my iPhone.

I’ve overheard several people and seen posts on Twitter today stating “election day should be a holiday” and “we should get the day off work.” While federal law doesn’t require businesses to give employees time off to vote, many states have related laws on the books. Virginia isn’t one of them.

Showing Mike and Adam how the Metaweblog API works. Apologies to Tess.

Acting on tip from someone I follow on Twitter, I’m checking out Moodle this morning. It’s an open source content management system that offer educators a number of courseware features including lessons, quizzes, surveys, assignments, chat, forums and much more.

I’m one of those people that’s hated Flash since day one—my main complaint being that the content couldn’t be properly indexed and so outside of showcasing art and/or a developer’s talent, Flash had no place driving the content of a web site.

VCU Tech Services knows where their customers are. Do you?

Mike over at MEDIA GUERRILLA shares some insight this morning about the high costs of doing business in places like Facebook and other social media outlets.

What caught my attention was this line:

And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

Oops. Someone must have glossed over the fact that their domain name could be read as “retail the rape”.

[Found on http://realpeoplerealstuff.com, which offers an interesting twist on classified ads. Check it out.]

Interesting report from TubeMogul.com regarding the time sensitivity of video online. Definitely worth reading, especially if you’re...oh I don’t know...working on an enterprise level video asset management system and the question of “how long should we store videos?” keeps coming up.

It looks like Microsoft is finally giving up on its Live Expo classified ad service. They close the doors on July 31st of this year. I wrote about the launch back in March ‘06 and had this to say:

It’s a run of the mill classified site with a pinch of social networking thrown in for good measure - because you know...social apps are cool.

Microsoft has the same problem every other classified newcomer has ... gaining momentum. I just ran a search on “Events” within a 50 mile radius of Washington DC. Surely I’d expect to find something listed - but no. Nothing going on in the sleepy little area around the beltway.

This is where newspapers and companies like Oodle really leverage their strengths. They can launch a classified listing service right out of the gate complete with ads and therefore provide a good experience for the first time user of the service.

Companies like Craigslist, Oodle, Yahoo!, eBay continue to dominate the classifieds market. Microsoft (once again) came in too late with too little.

[linklove for videoisnow.com. Thanks for pointing me to that site Liz!]

I just finished reading a great interview with Morgan Spurlock. In there was a wonderful quote on the importance of listening to others when creating a product.

Some of the best advice I ever got was from a friend of mine right before we made “Super Size Me.” I called a filmmaker friend of mine; I’d never made a movie, never made a feature and I said, “Could you just give me some advice?” And he said, “If the movie you end up with at the end is the exact same movie you envisioned at the beginning, then you didn’t listen to anybody along the way.”

[I’d link to the interview but the site looks like a “made for Adsense site”. My guess is that they’ve copied the article in full from someone else—so I’m not giving them any link love.]

Don’t take it from me—read what Fred Wilson, who spoke on Tuesday at Widget Web Expo, has to say on the topic.

The widgets (and the javascript I put on this blog) slow down the page load times considerably. And they are distracting to many of the readers. I imagine if I took a poll, about 2/3 of my readers would vote for widgetless sidebars.

I take issue with widgets, along similar lines of thinking as Fred -- specifically: stupid name, noise, and implementation.