Oblong Meat Update

Howdy, folks. It's been a dead week here on the Oblong Box, content wise - a situation I can quite well understand, as I am known for prolonged bouts of silence myself. But a great deal of behind the scenes work is being done that I should probably take a minute to inform you of.

New bloggers online!
MasterBlogger - Jeff Laepple is now online and blogging at MasterBlogger.net. Giving his unique brand of angst and relationship advice. Check it out!

Smokehouse - Art Lindsey III, you know him, you love him (or hate him), and he's going to be more than just a lurker on the list now, he's spewing his neo-con venom almost daily on his blog starting the end of the week.

New blogger coming online later this week!
Mom On A Tangent - Lauri Heitzer is going to be coming online this week talking about a good mix of things of personal and general interest. We can look forward to this by the end of the week.

New blogger coming in the next few weeks!
Deuce Peveto European Gigalo - Ryan Peveto, aka PV, fixture on the local Tyler scene, is headed on a whirlwind two year backpacking tour of Europe and Northern Africa. Assuming he lands on his feet this week when he hits Europe, he'll be posting quite regularly to his blog! Look for it!

In addition to the new bloggers, hopefully very soon the OblongBox homepage I've been working on will be all finished up. There are some text formatting issues I'm trying to work the kinks out on before it all goes live. Once those are done, I think we'll have a nice looking home page.

Furthermore, to my writers, I know that we've once again hit a dry spell on the Paid Placements, but you can ask Wendy, she and I have been hard at work putting together the work needed to get everyone going with the new PR company. It'll be all good soon.

In the meantime, I need my writers to continue posting to their blogs. When we start doing new placements, we'll need slightly older entries to start making the placements on. Doesn't matter what you write about... just do some writing!

PoddedMeat Stuff
In PoddedMeat news, viewership numbers keep rising exponentially, and I've found a number of interesting promotional tools that we'll be featuring on upcoming episodes of RunTime.

Additionally, serious progress on Paparazzi was made today (we're coming up the days we're going to be shooting the pilot/first episode), and some good talks with a major search engine company were made yesterday regarding another headlining show for PoddedMeat. I can't tell you what the company is yet, but I can tell you that if you're an avid blogger, you've probably been there before.

That's about all I got at the moment. Deuce!

Moving Concerns
In the near future, I'm going to need to move. Somehow I have survived the torture my landlord has inflicted upon me and I'm nearing the end of my lease. Additionally, Iris will be moving in with me at the beginning of next year, so I've begun the search for moving assistance - it's not easy, moving, and it doesn't get any more fun when you move as often as I do (once every 3-12 months).

I came across this site - Self Storage Directory - Moving.bz - which looks to be like a definitive site for moving information. You just enter your information and it'll give you bids on storing and moving your stuff (a lot like the quotecatcher system I use for my website bids). Definately check it out.

/rizzn

[this post contains paid placement]

My Day, My Weekend, My Slack

I love bit-torrent.

I've been watching season one of Boston Legal since last night. And I've been actually doing a bit of web design at the same time. VLC runs amazingly fast with fourteen other applications loaded at the same time.

At any rate, that's why you're seeing a text post and no video posts the last 12 hours or so.

On a note of complete seperateness, as many of you know, I am involved with and still am a partner in a VoIP company, and periodically post interesting VoIP news here on the site. One of the sites I've found invaluable in research of VoIP equipment and troubleshooting tips is the VoIP forums at Vonage. Yes, even though they are the evil competitor (and I have a dim view of their financial decisions sometimes), they do indeed have what is developing into the best online resource/community for your VoIP questions and answers. Check it out, if you're ever in the need for that type of thing.

/rizzn

A Cheap Shot...

But funny, in my opinion.

This is a page from the appalling children's book "Why Mommy is a Democrat." I made a note to something I noticed on the page as well. Feel free to pass around.




/rizzn

Do you need scrubs?

[this post contains paid placements]


So my friend Wendy and her aunt were talking about needing new Scrubs. Her aunt is a Nurse and needs all kinds of colors and some with prints on them. I told them to check online and gave them a few web sites to check out to see if they could find n e cheap scrubs for her aunt. I think Wendy just needs them for when she is doing her art stuff. She likes to wear them when she is painting so that she wont get n e paint on her clothes. I think its a pretty good idea if you ask me.

Good Day!

/rizzn

I remember when

[this post contains paid placements]


I don't know how old I was really but I remember when Yahoo still had user chat rooms. I met a lot of people in those rooms and they were a lot better then the just general chat rooms to go to. My friend Wendy and some of her good friends all hung out in the Juggalo chatroom when they still had them. She would tell me about the fun times she used to have when someone they didn't know would come into one of the rooms not knowing what a Juggalo was.

Rip-Off Report Accused of Extortion

According to US Web, an internet marketing and PR agency, Rip Off Report has been using shady practices in its for consumer, by consumer company rating system. Site owner and operator Ed Magedson has been the subject of several lawsuits from companies claiming that information posted on his website is fraudulent.

Other site operators claim that Ed Magedson uses the ranking power of RipOffReport.com under other company's names and use those rankings to extort money from the companies being reviewed.. We have successfully worked with one company already to push the Rip Off Report ranking back into Google and remove it from the top rankings that are unfairly hurting companies.

/rizzn

An Odd Day

Today wasn't very productive for me. Sometimes it's tough being an idea guy.

My mind has been racing with a thousand ideas, things that I've had planned for a while, projects I want to do, but simply don't have time to do them. In the near future, here, when PoddedMeat and OblongBox start bringing in the revenue, I'll have the capital to afford some programmers and get them done. In the mean time, I hope the ideas don't evaporate from my head (and I maintain the self-discipline to get what needs to be done accomplished).

Here's my thought process today.

I read an article last night that suggest to properly promote video works, you need to post it to all the two bit video sites, not just YouTube and GoogleVideo. So today I worked up a comprehensive list of all the video sites I could muster and downloaded all the upload clients, and have been steadily trafficking scads of video up to these various sites (if you notice my video blog, you'll see I've also been looking around a bit at their content as well).

One that I found that was particularly interesting was one called MetaCafe. It has an interesting concept for it's download client. Most of these sites, their download client is simply for uploading video - MetaCafe's client re-introduces the 'veg factor' into on-demand video, something that I think has been sorely lacking.

One of the elements I wanted to put into the show we did on podcasting clients was the weaknesses I saw in all the podcatching clients (which is the same weakness I see in all PVR systems as well, incidentally) - and that is they remove the veg-factor from TV viewing.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love on-demand, and I love podcasting and vodcasting. The problem is that if you think to your own TV viewing habits, they very likely don't match up to the world of on-demand yet. Unless you're actually sitting down to watch something specific, you've likely just got the TV on in the background, or you've got the news on that you're halfway paying attention to, or you've got some music video station playing. Something like that.

YouTube and GoogleVideo's content is primarily comprised of background noise style videos. Music Videos, idiots jumping off buildings while on fire, mentos in coke bottles, kittens falling asleep, stuff like this. Unless you're just killing time, you've probably not got the time like I do every day to sit and surf the site and hit play every 25 seconds. You're likely using the on-demand videos to spice up your MySpace page or to occasionally watch something someone sent you in an email.

Back to MetaCafe. They have an auto-download function. Basically, you flag the types of multimedia you like to watch, and it'll automatically download it for you. Then you turn on "TV Mode" and it'll play it continuous mix style, deleting old watched content. It's like streaming TV, but more like clickerless stream of consciousness TV.

This reminds me of two things, specifically. The first thing that comes to mind is a little known (anymore) application called PointCast. Back in the late 90's, screensavers were the bomb, and whenever you got tired of your flying toasters, you could download PointCast, which would every night dial up your internet connection, and download news of all types. Then the next day, it would display headlines and pictures and all kinds of good stuff on your screen when you weren't doing anything. It failed, of course, because they relied too heavily on people looking at ads, when presumably the application only turned on whenever you weren't at your computer.

The other thing MetaCafe reminds me of is that one very short scene in the Matrix where Neo is sitting at his home computer, and he runs a search on "the matrix" and "morpheus" and all these newspaper articles and text and photo feeds scroll past his screen at superfast speed. The Hollywood version of Google News, I suspect.

Thing is, I think that's cool. I've always wanted that application. It's a relatively simple thing to write. The chatter and technology both exist out there. RSS provides us with any kind of content we need, combined with the wires or Technorati, or podcast and vodcast feeds.

I envision a piece of software that you can run on a home entertainment PC like device that will stay connected to the internet, and whenever you're not watching stuff on TV or whatever, it'll start up, and display headlines, news images, blog headlines, and random vodcast and YouTube style videos. While it's primarily text and images on the screen, it'll play mellow chillout music of your genre choice (like the Weather Channel does inbetween forecasts, while it's doing your local thing).

Come on, you know that's a damn cool idea.

I almost don't care if someone steals it, as long as it gets done, and I get a free copy.

I've also got a few more ideas on re-introducing the veg-factor back into on-demand programming, but I'll get into that a little later. I think I've hit my limit at the moment for time I can devote to waxing philosophical on stuff that I don't have time to do today.

/rizzn