Watching some political stuff on Youtube and saw the ad on the side was for Google. It's rare you see Google marketing their stuff, but it seems when they do they tend to use their own platforms to do it. And why not they have access to billions of pageviews and they already know that people using Google like Google.. As well as tons of other info about you from using their services and interacting with Adsense all over the web.

Search Stories is a YouTube Channel that features the Google search bar. There are already a bunch of episodes and you watch a 60 second plot unfold through a series of searches. They built a custom episode player with sleek effects and if you catch it as it's loading you'll see the default Flex busy mouse cursor. Google uses Flex, I'm pretty sure they use it for the YouTube player as well and some of their other Flash constructions but I wonder how it ties in to their relationship with Adobe. Since they offer API access and libraries in Flash and Flex you'd think they'd already have had to develop their own framework for working in Flash.. Then again maybe they just use the best tool for the job.

The origin of the word 'hello' from Answers.com, I just think it's weird that we used to engage regularly in "long-distance shouting" and probably weirder that we don't anymore.

Origin: 1885

 

Alexander Graham Bell's much-talked-about invention gave us not only the new word telephone (1876) but also the greeting hello. To be sure, something like hello had been with us for a long time as a shout that the English had learned from the French in the Middle Ages. Ho là! they would say. It meant both "stop" and "pay attention," or in the words of an early translator, "hoe there, enough, soft soft, no more of that; also, heare you me, or come hither." In various English shouts and reshouts over the centuries, this became holla (1523), hollo, hollow (1542), and hillo, hilloa (1602). For long-distance shouts the ending was lengthened to -oo, leading to halloo (1568) and hulloo (1707). By the nineteenth century the variants included hallo, halloa (1840) and hullo, hulloa (1857).

It is not surprising that a call to stop and pay attention should become associated with the first telephones. But with all the possible ways of saying it, why should telephones call for a different pronunciation, that of the present-day hello? Because it is rude to shout, and hello discourages shouting. The short e keeps the mouth more closed than o or a, and -lo makes a quieter ending than. -loo. Telephones badly needed this civilizing because the first ones required people to shout and the first telephone exchanges were manned by boys who enthusiastically shouted right back. "Nothing could be done with them. They were immune to all schemes of discipline," noted one author. So within a few years, in the mid 1880s, "In place of the noisy and obstreperous boy came the docile, soft-voiced girl"--often called a hello girl in recognition of her civilized calling word. In 1889, Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court included this tribute: "The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."

The telephone hello soon became a face-to-face greeting too. It could take the place of How are you? and How do you do?, although it did not replace the informal hi and howdy derived from those expressions. At the end of the twentieth century, there was also a hello? that expressed surprise and a Hello-o-o with an exaggerated up and down of the voice that implied, Wake up! What do you think you're doing?

In Google's words, more videos after the jump.

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The Adobe Air 2.0 beta is available for download now. Air 2.0 is a huge advancement and brings tons of impactfull new features. Most notably you can now write fully native apps, that use fully native installers and communicate and launch native apps. Hugely improved performance. Work with sound like never before. Sockets, and HTML5.

Download the AIR 2.0 Beta.

The Flash 10.1 prerelease is also available for download.

This is from the Adobe Labs.

New Features in AIR 2

• Open documents with the user's default application
  You can open document files in the application the user has set up as the default opening application. Launching executables or script files is not permitted unless the application is packaged in a native installer. See File.openWithDefaultApplication() and Opening files with the default system application.
• Microphone data access
  You can access the sound data from a microphone directly for recording or other processing. See Microphone.sampleData and Capturing microphone sound data.
• Mass storage device detection
  You can now detect when a mass storage device, such as a USB drive or a camera, has been connected to the user's computer. See StorageVolumeInfo.
• Updated WebKit version
  • WebKit in AIR is based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3
  • Support for JavaScript profiling
  • SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine resulting in 50% faster performance using SunSpider tests
  • CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors, etc.).
  • Styling scrollbars via CSS
  • Latest Canvas enhancements.
• Global Error Handling
  Global error handling lets you handle all uncaught errors (both synchronous errors and asynchronous error events) in one place in your code. See UncaughtErrorEvent.
• New networking support
  • Server sockets
    You can listen for incoming socket connections. See ServerSocket and Server sockets.
  • UDP sockets
    You can send and receive messages using the Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP). See DatagramSocket and UDP sockets (AIR).
  • TLS/SSL sockets
    You now connect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket communications. See SecureSocket and Secure client sockets (AIR).
  • DNS lookup
    You can look up Domain Name System (DNS) resource records. See DNSResolver and Domain Name System (DNS) records.
  • Network interface enumeration
    You can enumerate the list of hardware and software network interfaces available on a client computer. See NetworkInfo and Network interfaces.
• Packaging an AIR application in a native installer
  You can package an AIR application in a native install program instead of an AIR file. Applications packaged and installed using a native installer have access to platform-specific features such as the Native Process API. See Packaging an AIR application in a native installer.
• Native process API
  You can launch and communicate with native processes. Applications that use this API must be installed using a native installer. See NativeProcess and Communicating with native processes in AIR and the following quick start articles: (For HTML developers) Interacting with a native process, (For Flex developers) Interacting with a native process, and (For Flash developers) Interacting with a native process.
• Database transaction savepoints
  You can commit or roll back multiple database changes as a single transaction. See SQLConnection.setSavePoint().
• Screen reader support (Windows only)
  Users can use screen reader software with AIR applications. See Accessibility.
• Printing enhancements
  • Vector printing is now supported on the Mac.
  • PrintJobOptions.printMethod allows you to control whether vector or bitmap printing is performed. You can also let the runtime choose the best method (using an internal heuristic based on analyzing the content to be printed). See PrintJobOptions.printMethod.
• Idle time-out settings for URL requests
  You can override the default idle time-out setting for URL requests. See idleTimeout.
• Improved IPv6 support
  IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input.
• Increased maximum size of NativeWindow
  The maximum size of a NativeWindow has been increased to 4095x4095 pixels (from 2880x2880 pixels). See NativeWindow.bounds.
• File promises (Win/Mac only)
  You can now allow users to drag a file that has not been created yet out of an AIR application and provide the data for that function after the file promise has been dropped. For example, you could provide a list of files available on a remote server. When the user drops an item from that list onto their desktop, you can download the data and write it to the dropped file. See URLFilePromise and Dropping file promises.
• Multi-touch events
  You can listen for multi-touch and gesture events on computers that have multi-touch hardware and operating system support. See TouchEvent.
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
  Input Method Editors (IMEs) can be used with any InteractiveObject, not just TextField objects. This allows you to support IME input when using the Flash Text Engine or the Adobe Text Layout Framework, for example. See IME.
• Native runtime install packages for Linux
  Native install packages are now provided for the rpm and debian package managers.

Sammy Hagar

Joe Satriani

Michael Anthony

Chad Smith

Preview (and then buy) the album http://www.chickenfoot.us/listeningparty/

Watch the 12 days of Chickenfoot video podcast where the band explains each song in the album http://www.chickenfoot.us/12days

Myspace | Facebook | YouTube | twitter | iPhone app

I was just on Digg or something and ended up watching the whole interview on Youtube. From what I could gather from the interview she wrote a bogus book and is full of shit, but it's entertaining so watch the video after the jump.

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Apple apparently plans to start rolling out trackpad gestures that involve the use of all 10 fingers, and a toe. The new unibody macbooks can sense up to 11 points of contact and it's been independently confirmed that the next version of OS X will include the single toe-double handed swoop which will be used to invert the colours of everything on the screen. Head over here to download an app created by the guy responsible for this which visualizes how many points of contact your macbook has.

or don't.. what do i care...

It's been up for a while now, but I just went to look around and I gotta say it's looking good. They looked like they were floundering during the medium change but based on the site I think it's more accurate that they're slowly trying to integrate CNN - the pundits, journalists, stories, and brand with proven web stuff and they're definitely doing things right. Some of the online stuff isn't new, but in the new package with everything else it's starting to take shape and make sense. Lots of video, their Live video system actually uses Octoshape which is like torrenting the live stream - everyone who activates it becomes part of the grid and distribution network so during peak viewing times quality of the feed and buffering will improve as people opt in. Their other video player for non-live content is equally impressive in letting you quickly make playlists of videos, view info and related videos similar to Youtube's player, and more importantly when you embed, and share a link on twitter which takes you to twitter via cnntweet.appspot.com. That's right they wrote they're own tweeting application hosted on Google Appspot that creates a tweet to the video using bit.ly.  NewsPulse.CNN.com is a digg style article browser, where popular stories bubble up to the top. The other day I started watching Amanpour, I'm not sure if she has a show on tv cause I don't have one anymore, but the video podcast is great and daily. I think they should have given her a show a long time ago, but I'm just glad tomorrow I can download another one.

It's also about time more business woke up and started investing in podcasts and new media. How is it that they invest in TV where everybody changes the channel, hits mute, or goes to the bathroom during commercials and they don't seem to be interested in new media - where it's on demand and most people WANT to watch ads because they're more targeted and give viewers a means to 'reward' the hard work that went into creating and distributing the content. Because so many independents are creating content now, they talk about it, and viewers of new media are more aware of where and how their content gets to them because of it, and more happy to support those that create. We feel indebted to those that go out of their way to bring us content the way we want to consume it.

Back to CNN.com they've got a bunch of social media, and dashboard apps and widgets, an incredible iPhone app that does video, their shows have blogs, their personalities are on Twitter, Don Lemon is at blogworld shooting video on a handheld camera, and you can get a CNN.com account that gives you a personalized page of recently viewed items, local weather; news; and stock quotes.

I'm very impressed, clearly they've been paying attention. Do I think TV as a media format will die anytime soon? I think like radio, TV will be around for a long time still, but I think it will start to have more focus on live shows, late night/interview stuff and the triumphant return of the test pattern during the day. People that have access to tons of on-demand content won't sit around staring at 50 year old tv shows. People will continue buy more smart media centre devices, but there will always be a different screen for the living room/office/bedroom.. for people that have all those rooms.

blach
hello, i know how you eat a cassarole.
that classy donut just did a classarole.
Not as good as you could,
not as adept
But if it was at all good
you'll have to accept.

You're not a donut, YOU'RE NOT
so any attempt to go nuts, SHOULD NOT
be allowed.
...to stop

I want to start posting more regularly and using the read more button. Basically it let's me write a summary that shows up on the main page and then have the bulk of the content/videos/images on a dedicated post page. Sure it'll increase the amount of clicks needed to read the last few posts, but the front page will load faster, and it'll give me a better idea of what you cows like reading about. So this is the first of those posts.. just to test it out and give me an idea of how I want it to work. Some posts won't have a read more link, but this one does.

Ok enough of this crap, there's something interesting after the jump

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