In 2000 artist Noah Kalina started taking a photo of himself every day. In August 2006, he put together a nearly 6 minute video of these photos, chronicling over 2300 days, up on YouTube. It has since been viewed over 8 million times and has spawned a number of imitators (though it should be noted that some of these immitation videos were in progress before Kalina put his video on the web). What Kalina and others did always struck me as a good idea and a really interesting way to visually track the changes in our outward appearance. I started on a project of my own to take a daily picture of my face after seeing Kalina's YouTube video, but I quickly found out that taking a picture of yourself every day can be a major pain in the butt.
Are we witnessing the emergence of the Long Tail of politics over the course of this presidential election cycle in the United States? Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia thinks so, and applies Chris Anderson's famous Long Tail theory to the campaign of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama in a rather compelling blog post last week. In the post, which was syndicated on the TechPresident blog, Garcia argues that Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent Ron Paul, have built campaigns on the back of the Long Tail of political interest in the US.
Tangler, a tool for enabling real-time discussions anywhere on the web (see our previous coverage here) has just announced a new version of their product which now supports the long-awaited embedding feature. This feature, which had been in private beta since mid-2007, is now available to all, allowing you to put embedded forums on any web site, blog, or social network profile.
Leading French video sharing site DailyMotion announced this morning that it is now supporting HD video upload and playback. It follows art-video site Vimeo, where HD was added in October.
YouTube's Steve Chen told Liz Gannes and Om Malik in November that YouTube is not focused on enabling HD as much as they are on universal access. His statements were a bit unclear though. A substantial group of outspoken video producers seem determined to demand HD for their work, but Chen contends that short form online video isn't a suitable setting for HD.
Last.fm is generally acknowledged to be one of the best web apps of this era - its music recommendation system literally creates a personalized radio station for you. But the now CBS-owned service doesn't get nearly enough credit for its API. We've heard stories about how 90% of Twitter's use comes from its API. Well, Last.fm also has an API that is used by many external services to add value for end users.
In this post we list 10 of our favorites, but there are many more of them to explore. We invite you to add your favorites in the comments, along with a note about why you like them.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft's unsolicited $44 billion takeover bid for Yahoo!.
Our 6th daily Comments Competition winner comes from a comment on our post 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. It came from Alan Wilensky, who wrote that "all of the [Semantic Web] tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered." Congratulations Alan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
1. You don’t need to apologize for calling it Web 3.0. Of course the Web does not upgrade in one go like a company switching to Vista. But there is a definite phase transition from current technologies. My personal Web 3.0 definition is “the combination of Web 2.0 mass collaboration with structured databases”.
The high definition DVD format war has been raging for quite some time now, but it looks as though there may finally be a victor. The HD DVD camp, started by Toshiba and including heavyweight backing from Microsoft, has been gradually losing ground over the last year. Recent events, which we discuss below, make it almost certain that the HD DVD format will be joining Betamax in format heaven soon.
Our 5th daily Comments Competition winner comes via a trackback. It's from Risa Dickens of the blog Indyish, in response to our post R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License. Congratulations Risa, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
Risa wrote that REM's open source video is "a taste of open source in the much more potentially disruptive way of open sourcing advanced by Linux, then the pay-what-you-can but still copy-written version tried on [Radiohead's] In Rainbows."
