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How to Create Your Own TV Channel for Your Blog

Posted on January 6, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been considering doing this for awhile – we’ll see how long it lasts and when my wife puts an end to it. If you look in the upper-left corner of the blog, you’ll see the “Ask Jesse” Show stream. If I’m online, when you click play you’ll see me, live, as you are on the blog!

Here’s how I did it:

Create an account at Ustream.tv

Click on “My Shows” – there you can configure the look and feel of your show page if you want

Click on the “Go to Show URL” link next to the “Broadcast Now” button

You’ll now see an “Embed Stream” html snippet in the lower right of the page – copy this, then paste into your html layout for your blog

Click “Broadcast Now”, and you’re live for all your voyeuristic viewers to see!

The Camera I’m using is the Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX. It has great picture, includes a built-in microphone that detects how far you are, and the camera comes in with built-in software that follows where your face is (or two faces if you’re more than one person). I’m half-way across the room, and you can still hear me well, and the streaming results are almost real-time! (Scott Lemon says it took just 14 seconds from him Twittering to me saying I received the Twitter)

Some issues to watch out for:

Make sure you’re appropriate when your camera is on! Put a sign up or something reminding those entering the camera area that they are being recorded.

Be careful if you talk to sensitive business clients. You may want to mute, or stop the stream altogether so sensitive information isn’t broadcast out to the entire world

Be sure your router can handle the bandwidth. I use a Gigabit Linksys WRT350N Router, and my Comcast connection has 8 Mb down, and about 3 or 4 up (at times). Search for “Comcast Speed” in the search box in the upper-right for some tips on how to speed up your home internet

My big prediction for 2008 is it will be the year of streaming video, and you’ll see more and more people embracing such technologies. I think I’ll try this for a bit – I think this can be a great way to drive people to stay on your blog longer. People are naturally voyeuristic, and want to know more about the person whose writing they are reading. If they can actually see them and chat with them, they are likely to stay longer, bringing more traffic to your site.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-05

Posted on January 5, 2008 by jessestay

just hacked my router to dd-wrt and upped the power. Let’s see if that fixes my range problems. #

The wind outside sounds a lot like it did in VA when Isabell came through #

@jrockway I loved your comment on my blog – I agree totally 🙂 #

This is a pretty cool “pay for viewing ads” system – Pirillo made $1000 yesterday from it!: http://bux.to/?r=jessestay (use that link an … #

announcement on SocialToo.com coming tonight (hopefully). Stay tuned!… #

SocialToo.com — Your Companion to the Social Web

Posted on January 5, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been working on a little side project lately, that I think will solve a lot of the headaches caused by lack of certain features in the Social Landscape. In the spirit of the book Jason and I are writing, my company, SocialOptimize.com is announcing the beta launch of SocialToo.com. What is it? It is intended to be a companion to the Social Web – the features you can’t find in the social landscape you will find here. Will it replace your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Plaxo account? Probably not, but it will make your experience in those Social Networks much better and compliment that experience.

Over the coming weeks (I have a strong release early, release often policy), you’ll see new features launched on the site that will make your Social experience better. The site is still very basic, but as a taste of what’s to come, for all those that sign up now we’ll enable auto following of all those that follow you on Twitter. Within the next week we’ll add the ability to blacklist those that follow you (so it doesn’t follow them). Soon after that we’ll add statistics, better bulk operations on your followers and following, and many more features. Soon we’ll start to incorporate Facebook data, linking your Twitter account with your Facebook account. After that, maybe Plaxo, or MySpace, or LinkedIn. These are all ideas of where we’re going with this.

So, I encourage all to register to find out what’s to come. Again, all those that register with their Twitter username and password will be automatically given auto-follow capabilities on their Twitter account! Keep following here and I’ll update as we progress.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-04

Posted on January 4, 2008 by jessestay

I like having my GrandCentral Call Me button on my site – it’s fun talking to my readers every so often in person #

@susanreynolds I’d say a couple times a month – I just got one, thought it was really cool. It’s kind of my personal tech support and s … #

We’re Catholic broke the 30,000 mark on Facebook, with 31,000 users, and growing #

@octalmage I’m Mormon, running a meta-network of religious applications on Facebook. On Facebook, I’m Christian. 🙂 #

@octalmage, I also run “We’re Baptist”, and I also started an “LDS App”, which I have since sold to an LDS Foundation #

@octalmage I’m also hoping to work on a Jewish app, and maybe even an Islamic app. I’m studying up on those religions first. #

@octalmage, as far as I’m concerned, each religious app belongs to that religion, and will maintain the culture and beliefs of those faiths #

@newmediajim you should follow @trippfenderson who works for Media General down south of you #

@guykawasaki is about to start following every person that follows him – just got him set up, and I think it’s working #

No one tests their Twitter libs on more than 100 friends or followers – had to fix several bugs in Net::Twitter to get it to work with h … #

@chrispirillo is also about to start following everyone that follows him – I’ll announce the site that is doing this here soon #

@guykawasaki start watching your Following number -it’s slowly going up right now #

@guykawasaki just wait until I add statistics, better blacklisting features in there (I”m thinking something like akismet) #

@guykawasaki, btw, I got Twitter to remove their quota of 70 requests / hour for you so hopefully it should follow all within the next hour #

@guykawasaki ha! I didn’t think of it that way – shows the spirit between the two networks. #

@guykawasaki I just hope this doesn’t trigger some bot in Twitter’s system like it did in Facebook’s #

You know, Twitter could build a business model just out of selling Twitter-branded schwag #

If you use my Twitter auto_follow script, you’ll need to patch Net::Twitter if you have over 100 friends: http://snurl.com/1wjpx #

Follow up to my previous post on the Zed comment, and why I think Rails users are proving Zed’s point: http://snurl.com/1wjrj #

@armandoalves as long as I’m not a Decepticon! 😉 #

@guykawasaki is now officially following more people than are following him 🙂 Now that’s a great Twitter citizen! #

@chrispirillo is soon to follow – my script should finish processing @guykawasaki here very shortly and move on to @chrispirillo #

@scobleizer it follows those that are following you, but you aren’t following. #

@scobleizer some people Twitter blacklists, which might be why they are in non-follow mode #

I think my blog is getting slammed right now – might have to pull out another EC2 instance here to handle the traffic #

@scobleizer: http://tinyurl.com/2xyjbs #

@chrispirillo want something entertaining to do? Whatch your “Following” number on twitter go up as you refresh the page 🙂 #

@benoitcazenave welcome! #

fading fast – if I get 8 hours of sleep, that means I wake up at 12pm! #

Now I’ve got recruiters both contacting me to work for them, and to work for me – some of these guys need to do their research! #

Happy that Twitter didn’t disable @guykawasaki’s account for the script I was running for him to follow all of his followers 😉 #

@alexdc the script has a blacklist for that. Also, after you get above 1,000 followers how can you possibly have a life and manually follow #

@alexdc every big name on Twitter with over 2,000 followers is using a script to auto-follow. At least they are listening to you now. #

anyone know of a good tutorial on setting up a wireless router as just a range extender for an existing router? #

@humancell perfect – thanks! Since there is no Wireless N extender I bought an extra N router and hope to use WDS to extend #

Finalizing edits on the FB book before sending back to the publisher. Lee Lorenzen is Forewarding, followed by a Superstar Afterword TBA! #

You can follow us on our Facebook Page for the book at http://tinyurl.com/2cqs9g #

hehe – comment from our editor in the manuscript: “What does ‘pwn’ mean?” (it’s a quote from an app description we were showing) #

Rails Maintainers (and Users), Take a Hint!

Posted on January 4, 2008 by jessestay

It appears I’ve caused quite a stir in my post about asking Perl to step up. Joey DeVilla on Global Nerdy thinks I’m funny. Several Perl users, including Andy Lester (author of WWW::Mechanize) have corrected me on the fact that it does not require testing for modules to be submitted to CPAN – I stand corrected (I was writing this late at night when I wrote it, as I am now, so bear with me).

This still brings me back to my point that regardless of whether a module has to go through rigorous testing or not to be on CPAN, CPAN contains one of the strongest architectures to prevent bad code from being submitted available. When modules are submitted, they still have access to a large group of testers that will return test results to you and give you feedback. The Perl test suites included in the Perl packaging tools (Test::More, etc.) are some of the strongest unit testing tools I’ve seen.

Andy Lester himself is a great example of why I think Catalyst and other Perl tools and frameworks are much stronger than those of Rails, and have a much stronger and smarter group of developers maintaining them. He is the essence of a true “computer scientist” IMO. From his biography on O’Reilly:

“Andy Lester started with computers early by keypunching letters to Grandma on IBM 029 punchcards. Now into his third decade of professional software development, he’s the QA & Release Manager for Socialtext. Andy is also in charge of PR for The Perl Foundation and maintains over 25 modules on CPAN. Andy’s two latest book projects are Mac OS X Tiger In A Nutshell from O’Reilly, and Pro Perl Debugging from Apress.”

How many of the Rails programmers can say they keypunched letters into punchcards early on? Maybe a few, but I think Zed has a point. Andy himself isn’t a contributor to the Catalyst source code (that I’m aware of), but his skills and experience to me show the breadth of who a Perl programmer is, and the type of people maintaining the Perl Catalyst MVC Framework.

So I guess what I was saying in my previous article is that perhaps some of these programmers, such as John Rockway, Marcus Ramberg, and even Andy Lester or Larry Wall (whom everyone would take notice) should take this opportunity, now that it is in the public eye, to expose what Catalyst brings to the community – why should one use it over Rails? I’d like to see these guys show, through the experience and Computer Science backgrounds that they have, that Catalyst is one of the best options out there for building a scalable web architecture. I’d even suggest each address Zed himself, inviting him to give it a try!

As to the Rails supporters that were commenting, criticizing, and laughing at my “Perl Power” speech previously, perhaps you should step back and learn, rather than laugh at us. I know many of our own that are learning other languages, trying to learn from the Zed experience, trying to figure out how we can better apply principles that Rails brings into our own Frameworks, what works, what doesn’t – you get the point. Those criticizing what I have said, IMO, are simply further proving Zed’s point to an outsider like myself.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-03

Posted on January 3, 2008 by jessestay

Is there a way to incorporate Google Notes with Google Reader? I’d love to include a note with why I shared an item in Reader. #

anyone else getting spam from Doba again from the Guy presentation here in Utah? #

@loiclemeur what is Patrick from Google’s Twitter ID? I’d love to get him out to Utah for one of our Social Media developers meetings #

Fixing bugs in Net::Twitter (undocumented Twitter API features) – will send them to maintainer when done. #

@al3x does the followers API call require a page number as well, or does it return all followers in one call? #

Some things I learned about Twitter and how they treat spam today: http://snurl.com/1wfsw #

GlobalNerdy thinks I’m funny: http://snurl.com/1wft5 #

@scobleizer sorry to hear about your Facebook account – is Facebook stupid??? Sounds like they need to know who their customers are. #

@jordanlee1 click on “profile”, then copy the url. #

@scobleizer it sounds like Facebook has an automated script that reads the logs, and sends out those notices if it detects someone scraping #

Wishing I got up as early as @rodneyrumford, @scobleizer, and the others so I could have been in on the rush. Bloggin now… #

@jasonalba, while not his intention, I bet his traffic is through the roof right now #

Why Plaxo execs need a copy of our book: http://tinyurl.com/2cr2uk #

My opinions of the whole @scobleizer Facebook controversy: http://snurl.com/1whfe #

@windley interested to hear your reasons for why it’s not a replacement for traditional web hosting #

Wow – my Perl blog post has people up in arms – I feel a follow up post coming #

I feel privileged that Andy Lester corrected me though – he is one of the reasons I think Perl has a reason to step up with the Rails outcry #

on the phone with a client, brainstorming some really cool ideas for their product #

@jasonalba cognizant? #

@jasonalba – having fun trying to understand? #

@royblumenthal – I hope she feels better! That’s been going around our house as well. #

@jasonalba do I get a pool or spa too since I wrote a book with you? #

tempted to create the shirt, “I do it in 140 characters or less” #

Trying to figure out this Twitter API – Net::Twitter for Perl doesn’t fully follow it #

Plaxo’s Mistake Costs Scoble His Facebook Account

Posted on January 3, 2008 by jessestay

There’s a storm a brewin’ in the Bay Area today, and it’s not just those rain clouds coming their way! For those following the Twitter Storm, and Scoble’s blog, Scoble was banned from Facebook today due to some testing he was doing with an unreleased version of Plaxo Pulse. While Scoble is understandably upset, I think he is unfairly putting the blame on Facebook.

In the book, we quote a point in the Terms of Service which says that you “[can’t] use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;” It would appear that Scoble might be better off blaming those at Plaxo that he trusted to have read that before giving him a script that explicitely violates the agreement. I think Scoble’s blame of Facebook is somewhat unfair. I hope Plaxo has apologized profusely to Scoble!

Here’s what I think Facebook should do in the future, now that another publicity nightmare is ensuing:

Of course, they should reinstate Scoble’s account – maybe a slap on the hand with an explanation for the rule if you still can’t allow that practice, but Scoble’s account should have never been disabled in the first place!

Whitelist Scoble, and any other A-list blogger from all your disable scripts! – Do this now! Scoble is not the first, and I guarantee won’t be the last if you keep doing this!

Work with Plaxo on an acceptable solution to the problem Scoble is trying to address – this could be an excellent opportunity to calm the waters, work with the two parties, and solve an issue of one of your biggest users and supporters

Disable the 5,000 limit for all those whitelisted above – Twitter has exceptions to their API and request limits, why can’t Facebook? All those generating serious traffic to Facebook should be treated as royalty IMO. Scoble deserves much better treatment.

What I think will come of all of this is I think something will finally be done to address some of the biggest issues facing Facebook today. I think finally some sort of Export method will be allowed for contacts (with privacy limits, I’m sure!). I also think the 5,000 friend limit will finally be lifted for Scoble, and the traffic on his site will more than double over today and as the situation unfolds.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-02

Posted on January 2, 2008 by jessestay

Our “I’m on Facebook — Now What???” book has a Facebook page! Become a fan for updates: http://tinyurl.com/2cqs9g #

@ericlitman thanks for the add! #

@ericlitman I’ve got a tool that when launched will create a database of those follow spammers #

@dacort, or, you could try: sudo perl -MCPANPLUS -e ‘install Date::Calc’ 😉 #

My disagreement with @jasonalba and why I think Facebook Mail is good!: http://snurl.com/1wc4v #

@libel_vox thank you! I feel very honored! I just hope I can live up to your expectations 😉 #

@libel_vox is there an rss feed for codeaway.org? #

@libel_vox – nm, I found it. It’s just not in the site header so wasn’t apearing in my url bar for Firefox. #

Look – I made #5! (thanks @libel_vox): http://voxpopdesign.com/wordpress/?p=104 #

@jrockway – this is your opportunity!: http://tinyurl.com/ytkjea (this is \me, btw) #

Anyone want to add me as a friend on Google Reader? Either shoot me an e-mail or request to chat: jessestay@gmail.com #

cool – @guykawasaki bottom-posts his e-mails. His geek factor just went up for me 😉 (thanks @guykawasaki) #

welcome @trippfenderson, a former co-worker from Media General in Richmond, VA. @newmediajim, @ericlitman, @biznickman be sure to follow! #

did you know you can get blacklisted by Twitter by trying to follow too many people in a short time period? #

Not just that, but the Twitter API acts as though their not blacklisted – you try to follow them through the API, and it returns friend info #

Apologies, but I’m not going to put anybody doing SEO work on our API
whitelist. Nothing personal, but SEO translates to “spam” in my book. #

That was from a Twitter developer to me when I was trying to get on their API whitelist to do some testing with my application #

SEO isn’t even my specialty! (but is for my company) #

@dacort that’s what I’m going to have to do – hack around the problem to get it to work. I’m trying to provide a free tool and Twitter’ … #

@dacort are you on the twitter-development-talk google group? #

@dacort be sure to check out my latest discussion #

Kudos back to the Twitter developer – he admitted he assumed wrongly and apologized. #

mmm..just made myself a meatball sandwich. That was good! Trying to decide if I should make another. #

Just found the perfect use for the Facebook Friends Grouping feature: http://snurl.com/1weh6 #

@codybob also see http://www.came2pass.com – that one I wrote. Has a few bugs ATM that I’ll fix soon though. #

@codybob the difference between sustaind and came2pass.com is that I contributed several modules to Pligg, and am still giving back to them #

sweet! Now recruiters are coming to me to try and work for me, rather than trying to hire me. I love being an entrepreneur! #

22 fans for “I’m on Facebook — Now What???” – become a fan here: http://snurl.com/1wej5 #

@ashbuckles you should try the iLike plugin for iTunes #

@QueenofSpain as soon as I work out the bugs with Twitter’s dev staff, I’ve got a solution for you #

Just received the Forward from our superstar Forward author (see our Facebook Page for a hint)! I’m stoked! #