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Yahoo! Live

Starting today, you can watch happenings of my life on Yahoo! Live at http://live.yahoo.com/jameskirsop. I’ll be broadcasting live (bandwidth permitting) from UTS Orientation/Clubs day this Wednesday, 20th Feb, so make sure you tune in to watch this social experiment.

Live (not to be confused with Microsoft’s Live service), seems pretty interesting – but isn’t really new. Other startups have been doing this for a while, but Yahoo seems to be the first major tech player to be doing anything about live video blogging.

The Y! Live blog gave a pretty good explanation of what they’re trying to do for broadcasters, viewers and developers on their blog.

You’ll see me intermittently broadcast from home — my connection isn’t fabulous here, but it might make some interesting viewing from time to time.

-james

 

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God’s gift to Facebook: 3rd Party Apps

With the recent addition of 3rd party apps, Facebook has become the superior site to MySpace among many of my tech-savy friends at Uni and at Apple. While some of them I find a bit of a waste of time, many of them are very useful and are very exciting for me as a user of many Web2.0 applications.

Two of my favourite apps are those that link my Facebook account to my flickr photostream and my account on Last.fm. Both of these services have allowed my friends to find out about my passion for photography and my taste in music – which couldn’t have been done nearly as well on MySpace – or even most other Social Networking sites.

I also like the Digg app, which pulls in the stories I digg throughout the day and the Texas HoldEm Poker application, which is proving as another great tool for procrastination as I go through my mid-year Uni holidays. Unfortunately the Poker app has a few bugs, or perhaps it’s just super popular and it’s causing server problems.
facebook poker
I’ve also heard, on the grapevine with nothing confirmed, that Apple might be doing some integration with Facebook, or another social networking site of similar nature. I’m not sure where they’d intergrate their current products (most probably the iLife suite or the iPod) into a social networking environment, but it would be interesting to see what they come up with.

What’s your favourite 3rd party Facebook app, do you like my favourites or do you have more suggestions?

– james

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Where in the world have I been?

Since it’s been quite a while since the hype that surrounded CeBIT AU (and I’ve still got some reviews to write up when I get a chance), I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been up to of late!
I’ve been doing a lot of Uni related activities of late – assignments, some paid work here and there, more assignments, and meeting people here and there. Uni has certainly kept me busy – and I’m looking forward to my break from studies (except for the one final exam I have) on Thursday afternoon.
I’m continuing to work at McDonalds, but I’m currently looking around for a new job. I really like working with the people I work with (especially the management, they’re all really great), but I’d like to find something I’m a little more interested in. Something up the tech side or something to do with photography would be great.
Here’s a few projects I’ve been working on at the moment, some old and some new.

  • St. Faith’s Youth website was launched recently, and proved to be a pretty big hit. We’re hoping to implement podcasts and vidcasts when I the time to do it. I’m trying to get a better production workflow happening, but that is proving difficult with only one computer.
  • As well as the youth website, I’m also producing a series of videos in the lead up to our yearly Youth Camp called Mission Impossible, with the theme this year looking to be Aliens, and based on 1 Peter. I’m also doing the technical production for the weekend, so I’m organising sound, lighting, AV and potentially a small scale radio station to run over the course of the weekend.
  • Various paid jobs mainly doing web design/consultancy and a few photography/media jobs on the odd occasion.
  • I’ve been elected as Computer Systems Officer for the UTS Programmers Society, which has taken quite alot of my time over the past few weeks. We’ve just swapped to a new file server with a much larger storage capacity and RAID, and I’ve had quite a few teething problems [1] that are yet to be resolved.

So, as you can see I’ve been pretty busy. But of course, that’s no excuse for not finding the time to write anything. Hopefully I’ll get back into writing once Uni finishes up. I’ve got a few things that I’d like to share with you all, but you’re just going to have to wait!

-james

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Google Maps Fun

Check out this little fun piece of trivia a friend alterted me to on Google Maps.

Go to the Google Maps website and in the text box type “Chicago to Germany”. Scroll down the list of directions on the left hand side and read point 20.

If you’re to lazy to do all that – just click here to go directly to the page.

I’m sure there’s alot of these sort of things in Google Maps, but that was just the first one I’ve found.

Good luck to anyone who uses Google Maps to get from Chicago to Germany. I hope you’re a good swimmer.

-james

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Twitterific 2.0beta

I just downloaded Twitterific 2.0 beta 4, so I just thought I’d give a quick run down on my impressions.

At the moment, I can’t see too many differences from what I’ve seen with 1.1, except I’m getting an error sometimes saying it can’t connect to the xml feed – but that could be a problem with my router as well (it does some weird things from time to time).

If you don’t know what Twitter is visit www.twitter.com and have a look. If you’re a mac user and using Twitter – Twitterific makes a great way to get updated via twitter. I also use Adium and my gmail/gtalk jabber account to keep track of everything.

You can add me as a Twitter friend with the username jamesk5. Let me know if you’re using Twitter (and the 2.0 beta) and what you think of it!

Update: I’ve just changed my Twitter username to jameskirsop to make it easier for people to find me.

-james

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James on the Interwebs!!

So from 12pm till 2pm today my face was clogging up tubes of the internet around the world as I sat in the booth for the Chaser’s War on Everything Season 2 countdown that is streaming across the world. I started off doing a Diggnation style program (minus the beer and a guy using a PC laptop), which was awesome. Some guy from Melbourne messaged in and said Diggnation was awesome, which it definately is!

You can visit the site at: http://www.countdowntothechaser.com.au/

Mad Props go to those that put this thing together, and the crew from the Bored of Studies for texting and calling me with stuff, also to the girl who texted me and said I was cute.. huge props to you ;).

Meanwhile, I might be back on during Friday morning (local time) from 2/3am till about 8am or so. I’m aiming to do a breakfast style program, with news of the day, maybe some interviews with people, and of course plugging the Chaser Which returns to the ABC at 9pm on Wednesday March 28th (if you hadn’t heard me say that before).

If I do it (and I’ll let you all know of specific times in the next 24 hours), I’d love to have people write in with things they want me to talk about.

Visit my contact page (above) to get my details!

-james

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Facebox, a MySpace alternative

Last weekend, I recieved another invite to a social networking service in my Hotmail inbox, which I usually regard as spam. I hadn’t seen an invite to this service come through my inbox before so I thought I’d check it out. I’m glad that I did, because Facebox seems to be a really good alternative to MySpace.
The first thing I noticed upon going to the Facebox homepage is that there are barely any ads which is something that is carried all the way through the site. So far, all I’ve been able to find is one block of Google ads on the Facebox homepage, compared to the multiple flashing and annoying ads that you get pushed at you on most pages within MySpace.
Profile pages on Facebox are quite appealing over the, usually, poorly designed MySpace pages. This is due to the user having the choice of a variety of pre-designed (and good looking) themes for their own pages, however the page layout is pretty standard at this stage. They don’t allow HTML tags, so you can’t make any modifications to the layout through hacking up their code, but that might change. I think one of the big appeals of MySpace is the way a user can customise their page to their hearts content (wether it actually looks good or not) and maybe Facebox will loose out on that factor.
In the feature set there’s the standard Photo/Video upload that you can find on most social networking sites these days. There’s also the ability to check out some basic stats on who’s been visiting your profile which is pretty handy. The messaging between users is also pretty good and they seem to have taken a page out of Google’s book in the way that they arrange the messages.
Facebox Messaging System
The best part of all, is that the service doesn’t break every 5 minutes! I’m sick of getting errors that have ‘Been forwarded to our technical department’ on MySpace. Unfortunately, the searching feature on Facebox needs a strong overhall because when I search for people from within a certain age range, I’ll often get people 2 years younger than the minimum age I searched for mixed in with the results I actually wanted.
I strongly recommend that people check out and register on Facebox if you’re addicted to MySpace, or just want to sign up to a MySpace like service without all the ads and other junk that you see there. There’s no band pages on Facebox, but that’s a small price to pay for a much cleaner looking, more stable service.
You can checkout my Facebox profile at: http://en.facebox.com/jameskirsop and if you register use my referal link so I get some Facebox credits.

-james

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