JustinSpeak

The Live Video Control Room at NBCOlympics.com is the coolest thing ever. You can watch up to four events at once, assign different video to different screens, jump from sport to sport, enlarge a video if you’re particularly interested and there are other features I’m still learning.  This is major cool.  I wish Joost would have been able to do this (I like supporting the little guy).  Speaking of supporting the little guy, Micrsoft’s Silverlight technology really seems to be making a name for itself here.  Yeah, its a Flash alternative, but if NBCOlympics.com is taste of the potential of Silverlight, then I guess we have room for another fancy Internet technology.

So I’ve been using StumbleUpon for about a month or so now.  I love it.  It is SO easy to bookmark a page.  All you have to do is click the thumbs up.  However, I’m a big del.icio.us user and it makes it a little difficult on deciding which service to use for which page. My first idea was to use Stumble for individual pages and Delicious for entire sites.  However, that makes it difficult because sometimes I want to mark an individual page AND the parent site.

There are two particular issues about Stumble that are getting my goat. Stumble supposedly has a feature where you can import your del.icio.us bookmarks, but I can’t get it to work. This really pisses me off because being able to do a once a month dump into Stumble would really build an accurate picture of what I like on the Internet.  My other gripe is that I’ve been using Delicious for several years now and have hundreds and hundreds of bookmarks stored up! What’s a Justin Schmidt to do?

The random stumbling though is easily the coolest feature.  Not that I get bored on the Internet much, but when I do it is a great way to find new shit to see.

Here is a great post by Beth Sinak on a not-so-well known practice of the “other” search engine.

Yahoo’s Organic Links

I got curious today and decided to put the “Run Once - Welcome Back, Check Out How Much IE7 Rules” screen in Firefox to see how it would render.

Check out the image to see the awesomeness.

As you can see, there are rendering errors galore. Microsoft FTW.

If you have any interest in online music collaboration, then I highly suggest you check out www.indabamusic.com.  I love it.  They’ve got a great interface to share ideas, open your ideas to the public, a pretty good online editor, and they just added some great new features.  The best part about it, for now, is that it is ad free.  Unfortunately, being ad free does force them to use a paid model for people who really want to take advantage of all the features.  You only get five projects with the free version, which kinda blows.

There is another site out there for creating virtual bands, but it isn’t quite as user friendly as Indaba.  For those of you who didn’t click on the link, this other site is called www.kompoz.com.  It does basically the same thing, but the interface isn’t as nice.  In fact, I got frustrated setting up an account, and I’m very Web savvy.