Consultancy: Bringing a Beautiful Voice into Internet View

Over a year ago I wrote about my friend Neva:

I wasn’t living in Long Beach when Melissa Etheridge made her breakthrough playing locally at a club called Que Sera on 7th Street (funny that her wikipedia article doesn’t mention Que Sera), but every time I come out and watch Neva I think I’m seeing the beginning of the same thing. – neva rocks taco beach! *video* – May 4, 2008

I don’t remember how long I’d been going to my favorite watering hole, Taco Beach, when I happened to be there on a night when Neva was performing. Nothing formal or flashy, just an acoustic guitar and amazing voice playing over the bar PA, taking the passing attention of the audience between their conversations and drinking. Doing a solo acoustic set in that setting was not for the faint of heart. The audience wasn’t overly obnoxious or disruptive, but I’ve seen pretty talented musicians stare down at the floor, reduced to mumbling through their songs because they couldn’t break through the conversational sound-barrier. Sometimes it seemed to take a whole band to grab the audience’s attention, or at least something electric and loud. Neva had a backing-band a couple of times, but most of the time it was just her and her guitar and she was able to get the whole place rockin’ in her direction.

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Experimenting with Second Life in Education

Just “went” to a “screening” in Second Life of video projects created by Full Sail students. I’m intrigued by the idea of hanging around and chatting with friends and students in the virtual space and amused at how one of my my WoW loving coworkers belittles the experience. This was the first time I’d been in Second Life since briefly experimenting with it early in my Pepperdine doctoral program over three years ago. While it was less clunky than I remember it being, it was still a bit of a challenge just maneuvering around the theater where the presentation was taking place. I forgot the command sequence so that my avatar could just sit down. Not to belittle all the effort that the students and Dr. Repp put into the presentation, there were still a number of technical difficulties, such as being able to have all of us experiencing the videos in the same way (we had to “run” the videos on our computers versus Dr. Repp pressing a button) and that kind of undermined the “shared experience” part of the presentation.

I have no doubt that, if Second Life continues, it will get better year after year. I remember about two years ago a lot of companies and agencies were going to Second Life because many of them saw it as the next generation communication portal that would be much more natural than a webpage. Podcasters like Cali Lewis, from Geekbrief, and Adam Curry saw it as a great way to meet-up with fans and supporters. And a few bands put on virtual concerts (I never did find out if the bands played “live” and then pumped the sound to SL or just let their avatars gyrate to recordings and passed it off as a “concert”). But after a while activity seemed to drop off because companies, agencies and rock stars soon learned that things didn’t really work well with more than 20 people/avatars in a room. SL may have had millions of users and 100s of thousands visiting monthly, but it wasn’t able to accommodate very many avatars when they gathered together in the same room. The reality was that even virtual space has limitation based on the “horsepower” of the end users computers, the bandwidth of the Internet connection at the users’ end and at the server end, and the computing power at the server end to generate and distribute a virtual world across the network. But given the technology hurdles that one has to overcome just to make it work, I still think that SL is an interesting experiment, a good place to introduce students to virtual worlds and virtual world creation, but not someplace to really conduct class. One thing that came out of early SL experiments is that video podcasters like Cali Lewis and Chris Pirillo have gone to “live” video streaming services like U-stream and Stickam, that allows them to communicate with their fans and community in real time and in some cases have video or chat dialogue. So they accomplish the need/desire to connect with their community without having to learn how to teach a damn avatar how to sit down. jbb

Music: On the Subway by Brian Reitzell & Roger J. Manning Jr. from the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack

Click the following link for a SL in Education video…

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The iPhone Hype Continues – Leo Does 24-Hour Marathon

One cool thing with this year’s iPhone release is that I can follow it live on the web, especially iPhone coverage by Leo Laporte on his TWiTlive stream. This year Leo decided to stay “on-the-air” for over 24-hours, beginning with the release of the iPhone in New Zealand around 1PM PST and ending with the Hawaii release. The comparisons with Jerry Lewis’ famed telethons have been abundant. Thank god it’s been very much a dialogue and not a monologue with TWiT favorites Tom Merrit, Cali Lewis, Andy Ihnatko, Amber MacArthur, and Alex Lindsey and Apple Co-founder Steve Wazniak. As if additional buzz was needed, Leo has been giving away iPhone 3Gs which were donated by Audible.com. Thus there have been a few “give me an iPhone” videos such as the following:

Leo’s Kids – A TWiT Charitable Effort from Nick S on Vimeo.

Leo’s own ad for the 24-hour coverage:

I’m thinking that I’ll probably swing by the local Apple Store sometime over the weekend. And the hype continues. jbb

Technorati Tags: ambermacarthur, apple, applehardware, calilewis, CNET, geekbrief, iphone, leolaporte, media, techtoys, video

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Remembering the 1st Time (On the Eve of the 2nd Coming)

Ah, remember the magic of last year at the first iPhone event? It’s probably a sign of my own emotional instability that I’m nostalgic and emotional about such odd things. But on the eve of the possible second coming of the iPhone I thought it’d be fun to revisit that special moment June 29th, 2007. Alas, except for a couple of blurry pix none of the video that I shot (on my old Sony point-and-shoot) got saved. Damn. So, this video rendition is courtesy Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV and Geoff Smith from Ringtonefeeder.com. Enjoy (sigh). jbb

Music/Podcast: GBTV #0389 (medium) | GeekBrief.TV from the album “GeekBrief.TV | Medium Format” by Cali Lewis

Technorati Tags: calilewis, geekbrief, iphone, love, lust, musicvideo, techtoys, videopodcast, youtube

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We Few Tech-Pioneers

Tech-buddy, Greg text-messaged me today complaining that our favorite podcast empire, TWIT, is all about the toys and business of tech but has nothing in the education space. I offered my usual snotty response: “Well, ED tends to act like a walled garden, I’m probably the only one I know to twitter DURING class.” To put it more clearly, we can complain about there being no education voice (so far), but the truth is that I’m the only one in my circle of “real world” friends and family who does any of this stuff. I mean, my four siblings are all college graduates, intelligent folks, but I’m the only one with a blog or who listens to podcasts and twitters. Going one step bigger, of the forty staff members teaching or working at my middle school I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who does any of this stuff. I know that the boss has a website, because he’s a home-studio musician and wants to share his stuff and there are maybe four other teachers with MySpace accounts. But again, I don’t know anyone else has an ongoing web-presence, except a few of my Pepperdine techies and a few of my students. So it doesn’t surprise me that all the podcasts are about tech or tech related things and there are few ed-related ones on the “A” list. The ED-audience will come. I think it’d just be cool if I saw my brother or some other friends random musings on Twitter.

To that end, I just saw this video on Cali Lewis‘ Geek Brief podcasts and she said that when she showed it to some family members they suddenly understood it and started to Twitter. If only …. The following is from the folks at the CommonCraft show at www.commoncraft.com.

BTW, I’m jbb on twitter and you can catch my little 140 character witticisms at http://twitter.com/jbb

Music: If It Makes You Happy (Featuring Chrissie Hynde) from the album “Live From Central Park” by Sheryl Crow

Technorati Tags: calilewis, family, kids, media, podcasts, twit, twitter, videopodcast, work

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