First an update on SpaceVidcast.com. Site is coming along nicely. The live stream is up and counting down to the STS-123 launch.
The UStream.tv banner is complete and I think it looks really nice:
While the Spacevidcast thing is wrapping up I’m starting two other projects. One is a lifecast of sorts. This is my replacement to the Technology Evangelist podcasts, but a wee bit different. I have set up my office with audio and video and I am setting up my home office with similar equipment. I’ll be doing off-the-cuff technology shows live and recording them and doing a little TubeMogul distribution of sorts. Unlike the TE shows where you had to tune in at a specific time, this you will be able to watch 24×7. Unlike lifecasting where 95% of it is boring in this scenario we’ll be switching between streams and people to keep the conversation going. Should be a lot of fun. Look for more info here later.
The next project I’m working on is part of the TechCompass.com network. This is still in formation so I can’t say too much. Not because it is confidential but because I simply don’t know yet. More deets on this project as I bring the lifecasting project online and Spacevidcast becomes a well oiled machine.
All of this AND I have a full time job. Early in the week I will be deploying new anti-virus software to replace an aging Trend Micro system, deploying a new backup solution, fixing the date/time problem on a few really old servers, and just generally keeping the system running.
My time will be stretched pretty thin, but in the end I believe the new media projects are well worth it. My past is in media, my future will be in media. Media is what I love to do, it is what I was born for. I’m good at Information Technology (IT), I’m *great* at live TV and I love the new Internet live streaming. Monetization here I come!
I took some of the work Bluefox did and modified it to be actual advertising banners for the upcoming STS-123 mission. There are currently some issues with Endeavour’s UHF radio which may delay launch, but if not then you may start to see something along these lines on UStream.tv:
Bluefox has not yet approved these designs, so he may come back and say “they look awful, what are you thinking?????” Personally, I like the one with the shuttle taking off (secret: the orbiter in all the pictures is Atlantis and not Endeavour. Shhhhhhhh).
I have brought Spacevidcast.com online in a rough form. Only the very basic functions are there right now and I have yet to get simple things like navigation in place, but it is still neat to see.
Even if the site is not fully online should Endeavour launch on March 11th as scheduled I will be covering it live. The site is not required for live coverage, but it sure would be nice.
There are two really neat things on the site:
1 - The search box is an AJAX search that will show results in real-time as you type.
2 - The code is all W3C compliant. COOL!
Bluefox is super picky about his designs (as any good designer is) and wants to change the stars in the upper left. When I spliced the image apart to turn it in to HTML I had to create a repeating element for the stars. He doesn’t like this, and I tend to agree. It’s very subtle but once you see it the repeating pattern will annoy the heck out of anyone.
I like how clean the site ended up being. I also like that with the 750 pixel wide white area (710 usable) I can add a 640×360 video that I shot in HD and not have to pop up another window. The problem is, like I mentioned earlier, I have no navigation on the page yet. If I want to keep the ability to have 640×360 videos I’ll need to figure something out with navigation that is horizontal.
Next steps are to fix that repeating star element, add navigation back in, clean up the footer, test with a UStream.tv video window and chat box side by side (it will be tight), get some cacheing installed, SEO/SEM optimize the site and finally find a way to distribute the vidcasts in their own RSS feed. Sounds like a lot but once the nav is in place the rest should come quickly.
The launch of STS-123 is coming up (hopefully) on March 11th in the wee hours of the morning. I wanted to get at least one on-demand show out the door for SpaceVidcast.com as well as prep for live coverage of STS-123. A couple things were missing though, namely a web site design. Sure we have the logos for the live show and whatnot, but no web site. Bluefox to the rescue!
Large Banner
Standard Ad Banner
Small Ad Banner
Vertical Ad Banner
Some of the text needs to change before I start using the banners. I would like to partner up with sites like NASASpaceFlight.com and Spaceflightnow.com. To do that I don’t want to compete with their core audience who will be reading breaking news. My goal is to bring awareness to the masses on why space flight is important for humanity, why it is worth the billions and billions of dollars it takes and frankly to get people excited about space travel again.
Bluefox and I were at it again and he got a few more graphics cranked out. These are missing the RSS ticker at the bottom, but we’re getting closer. I really like how the images are coming along. Next is the web design and the advertising banners at which point I believe all design work will be complete!
This is the lower third for things like IRC chat, possibly name banners, etc.
This is the color bug
And finally this is the standard black and white bug for when no other graphics are on-screen
Earlier I posted that I was using Bluefox to design my live show graphics for SpaceVidcast.com (which was earlier called NASASpaceCast.com and may change names again before we launch.) The problem with using a talented graphic designer is that they are super busy all day and night designing, so it can be hard to get extremely fast yet pretty graphics out of them.
Yesterday I decided I should probably have a plan B and designed my own live streaming graphics. This is what I came up with:
Not bad but really nothing different than what anyone else has done. Later in the evening around 2:00am or so I was able to meet up with Bluefox and a couple hours later he was able to crank this out:
That’s pretty freaking cool but doesn’t quite work with the graphics. So a few minutes later this came my way:
That’s even better. Logo is a bit smaller to allow for more text and there is more usable area for objects at the bottom while still remaining very sleek and web 2.0 looking. Finally Bluefox thought that there may be a way to reduce the footprint even more and still allow for text, or possibly use both the last image and the following image in two different scenarios:
Even smaller logo but it still comes across in the stream beautifully and an even smaller footprint but you’ll see we were still able to fit all of the text on there in the same font size.
Bluefox isn’t done but it got to be around 4:00am CST and we were both tired and called it a night. The graphic at the top that I did doesn’t even begin to compare to a couple hours work for Bluefox. This is why I use a pro graphic designer, and you should too. My next task for Bluefox: fix my blog theme!
I’m testing a new build of CamTwist. Rather than just run it on my desktop I decided I should probably try streaming it live to see what happens. Below is my live video and chat room:
In anticipation of a few projects I have going on I have moved to my own hosted platform. For anyone who wants to do Wordpress or Drupal hosting I thought it would be nice for me to go over what options I went with and why:
HTTP Host - MediaTemple.org. I like MediaTemple because they have incredible uptime, great prices and packages that will fit almost anyones needs. I used their Grid Service (GS) for a while but my needs are a bit more complex so I went for a Dedicated Virtual server (DV) which gets me a full Plesk control panel.
Registrar - GoDaddy.com. While they used to be the big evil registrar that would steal your domains right from under you they seem to have turned a new leaf. Great pricing, mobile access and a powerful administration tool make this my favorite registrar.
DNS - DNSMadeEasy.com. If you even think for a moment that using the DNS service that comes with your registrar is a good idea then you’re a fool. Registrars really suck at DNS hosting and so I use DNSMadeEasy.com which has a remarkable uptime and a ton of options for both forward and reverse DNS settings. The admin interface is a bit rough but when it comes down to DNS you’ll want a low price, 100% uptime and the most amount of flexibility. In the 8 years that I have used these guys I have seen zero issues. The best part is that if you go for an enterprise account (around $60.00 a year) you get free domain monitoring (which is usually a couple dollars per domain) plus DNS failover so if your main host goes down you can fail to a backup page. Really great stuff.
E-Mail - Google Apps for Business. Use IMAP and just about any client other than Outlook (the worst e-mail client ever built, ever, ever) and you’ll have an amazing e-mail experience. If you have a Macintosh just use Mail.app and call it a day. I have tried to sell this to users for years and they seem to fight me every step of the way. Once I break them down they move to IMAP and never, ever look back (unless of course they stay with Outlook). Google Apps is free, has good enough IMAP support and still allows for a webmin interface.
Platform - Wordpress.org. This is personal preference. I would say it is between Wordpress.org for blogs and Drupal.org for full platforms. Stay away from MovableType as they don’t scale well at all and the platform is simply a pain in the butt to work with. Oh yeah, and it’s based on freaking Perl. WTF?
Graphic design - Bluefox. The Bencredible site actually was not designed by Bluefox, and you can tell. Hard to read, bad fonts, just a really amateur design. All of my future sites will be designed by Bluefox as he has a really great feel for web 2.0 stuff and the latest trends in pretty.
In the end the above items allow for very rapid deployment of your blog or community based platform. Fast, easy and as close to 100% uptime as you’re going to get without load balancers or moving to the EC2 service. For now as we wait for DNS to fully make the switch (24 to 48 hours) you may bounce between the old and new site. If you see this post you’ll know you have come to the right server!
Not that long ago I sent in my own Good Question to WCCO asking why they were not broadcasting their news in HD. The beautiful irony is that I send in that very question in, wait for it… HD!
Today I found out that while WCCO news may not be HD (yet) they do have a twitter account for breaking news stories. Ok, cool and good first step to getting my attention. Then I dig a bit deeper and find that not only do they have a Twitter account but they also have at least one N95-3 cameraphone that they are playing with.
WCCO is not sure how they are going to use it yet. Does one go for the Qik angle and stream breaking news directly from the phone? Should they walk the studio during a live broadcast and give a behind-the-scenes view of the show? Is there another angle that they can use the device for and really push the boundaries of new media? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet (mostly because they don’t know either) but I have a feeling that they will be doing something very cool, very soon.
My suggestion to WCCO News: do it all.
WCCO News isn’t known for getting the younger crowd but I think if they start to hit all of the new media markets they will slowly get there. I’m speaking as someone in the 18-30 year old demographic here. Go HD (don’t tell me it is expensive, I used to do R&D for HD studios far larger than yours, I know exactly how expensive it is, suck it up). Get on Twitter not only for breaking news but for other station personalities as well. Get on Facebook and MySpace for all of these personalities too. Have a nightly UStream.tv broadcast using something like the upcoming version of CamTwist that will allow you to cut between multiple cameras (one in the control room with ISO/IFB audio, one in the studio pointed backwards, one in the MCO, etc., etc.) Have Qik live streams that are linked to your Twitter account and bring these cameras out with you in the field. Bring us, your audience, in to the conversation. Make the news a community driven event again. Make your broadcast a social network in and of itself! Be innovators in Electronic News Gathering, push the envelope, force the other local stations to take notice. Heck, make CBS take notice. These technologies are incredibly inexpensive or in many cases free. All of them open you up to a whole new audience, some of which is even outside of Minnesota.
This is either going to be very exciting when WCCO starts to move forward, or they are going to get scared, back down and do something lame. Here’s hoping they just do it all.
I am working on a new personal project which right now is known as NASASpaceCast.com (no domain there yet so no actual link). This will be a weekly live video podcast on all things space flight as well as live coverage of NASA space missions including the upcoming STS-123 flight to the International Space Station.
So far I have many pieces of the puzzle in place. I already own all the audio gear myself (I have some pretty kick butt gear), I have the computer but what was missing was the video side and the show image. The video portion of the show is near completion with a new revision of CamTwist from Steve Green (it is going to be uber cool). The show image (branding) is being worked on by BlueFox AKA Sean Blake (one of my favorite designers) and below is the first draft of what you’re going to start to see.
This of course is just the logo and will be the basis for what all of the show graphic, advertising banners and templates look like. I also need to make a final decision on domain name. The options I have are: NASASpaceCast.com, SpaceVideocast.com, SpaceVidcast.com and SpaceFlightCast.com. If you have a preference please leave it in the comments below. Personally I go between NASASpaceCast.com and SpaceVidcast.com. What I really want is Spacecast.com but that’s not going to happen as it is already taken by a TV network (curses!)
The final steps will be to create a theme song, which I’ll start working on soon and finish up the show outline. I’m really close to release, about 80% there. Then again I was 75% of the way there about 2 months ago. I’m in the stages where one element can hold up the whole thing. Unlike other live videocasts and podcasts I want to ensure that I have fantastic production values and make a show that is fun and interesting to watch week after week. Content is king but it needs to be fun too!
Keep watching Bencredible.com for more interesting announcements and behind-the-scenes info on NASASpaceFlight, the Compass Networks (more on that soon), and the resurrection of the old TechnologyEvangelist.com podcasts under a new brand. Very exciting stuff is headed your way soon! I’ll keep updating everyone on the progress of these projects here.
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