Hey local buddies – I want to make sure that BarCamp Portland is on your radar. It’s coming up next month. What’s BarCamp? If you’re not familiar, it’s a network of technology “unconferences” held in more than 30 cities around the world, with no preset agenda. I just put together a SplashCast channel of RSS feeds for BarCamp videos on YouTube arround the world. This should give you a taste of what it’s like.
I blogged more about this here.
Participants in the event could post their video blog episodes on any hosting service they chose and then tag it videobloggingweek2007 in MeFeedia.  Pretty cool stuff.  What kinds of videos were included?  Well, lest you think video blogging is a small thing – there were more than 900 videos uploaded last week!  Over at SplashCast we indexed the RSS feed from MeFeedia and created this crazy huge SplashCast show.  It’s not all 1k videos, but it does include the most recent 168 videos in the MeFeedia feed.  And, believe it or not, any new videos given the same tag will automatically appear in this show as well.  So check it out to get an idea of the breadth of the participants.  It takes a few seconds to load for the first time, but there’s a whole lot of video in there and after the first time you press play then advancing to other shows is very fast.
If someone wanted to put this live content on their own page they could do so with ease.  Pretty cool, huh?  Lots of fun video blogs here to check out.  Hover over the blue “i” in the bottom left of any video for a link to its page on MeFeedia, complete with description and website links.
This is the kind of thing I took the job at SplashCast for.  It’s just a preview of some incredible functionality the company is going to roll out next week. Three cheers for RSS feeds and online video!
Posted last night a profile of possibly my favorite SplashCast user – GrowingGoodness.com. Fascinating situation. This guy collected 35 “channels” of video from YouTube related to local, organic food, displayed them in SplashCast and then built an awesome site around them. The site is so proffesional looking and such a valuable resource – and the video channels are so compelling – that now people from the local, organic food communities are submitting original video to GrowingGoodness itself. I love it – I actually think it’s a great example of an emerging art form. If this sounds interesting to you, go check it out and don’t forget to visit the site’s blog. If you want to share some Digg love and get this story out to a much larger audience, here’s the link. I love stuff like this! Totally makes my job feel fun and worth doing.
Warning: Unusually mean stuff coming. Do you remember the ajax chat plug-in for blogs that launched a year ago February called 3Bubbles?  I didn’t think so; unless you watch every new app closely or follow the work of old school advisor types, you probably couldn’t have cared less over the last year about 3Bubbles. “3bubbles is going to be wildly popular with bloggers,” Michael Arrington wrote in his review when the company launched.  Wrong!  Though Arrington’s pied piper blog post led 40 other bloggers to link to his review, 3Bubbles today looks like a cold fish.  The company’s blog, linked to on the front page, hasn’t been updated in 9 months! That’s slower than TechCrunch posts in the morning!  They didn’t even post about John Edwards using the service, though there’s a badge on the front page.  John Edwards uses such an excessive number of Web 2.0 apps that if yours is on the list – odds are it’s not going anywhere.
Arrington was concerned that 3Bubbles might not be able to handle the massive traffic influx headed its way.  He forgot to mention in the post that that traffic was likely to be dispersed across Mebo, Gabbly, InCircles, GeeSee and goodness knows how many other services just like this that launched in 2006!  Man oh man did that guy give me a hard time when I worked for him if I gushed about someone without mentioning any competitors! Maybe he was just got distracted by all the players and lost his head in enthusiasm! Â
Why the hostility? TechCrunch is holding a contest calling people to mock the site about how how wrong it’s been about a review or market forecast.  I’m still embarrassed about falling for the April Fool’s joke – so in love and respect, I thought I’d oblige! What did 3Bubbles do to deserve this mean spirited post? Nothing, really. As someone working at a company staring into the startup abyss, I shouldn’t be so nasty. There’s just no other way to participate in the contest! What kind of blog runs a contest like that?
If you’re already reading the SplashCast blog, and you really ought to, then you’ll see this post there. I worked on it for quite awhile though, am quite proud of it, and wanted to post it here too. If you like it, there’s no shame in giving it a click over on Digg.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, has played a huge role in making the internet what it is today.  It’s made blogs and podcasts subscribable, it’s taken search to a new level and it’s changed the way many people read news.  The web continues to change, though, and our use of RSS can change as well.  Different types of media – video, photos and audio – are taking the web by storm.  Our collective engagement with that media by RSS is still in its infancy.
My definition of a mixed media RSS feed is this: it’s a feed created for the delivery of video, photos, audio files and other media items all together by RSS.
We here at SplashCast are proud to be some of the first to implement a type of strategy that we know that many service providers will unveil soon.  Today, we’re the only company that provides a way for you publish a channel of mixed media content (video, photos, audio and more) that’s subscribable by RSS and can be displayed in an embeddable player.  Other services will offer this soon, but we’ve got a whole lot more up our sleeves in the mean time.
For now, when we present our list of 10 Things You Can Do with Mixed Media RSS, we refer to SplashCast feeds.  These are big-picture use-cases, though, that you’ll see people exploring with many media delivery services in the future.  I’d love to read some more ideas, so please don’t be shy in comments.  What can you imagine doing with an RSS feed of any videos, photos, podcasts and PowerPoint files all put together, with voice overs, live links on text pages and more?
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Get Your Media Into Blog Search Engines Â
Get SEO From Your Videos, Photos, Audio
RSS feeds are the primary way most blogs are indexed by blogsearch engines, and sure enough thanks to RSS your SplashCast shows will appear in blogsearch results as well.  If you post your media in a blog post, then it will have twice the search engine juice.  If you just put it up in your sidebar or any other type of page, it will still be indexed.  We think that’s a pretty big deal and we’re always working on making this part of our service more powerful.  Right now Google Blogsearch RSS feeds will find SplashCast shows more reliably than the site’s regular search or Technorati, but we’ll continue to work on increasing the search engine optimization of media delivered through SplashCast.  Remember when blogsearch engines started indexing Twitter feeds?  Those sites are set to start indexing all kinds of personally produced media – including user generated media feeds in general.
Mix All Your Web Content Together Â
Add Your Own or Your Favorite Rich Media to Your Other Feeds
When your media has an easily accessed RSS feed, there’s all kinds of 3rd party services you can plug it into.  For example, you can use services like FeedRinse, Tumblr or others to splice your SplashCast media feed with other feeds you produce.  That means you can offer one RSS feed that combines your narrated photos, videos, PowerPoint presentations or whatever else you put into SplashCast along with your blog’s feed, your Del.icio.us bookmarks or any other RSS feed.  Put that spliced feed through FeedBurner and you’ve got a full-flavored RSS experience with analytics and easy subscription – even by email.  Why not replace your blog’s current feed in FeedBurner with a new source feed that’s your blog plus your media feed spliced together?  That way your subscribers can recieve text and media you publish.
Report Breaking News in Mixed Media Â
RSS Enables Fast, Automatic Notification
If you’re covering an important event in video, narrated photos, audio or a combination of all kinds of media – why not run your SplashCast RSS feed through an RSS-to-IM service?  Zaptxt, Rasasa, FeedCrier and other services will let your viewers sign up for an Instant Message or SMS whenever your SplashCast RSS feed updates.  No need for them to keep checking back to see if there’s a new installment to your breaking coverage!
Create A Collaborative News Network Â
Splice Your Feed With Other Peoples’
Splicing together multiple SplashCast channel RSS feeds into one RSS feed (using FeedRinse, FeedDigest or another 3rd party service of your choice) lets multiple users collaborate while retaining individual attribution and control over their personal  channels.  Right now we limit each embedded player to displaying one channel – but RSS subscribers can easily watch one feed that combines multiple channels.
Make Your Podcast Subscribable Wherever It’s Embedded Â
Let Your Fans Help With Distribution
Because every SplashCast player lets viewers subscribe by RSS with just two clicks, every fan of your audio or video podcast that grabs the embed code becomes another point of distribution not just for embeddable players but for RSS subscribers as well.  YouTube’s embed code is great, but SplashCast provides embed code in the player itself and each channel’s RSS feed for people who want to stay up to date on a channel without posting it to their own site.
Send Narrated SlideShows to Your Family and Friends Â
The Easiest Way to Subscribe to Media RSS Feeds
You probably know people who use My Yahoo, Live.com or other common, basic ways to read feeds.  SplashCast lets you narrate over photos, mix in videos and music – and all of that can be added to these common, basic feed readers with just two clicks.
Make Your PowerPoint Presentations Subscribable Â
Put Legacy Content to Work on the Live Web
If you create a lot of PowerPoint presentations for a class or for work, why not embed all of them in one player on a web page and let your audience get all the newest presentations by RSS?  We’re very excited to help people put the huge number of legacy PowerPoint files they’ve created on the web and deliver new ones easily by RSS.
Host Old-Fashioned Radio Contests, Web 2.0 Style Â
Anyone’s New Media Can Be Interactive
It’s easy to turn “the first three callers after we play song X will win a fantastic prize” into “the first three subscribers to our feed who email when we run a video or show a photo of X will win an incredible prize.”  We’ve got a number of SplashCast users who are running contests for people who embed their channel on MySpace pages – but why not use contests to expand your RSS subscribers?
Subscribe to Spiritual Teaching by RSSÂ Â
Illumination by Syndication
Wether your preference is ZenCast.tv or the Southside Assembly of God – you can subscribe by RSS to a wide variety of religious materiel through the SplashCast catalog.  Does Bill Clinton count as a spiritual teacher?  If not, Tracy Chapman definitely does.  Both are coming soon to the TED Talks channel.  Who wants a dose of corporate branding overlayed on top of their heartfelt media?  SplashCast lets you deliver your message to your subscribers without our name and logo getting in the way.
Brush Up On English as Your Second Language   Â
Syndicate Educational Media
Language learning is one of the most widely popular uses of the web and we’re proud to have the excellent show English Feed  distributed made with and distributed through SplashCast.  It’s just one of many educational uses made possible by mixed media syndication.
These are just some of the things you can do with a mixed media RSS feed.  What else can you think of?  There’s lots of possibilities in sports media, real estate, health care – you name it.  The underlying theme, though, is that when media is delivered by RSS it is more flexible and dynamic than ever before. Â
The innovation is only beginning.  We’ll be rolling out something based on RSS later this week that will knock your socks off and we’re sure that other media delivery services are working on a long list of exciting features as well.  Tools that make publishing easy combined with widespread use at varying levels of RSS reading technology, will help make the web an incredibly fecund medium long into the future.
Sometimes you’ve got to take advantage of having a personal blog. Doing a file transfer between computers tonight and found these. The one with my dad looks so much like me! I promise to return to regularly scheduled posts about stuffy internet matters soon.
How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it’s unavailable? I have never engaged in sustained use of a web app that is down this much – I can imagine large numbers of other people just walk away and never come back. Everybody says Evan Williams has struck gold in this wildly succesful new service – but I’m sure he knows there’s a real risk of that never proving true do to constant service problems. Good luck to the Twitter folks – I sure wish the site was up!