Léoville - Latest Comments in A River of TWiT

Re: A River of TWiT

stepp — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:00:45 -0000

Leo,

Here's a link for a beta Wiffiti screen tagged @River that you could try.

You can txt a message by sending @River <message> to 87884 or any Tweet with @River (or any other word we/you choose to tag) would get displayed on the @river Wiffiti screen.

This is a "lean in" and chat or "lean back" and watch experience.

Re: A River of TWiT

Jay Robinson — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:50:09 -0000

(Sorry for being off topic here)

Leo, Regarding your comment on TWiT #197, where you mention doing real time reactions to an Apple Event with silhouettes of you and your panelists a la Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This sounds very interesting! What if you did record an audio version of this which could be listened to with the video once Apple releases the Keynote to the podcast feed?

This would be a really fun idea!

Re: A River of TWiT

dave mora — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:11:04 -0000

Here are my 2 cents i wrote up a while back http://eunknown.org/blog/?p... not sure why but it bugs me the use @ when sending someone a message I vote for ~username and using @ as a location short.

Ex:

~davemora , I am @ work. where you @ ?

Leo, if you can add a feature where people on phone device can txt me with out being a member and I can reply back to their phone device I am willing to pay $$ a month for that feature. You can assigned Virtual Numbers like VN8188188180@twit.im the idea I can give people who wont join another social network still have the ability to send me a message (DM) make me happy.

If you will ever have a focus group count me in :) I love the idea of a constant stream of information. But, with more information comes the need to try and police it and keep it relevant.

Re: A River of TWiT

Teen TWiT — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:36:48 -0000

Sounds like a good idea. I have a question about it though. Using this "river" would you be able to quickly post the order of the reruns you are going to play so people have an idea of when those recording would be on? Just an idea, and it should be quick and easy to just type episode names quickly. You could even just say SN177, WW88, etc.

Just my ideas on the XMPP, it sounds good to me.

Re: A River of TWiT

AaronAsAChimp — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:08:43 -0000

I think it be also useful to distribute the river as a subtitle file when the shows are posted, instead of have to find the relevant links and stuff in friend feed. That way also the feed will be preserved along with the show.

Re: A River of TWiT

ChrisGilmore — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 05:52:55 -0000

Very interesting and a great idea...

Is there any way to get that feed into the tricaster? If the Tricaster could act on what sort of content it was seeing from the feed and put up the appropriate CG up, and possibly link to that story or ad page which is then clickable (we're streaming in Flash so IT SHOULD be relativly easy but then again, I have no experience with the Tricaster).

Is this possible within the current Tricaster system?

So if in the XMPP feed (for shownotes), we might have an audible ad for http://www.audible.com/twit, the tricaster would then see this as an ad and put the relavent audible CG up. If the content was a link to a story or a website you're discussing, it would put up a CG that is predefined (let's say the general TWiT one) with a clickable link to that story.

Re: A River of TWiT

Mike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 05:43:30 -0000

I strongly feel that the key to the sucess of this is simplicity! If you dont keep it quick, easy and simple to use the up take and usage will suffer. Look at the sucess both google and twitter had with a basic, clean but effective page.

I also think a possible problem will also be spam and spam bots on an open client with no 24/7 mods. Many music channel over here in the uk run txt to screen services, despite some very good filters they have all had to opt for 24/7 mods but i'm told this is outsourced to indian for cost.

Re: A River of TWiT

BenFranske — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:45:06 -0000

I would request that the stream be CC licensed (preferably the Wikipedia friendly and very basic CC-BY). This should be a requirement of contributing (like Wikipedia) and would allow future distribution of the show notes along with the (CC licensed) shows.

Re: A River of TWiT

Michael Wyres — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:49:34 -0000

As long as there is a decent tagging mechanism - (and obviously XMPP provides that) - it sounds like an excellent plan. I think you would need to have "topic" tags, so people can "sip from the firehouse" for stuff they want. You will also need "people" tags, so you can specifically take information from particular users, and exclude information from particular users, and possibly "group" tags - ie: say you wanted to join a group of people interested in all parts of the stream related to "widgets", you can join the group, and automatically get stuff from people in the group.

Re: A River of TWiT

Clayton — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:33:18 -0000

It appears that the intent of the new stream is not to replace the chat rooms as the primary way for live viewers to interact with each other but is to provide a very controlled way to supplement the live broadcast with ancillary information. This ancillary information could also be used to help form show notes and could, potentially, be associated with rebroadcasts of the show.

And as a secondary use, the system would provide the infrastructure for less structured one-off live blogging events like MacWorld keynotes.

I can't help but wonder if we are introducing a human scaling problem here. Can we really expect to have community moderators sift the firehose looking for the gems to promote up to the moderated stream? I guess it depends on the size of the firehose. I suppose if the bulk of the stream content comes from Leo, the hosts, and the pre-approved users the mods can be very picky about what gets promoted up from the masses.

I hope I'm not coming across as against this (I'm not, I like the idea), but it is hard to take off the tester hat that I wear at work as I look for holes or think of ways I can break the system. It creeps into real life far to often.

Still fighting to understand the use cases. Am I getting closer?

Re: A River of TWiT

blackfeathers — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:50:32 -0000

earlier thoughts that may be applicable:
some applications i would like to see with this river, in a way, correspond to my thoughts a decade ago about incorporating a feed that streams directly to an led ticker. back then, perl or python seemed like it was doable -yet very restrictive. i've searched all over the internet and ebay but either the components of a finished product aren't there or you have to deal with an expensive product relegated to talking with a salesperson in addition to figuring out what you had to deal with -ie. serial port/usb port/comm port/ethernet and if you had the necessary drivers to do it. lots of guesswork and gamble for me at the time.

other thoughts:
i think it would be great to have an adobe air application as well as an iphone application.

in all these implementations, i agree that having it versatile in accessibility is key. as long as there is a way for any device to pull data from the internet would make it really great.

and as you have stated, refining and tailoring the data for each user in realtime would help make it very viable.

Re: A River of TWiT

KDP — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:46:12 -0000

Sounds good, but would you consider porting it out to Windows Live alerts, or some kind of new tab on Windows Live Messenger? I guess the alert noise is annoying, but the concept of important messages popping up in an already well-established IM is pretty useful.
Also, could you integrate it with your twit.am audio stream, and send out text links? I know that Windows Media server has a command for sending out text inside a WMA stream, which custom-written receivers can interpret as needed (ie use as a url of a slide in a presentation, or use as a text command to trigger a function in an app or webpage.) You could have a floating window (or better yet, an HTML application running in it's own sandbox) which has a UI to recieve the TWIT.am stream, and display the text underneath.

Re: A River of TWiT

heking — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:24:01 -0000

Conceptually this sounds like a 'stream of consciousness' (or in this case 'river of consciousness') for the net. Indexing would be crucial, but the idea is fabulous.

Re: A River of TWiT

jdwusami — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:07:45 -0000

That sounds very cool Leo. I would love to participate in a live IM stream of content. Just have it work with Adium or iChat and I am in.

Re: A River of TWiT

Jesse — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:20:42 -0000

If you are going to offer an archived stream there needs to be a way to keep links from being broken or the link content from being compromised. Imagine what would happen if a link was suddenly pointing to malware. Yuck! How about doing some sort of tinyurl like link library that would be under TWIT control for later editing or redirecting.

Re: A River of TWiT

Chris Kaufman — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:14:35 -0000

Adding value to your content...Crowd Sourcing and Interactive Ranking:

I watch the shows pre-recorded. I assume the video will be on-demand sometime soon. Hash tags will be great to filter, but here is the feature I would think would be extremely helpful, though technically tricky possibly.

Each tag or comment should have an approximate time-code that matches up with the live video stream.
Each comment as an "object" should be right mouse clickable as it streams across
Right mouse click would expose a small menu: Example: 1) Funny, 2)Helpful, 3)Abusive etc
A server would collect and rank the top Funny, top Helpful, and etc

Question: Can Stickam pass script calls like you could in Video Flash?

If I had a Client that could replay Video on Demand and add the Funniest, or the most Helpful that would be extremely helpful. Also, You might insert a "Best of" feed post broadcast later into the actual video as a CNN type crawl. (See Obama the Magic N***gro feed on Fox for why not to insert it live)

I think this would make the video extremely valuable as tool and resource. It would leverage crowd sourcing aspects and add tremendous value to pre-recorded feeds.

Also it would give the crowd generated content a ranking, give lurkers and quiet listeners an easy task and allow less witty, or less knowledgeable viewers a way to participate.

And it would give Twit Members a way to see the best of the TwitCrowd. A Blog or Site would list these rankings. A simple script might someday be able call up that segment when the comment was made. By restricting the voting ranking to live sessions only, you could control demand and spamming.

Its been years since I engineered interactive TV, but I recall flash video enables this and I think this should be possible yes?

Re: A River of TWiT

Makrate — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:38:56 -0000

I like IRC style, I like the idea of a Pirillo-esque scrolling feed/river, but I don't like standalone IM client. As information will be coming pretty quickly, I like the idea of being able to pull individual feeds out of the "River" into my own "Pond" if you will, where I can look at my handpicked links, comments if i can't keep up with them. I know that the RSS piped into friend feed will provide all this for archival purpose, but I like being able to choose what I like on the fly, so that once the podcast is done I can save it for if I want to download the podcast later and look at my personal stream while listening. This might be beyond the scope of what you are trying to accomplish, but just my musings :)

Re: A River of TWiT

Robert Copelan — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:10:18 -0000

Bingo. I find the twitter public_timeline to be interesting but there is a lot of noise. An XMPP feed with a Real-time "ticker scroll" client will help that 24/7 "CSPAN" type of environment you want to create. On our side the ticker can be configurable as you suggest above or as someone else suggested with "Moderation points" or left wide open.

Re: A River of TWiT

Chris Heath — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:32:50 -0000

The whole idea is to have a live stream of trusted users creating this river in real time during the recording of the netcast. Later when you're listening you can then pull up the river for that specific netcast and have that real-time list of links and comments (from trusted sources so it's not noisy) and follow along as if it was in real-time.

I hope that made sense,
Chris Heath

Re: A River of TWiT

carrie — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:18:31 -0000

"We'll pipe it into a Friend Feed room where you can search, read, and comment on it at your leisure..."
Now you're talkin'. I only listen to the 'casts on my iPod, almost never live so a web page to look at with the links etc. would be great. Especially the chat stuff I never get to see.
-Carrie

Re: A River of TWiT

j5_jhallgren — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:11:37 -0000

I think the idea is for general users to supply info to "mods" who will then post the info to stream, thus keeping junk/spam under some control. A link to another site that is validated by someone like Darth_Emma would go thru, but a random submit by Listener-xxx wouldn't go direct to stream, ok?

Re: A River of TWiT

Catherine Ford — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:51:10 -0000

Hi Leo! I think this is an intriguing idea and I can't wait to see it implemented. I'm not a code monkey, but I'd definitely like to play with the finished product. I'll keep an eye out for your go-live announcement!

Re: A River of TWiT

Swift2 — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:49:27 -0000

Working in closed captions, I see problems. I'd rather have these links and so on appear in the podcast as a sprite, like Alex used to do with MacBreak videos. In other words, there's always the problem of dealing with synchronicity and "the river." It could end up as the worst of FOX's lower third crawl, which got adopted by everybody else, but goes against everything I learned from broadcasting and captioning. You want things to be thought out beforehand, as in, we'll put the url up when you talk about that recommendation, etc. In other words, if you don't plan ahead, and proofread and time afterwards, then it's not going to add much. Sorry. I'm a skeptic. If you edit it down, and put sprites on the podcast, and notes in what you post to iTunes, it's one thing. But I listen because I like listening.

Re: A River of TWiT

doctor atlantis — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:41:17 -0000

I think all the expletives should (by default) be replaced with "DV0R@K!" in the River. (And if it isn't too much trouble you could have them link to dvorak.org/blog.

Re: A River of TWiT

craisis — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:33:42 -0000

I agree with you. I think an IRC interface, maybe a moderated channel for some of the shows, (only voices can post) and open channels otherwise, and bots to grab and post, even with an XMPP interface would work. I also think it would be nice to have several channels, as the population grown on irc now, during some show's it's impossible to follow the conversations because of the number of them going on, so have one for gen chat, have one for show specific chats, etc.