Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

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December 30, 2007

Reliving My Grandparents' Wedding

Watch the Video

Tags: 1938 | Cy Kaplan | grandma | grandpa | Theresa Goldman Kaplan | weddings

Posted by acarvin at 6:33 PM

December 26, 2007

A Christmas Lumiere

Watch the Video

Tags: 1890s | Christmas | film | Lumiere

Posted by acarvin at 3:58 PM

Retro Sci Fi Kayleigh

Retro Sci Fi Kayleigh, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Funny pic of Kayleigh peering through a piece of orange plastic on a toy tent.

Posted by acarvin at 2:22 PM

December 21, 2007

Highlights from the NPR Utterz-Twitter Experiment

This week, NPR's Morning Edition will air a series on the 10th anniversary of the word "weblog" and the impact of blogging over the last decade. I've been helping the producers in a variety of ways, like writing a timeline tracing blogging's origins, tracking down interesting bloggers for them to interview and writing a story on my own experience with blogging over the years. (I'll post links to them once they go online.)

I also sat down with a producer from Morning Edition to do a demo of the mobile audio blogging service Utterz and the microblogging tool Twitter. We were curious to see what kinds of responses we'd get from Utterz Twitter users to this question: "What are you doing for New Year's Eve, and what do you wish you were doing?" We got 70 replies, and I thought I'd share some of the highlights.

For Utterz, I recorded the question as a voicemail over my mobile phone, which then got cross-posted onto my Utterz page, my blog and my Twitter account.

We got 42 replies to the question this way, including this one from video blogger Jonny Goldstein, who talks about attending a Chinese banquet with his in-laws:

Wendy Drexler, a teacher in Florida, described a trip she's taking to Maine:

Fricka, who designs apparel for gamers, recalls how she spent one New Year's eve helping a mother and baby after their car caught on fire:

It should come as no surprise that Hawaiian blogger InfinityPro is happy to be home in Hawaii:

In contrast, technology evangelist Len Edgerly would prefer to toast the new year with Barack Obama:

One Utterz user who goes by the name "rcow" doesn't know what he's doing because his wife plans all of their social engagements:

Jennifer Sardam, who writes the literary blog Observed in Books, plans to work on her reading goals for 2008, even though she'd rather be celebrating another new year in Germany:

Over at Twitter, meanwhile, I received 28 replies. Some of my favorites:

kthread: happy to be ringing in the new year partying with close friends at my house, attempting to make this: http://tinyurl.com/39rcsu

leh4: What I wish I were doing: scuba diving somewhere WARM. what i'm actually doing: moving into my new apt

karynromeis: I'm going to a party at my church. I wish I was going to a party with my friends back in Cape Town!

vgloucester: Probably sleeping - probably sleeping...lol.

ruby: I'll be at the beach with my friends and our families for the 11th New Year's in a row! It's ritual of laziness+food+drink+love.

ryanne: we don't have plans yet, but probably something low key!

ClareLane: Going to Sedona for R&R with nature and spirit and college roomie and our hubbies. Am very happy doing just that Thanks!

jonnygoldstein (supplementing his Utterz post): i'm will be in NYC. Going to Chinese midnight banquet with my wife and in laws. Wish I was going to be inebriated at some blow out.

digitalmaverick: I'll be, as every true Scot, wearing my kilt and singing Auld Lang Syne at a party, then at the bells I'll 1st Foot my neighbours

kanter: raising money for cambodian orphans http://tinyurl.com/yryffz

jensimmons: I'm sleeping on much of New Years, recovering from hauling all my stuff to Jersey. I'm thinking about heading to a yoga retreat.

Darshell: Hope to be going out with the hubby- dinner, dancing, etc but will probably be home with the kids. Who wants to babysit new year's?

Karoli: staying home watching the ball drop on the high-def TV. wish I were going to Corona del Mar and chilling

tigerbeat: not sure yet. Probably be up late enough to listen to the 3 am feed of Morning Edition on KQED. Wish i were somewhere warm & sunny

JoeGermuska: spending it in with friends, which is just the way I like it

BrassT: Watching movies and playing boardgames with the kids and hubby :-) How late will the kids sleep if I let them stay up til 12?

But my favorite reply came in the form of two responses from blogger/artist Susan Reynolds:

NEW YEARs eve home in VA recovering from breast cancer surgery but encouraged by all of you. Twitter pea avatars = VISIBLE Support

NEW YEARs eve - what I wish I was doing? I can't imagine feling more loved, so no celebration could be better

For those of you who don't follow Twitter, about two weeks ago Susan announced via Twitter that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and would have surgery on December 21. Susan even created a blog called Boobs on Ice to document her sudden transformation into a cancer patient, including how she soothed the pain of her biopsies by using bags of frozen peas as a compress.

Almost immediately, the Twitter community responded. Dozens of people started changing their profile picture to show them with a bag of frozen peas, to show their solidarity with Susan. That gesture then morphed into a photo sharing group on Flickr, which now has almost 300 pictures of Twitter users with their bags of peas.

Meanwhile, it didn't take long for Utterz to get into the mix. NBC cameraman Jim Long, better known to the Twitter community as NewMediaJim, recorded an impromptu interview with Susan using Utterz, just after she finished her pre-op visit:

By the time Susan's surgery took place on the 21st, Twitter users had organized a fundraising campaign called the Frozen Pea Fund, asking people to donate to the American Cancer Society in Susan's name. Nearly 120 people donated more than $3500 in the first 24 hours. If that doesn't demonstrate the power of Twitter and Utterz as tools for building community, I'm not sure what would. -andy

Tags: microblogging | mobcasting | Morning Edition | NPR | Susan Reynolds | twitter | utterz

Posted by acarvin at 4:49 PM

December 18, 2007

Demoing Utterz for NPR's Morning Edition; Your Help Needed!

Right now I'm recording a demo of Utterz with a producer from Morning Edition. We just posted question to Twitter - "What are you doing for New Years and what do you wish you were doing?" - and we're asking it on Utterz as well to see what kind of replies we get in the next 24 hours. You can also reply using other tools like Seesmic, blip.tv, etc - whatever you want. Just be sure to let me know either by replying to me on Twitter or posting a comment below if you're not a Twitter user. And please keep your responses clean as we may use them on air. Thanks!

Mobile post sent by acarvin using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Tags: mobcasting | mobile phones | Morning Edition | NPR | podcasting | Twitter | Utterz

Posted by acarvin at 2:49 PM

December 17, 2007

Social Media Advice for Ayman Al-Zawahiri

According to Al Jazeera and a number of other news sources, the latest video from Osama bin Laden's wingman, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, came with a brief note that Zawahiri would like to take questions from the public and answer them in his next propaganda video. The Al Qaeda-associated websites that first published the video said that Zawahiri would conduct an "open interview" in which user questions could be submitted over the Net. However, they didn't go into too much detail as to how those questions would actually be collected or selected.

Just in case Dr. Zawahiri is reading this blog, I thought I'd offer some friendly suggestions, from one Web 2.0 enthusiast to another.

1. Accept tough questions. If all of the questions you answer are along the lines of, "What's it like to be the coolest surgeon-turned-terrorist?" "What's your favorite hidout?" or "Diamonds or pearls?" you'll quickly lose credibility among bloggers.

2. Be sure to vet the people asking the questions. You may have heard that CNN and YouTube recently had a debate in which some of the people whose videos were used had connections with various political campaigns. CNN is still taking a tongue-lashing from the blogosphere, and Anderson Cooper even had to issue an apology. So when you select questions, be sure to note publicly if they have any potential conflicts of interest, such as, "This question comes from David, who as an undergrad attended a rally against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and once sent Yassir Arafat a birthday card." There's nothing worse than having anyone question your professional integrity.

3. Consider using open source. I'm sure you must be a big fan of Digg, so perhaps you've come across Pligg, an open source content management system that lets you do Digg-liking social news polling. The online community is a sucker for anyone who embraces open source, so that'll go a long way in getting coverage on sites like Techcrunch, Boing Boing or maybe even Slashdot. Speaking of Slashdot...

4. Be prepared for the Slashdot effect. If you're gonna ask the public to contribute questions, be prepared for the traffic. If your server goes down for even a few minutes, you'll never hear the end of it, and it'll be the last time Osama lets you pull a stunt like this. And who wants to go back to the old-school way of coming up with your own questions when all the cool kids are doing otherwise?

5. Trust your users. If the public rates a question particularly highly, you ignore it at your own risk. There's nothing worse than participating in a social news project only to find out that the editors have completely ignored the community's preferences and gone with a question they wanted to use.

6. Consider tagging. One failing of the YouTube debate was that users had to go to YouTube to submit their questions. 10questions.com, on the other hand, let users go to a variety of uploading tools and then "tag" that content with a keyword, so it could be aggregated easily. For example, if you told users to upload their question to whatever site they chose (including their own blog) and tag it AskDrZawahiri or AskATerrorist, you'd go a long way in terms of winning kudos from folks who are skeptical of anything YouTube does.

7. Remember to have fun with it. You're bound to get lots of questions like "How could a person trained to do no harm adopt a philosophy that seeks to do as much harm to innocent people as is humanly possible?" or "What do you expect to gain from killing so many of your fellow Muslims?" Try mixing it up a bit and consider questions like, "So Ayman - what's the story with your forehead?" You know you're bound to have that question rise through the voting ranks like a softball question for Ron Paul, so why not embrace it? You know we're all dying to know.

Tags: Al Qaeda | Anderson Cooper | Ayman Al-Zawahiri | CNN | community | Digg | Pligg | questions | social media | social news | web 2.0 | YouTube

Posted by acarvin at 2:05 PM

December 14, 2007

Caught in the Act

Caught in the Act, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

...and they thought they could get away with it!

Posted by acarvin at 9:11 PM

Star Wars Stencil Graffiti

star wars, originally uploaded by Chuckumentary.

Gotta love this pic taken by Chuck Olsen in Minneapolis.

Posted by acarvin at 1:24 PM

Another Utterz Demo for an NPR Colleague

Mobile post sent by acarvin using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Posted by acarvin at 10:34 AM

What Teachers Really Make

High school teacher and slam poet Taylor Mali gives his response to the obnoxious question, "So, you're a teacher - what do you really make?"

Hat tip: Larry Anderson

Posted by acarvin at 8:51 AM

December 13, 2007

Technology Daily Closing Down in January

I just got a Facebook message from Danny Glover, editor of National Journal's Technology Daily announcing that they'll be shutting down at the end of January. Here's the text of his announcement.

I am writing to let you know that after a nine-year run, National Journal's Technology Daily will cease publication next month. The company's commitment to covering tech policy and politics remains as strong as ever, however, and we hope you will continue to look to National Journal for the hottest news and sharpest insights in that arena.

I am proud to have given Tech Daily a home on Facebook over the past several months, and I am grateful for your readership. I am happy to answer any of your questions or refer you to the people within the company who can answer them. You can e-mail me at dglover@nationaljournal.com.

Below is the note we sent to Tech Daily subscribers yesterday evening. We thank you again for your interest in our publication.

Sincerely,
Danny Glover, Editor
National Journal's Technology Daily

December 12, 2007

Dear Technology Daily Subscriber:

We wanted to make you aware of some important changes planned in the coming weeks and months with regard to coverage of technology policy.

We will be expanding our technology coverage across our publications in 2008, in recognition that technology issues infuse nearly every area we cover: health care, energy and the environment, national security, education, and even campaigns and elections.

Most immediately, we will be adding reporters to CongressDaily – our twice daily publication for Capitol Hill insiders – to enhance coverage of technology policies, while also devoting additional space and resources to better track technology-related issues within the public policy arena.

We will be closing our technology-specific online publication, TechDaily, effective at the end of January 2008. Launched nine years ago, during the “tech boom,” TechDaily covered an important and emerging sector, which was little understood or appreciated in Washington at that time. Editor Danny Glover, his predecessor, Sharon McLoone, and the staff at TechDaily have done an outstanding job and we are grateful for their efforts.

Technology issues and coverage have come a long way in ten years; it is time to recognize the need to incorporate technology into all that we do. We plan to make some of TechDaily’s most popular features available in CongressDaily.

A member of our Reader Relations team will contact you in the next few weeks to provide specific details on this transition and to address any questions or concerns you may have. If you have any questions in the interim, please contact us at (202) 266-7388 or by email (TDService@nationaljournal.com), or feel free to contact me directly at SuzanneClark@nationaljournal.com.

Thank you,
Suzanne P. Clark
President
National Journal Group

Tags: journalism | National Journal | news | Technology Daily

Posted by acarvin at 9:29 AM

December 12, 2007

Just a Test of Utterz.com

I'm just testing out the mobile podcasting tool Utterz. It's similar to tools like Audioblogger and Audlink, both of which went defunct a while back, except that it does a much better job at letting you crosspost to other sites, such as your blog or your Twitter account. At least that's the idea. We'll see if this works.

Mobile post sent by acarvin using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Posted by acarvin at 2:10 PM

December 11, 2007

What Milestones Would You Include in a Timeline History of Blogging?

I'm working with the folks at NPR's Morning Edition on a series they're planning to do about the history of blogging and its impact on society, and one of the things I'm trying to write is a timeline identifying some of the major milestones. My goal is two-fold. First, I want to show that blogging's origins on the Internet pre-date the invention of the term "Web log" by many years, not to mention its historic relation to journal-writing more broadly. Second, I want to emphasize interesting milestones that would be of interest to a mainstream, non-technical audience, rather than create a comprehensive timeline with every minor technical, business, political and social milestone. I'm not sure what the overall word length will be, but it won't be huge, so I need to pick my milestones carefully.

Here are some of the milestones I've come up with so far:

Unknown: Mariners begin keeping a "log book" to record the speed of their ships, measured by "heaving the log," throwing overboard a piece of wood or lead attached to a long rope with knots in it.

Early 9th Century: Chinese philosopher Li Ao publishes one of the first known diaries, a travel journal entitled Lainan Lu ("Record of Coming to the South").

17th Century: Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn publish journals that are among the earliest diary best-sellers in the English language

1812: London publisher John Letts begins selling blank "page-a-day" books intended to be used as personal journals and business ledgers.

1966: James T. Kirk (William Shatner) begins an episode of Star Trek with the words "Captain's Log: Stardate," inspiring a generation of young diarists eager to document their own life events by any means necessary.

1967: The Internet is invented.

1979: The birth of USENET, a decentralized system of discussion boards, forming the basis of some of the Internet's oldest online communities.

1983: Brian Redman creates mod.ber, a USENET discussion through which he and his friends post summaries of interesting things they find online and offline.

1989: British researcher Tim Berners-Lee proposes the development of the World Wide Web.

1990: Margaret Lanterman, aka The Log Lady, begins dispensing advice and prophesies that supposedly emanate from the wooden log she carries on the TV series Twin Peaks. (It remains to be seen how much of an influence Lanterman is in blogging history, but I thought I'd err on the safe side and include her just in case.) Hat tip: Jim Long

1992: Berners-Lee launches the first website. Among his publishing innovations that year is the first "What's New" page, a Web page that places new updates at the top of each page, pushing older items down to the bottom.

1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his "Open Diary," a Web page documenting goings-on in his life. At the same time, online diarist Justin Hall would gain notoriety for creating a "personal homepage" on the Web covering his day-to-day activities in very revealing – and occasionally embarrassing - detail.

1994: Brian Lucas launches travel-library.com, a collection of online travel journals submitted by the public to the rec.travel USENET group.

1995: Vermeer Technologies releases FrontPage, one of the first Web publishing tools. Introduced the idea of allowing people without coding skills to publish websites.

1996: The 24 Hours in Cyberspace. Thousands of people use the Internet to collect photographs of people whose lives were affected by the Internet. An early experiment in collaborative photo blogging.

Feb 1997: Steve Gibson hired by Ritual Entertainment to journal on a full-time basis, making him one of the first professional bloggers.

Dec 1997: Jorn Barger uses the term "Weblog" for the first time to describe his online journal, Robot Wisdom.

1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals. Would later be followed by other journaling tools including LiveJournal (1999), DiaryLand (1999), Pitas (1999) Blogger (1999), Xanga (2000), Movable Type (2001) and Wordpress (2003).

Spring 1999: Online journal writer Peter Merholz jokingly takes the word "Weblog" and splits it into the phrase "We blog." Over time, "blog" would supercede "Weblog" as the term of art for describing online journals.

1999: Development of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Made it easier for people to subscribe to blog posts, as well as distribute them across the Internet, such as the early news aggregator Radio UserLand. (Hat tip: Joe Germuska)

2001: Big-name bloggers begin to emerge, including Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit)

2002: Bloggers focus their attention on comments made by Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) that appear to endorse segregation. After intense coverage in the blogosphere, the story spreads throughout the media, forcing Lott to resign his leadership position in the senate.

2004: Bloggers play a major role in covering the presidential campaign; a number of them are credentialed to participate in the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Dan Rather resigns following pressure from bloggers who documented errors in a story about President George W. Bush's military service record.

2005 (?): The launch of some of the first blog search engines, including Feedster and Technorati, making it possible for people to track blog conversations on a continuous basis.

2005: Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center launch GlobalVoicesOnline.org, an international network of bloggers emphasizing local and regional stories around the world that aren't being covered by mainstream media.

March 2005: Garrett M. Graff becomes the first blogger to receive credentials for the daily White House briefing.

2006: The launch of Twitter, one of the first "micro-blogging" communities that allows user to publish and receive short posts via the Web, text messaging and instant messaging.

2006: Research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs.

2007: Technorati is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.

If you have any suggestions of ones you think I should edit, add or drop altogether, please feel free to post them as a comment. I need to put this to bed in the next couple of days, so if you can get me your suggestions no later than December 13, I'd really appreciate it.

Tags: blogging | diaries | history | journals | milestones | personal homepage | timeline

Posted by acarvin at 11:27 AM

December 8, 2007

Dizzy and Kayleigh, a la Norman Rockwell

Dizzy and Kayleigh a la Norman Rockwell, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

It's too bad this picture is slightly out of focus, but I still love the wonderful eye contact the two of them are making. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:17 AM

Fun With Leaves

Fun With Leaves, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

This is, without a doubt, one of my favorite photos of Susanne and Kayleigh. It was taken a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC's Rock Creek Park. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:48 AM

December 6, 2007

Matzah Ball Mashup

Matzah Ball Mashup, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Gotta love this mashup of me and my matzah ball soup video done by Mad River Photo Company.

Posted by acarvin at 1:57 PM

December 3, 2007

Matzah Ball Madness!

Watch the Video

Tags: chicken soup | grandma | how-to | kneidl | kneidlach | matzah balls | matzah meal | recipe | schmaltz | traditional

Posted by acarvin at 10:47 PM

December 2, 2007

Scottish Christmas Walk

Watch the Video

Tags: Alexandria | bagpipes | Christmas | dogs | John Warner | parades | Scotland | Virginia

Posted by acarvin at 8:26 PM