In the name of design I started my practical (home) exam in Mulitmedia-journalism a Tuesday morning in December. Inspired over the years by a number of slick and shining splash-screens, I knew that I wanted to design a cool hoover (vacuum cleaner) illustration.

Our assignment was to design a website and fill with content for the support group: Menn mot hybelkaniner – Men against dust collecting at home. We had to interview people, come up with tips and techniques for keeping the house clean. Check out a copy of the webpages here on stepheno.net .

I am sorry that all the pages are in Norwegian, and as this was my first Flash video conversion I am not sure how fast they load.

Adding some multimedia content to the more traditional webpages using interactive accessible video. The pages were all designed in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 (which also kept me stuck at school for the software) since I did not have time to code it all raw. (I normally prefer raw-coding instead of WYSIWYG, since I feel you have much more more control.) Considering the site was created in less than I week I am quite pleased with the result, although doing it all over, or with a couple more hours of time I would have made a number of changes.

Joost is another online TV solution. It combines both software and content, with a dosage of advertising.

In April I gave Joost beta my first try. I tried it on a relativly fast PC’s with more than enough bandwidth. But I was constantly disappointed with the CPU usage and bandwidth the program required. Their content then was rather limited, still promising. Not personally owning a machine that managed to use Joost I forgot about it for a couple of months. Now for a couple of weeks I have had access to an Intel Mac and re-downloaded Joost to see a real boost in content and functionality.

The Mac remote works nicely with Joost and really gives the Joost feeling. Being able to provide the wide and impressive content obviously costs, and the ads in between every song or show proves this.
I could quickly now sit hours in front of the Joost-set. With the remote functionality it enhances the TV-feel, and allows you to relax. However I am still figuring out how to customize the content I believe that we will see a lot more of Joost to come.

At a first glance I found Joost’s featured selection more entertaining than Miro’s. With Joost you can’t download anything, but this is not a problem as long as the content remains searchable and accessible. Joost’s main downside for me atm is some of the lengthy advertising, I am find with splashscreens and short ads. But when I start to doubt whether this is an ad or a rogue channel this pulls down the Joost experience. Another Joost negative is the quality, although much better since April, they still have a way to go considering what you see is all transferred more or less “live”.

The popular TV-show crime series CSI:NY from CBS will include an investigation in Second Life in its next awaited episode, that viewers can also participate in, TechCrunch reports. I find this is a very exciting new step in the social media world, as it truly does add interactivity into a prime time TV-series.

As Hollywood, or the showbiz if you want, steps into the virtual realm of Second Life it will definitely give the virtual, other, second life of yours a very exciting and exotic opportunity to sharing in solving the mystery of this intriguing and entertaining action crime series. A two-way intergration of normally very single tracked popular tv-series will definitely cause a great deal of us previous sceptically towards Second Life and the virtual world to perhaps give it a new chance. And perhaps the actual investigation can teach you a couple things as well?

This tied in nicely with some topics from as seminar I was at today, discussing new social media trends, with several new media personalities in Norway. Amongst them Øyvind Solstad one of the guys behind NRKbeta.no talked about Second Life.

Anyway I will personally have to perhaps give Second Life a new chance, because I must admit it I think CBS has made a genius move.

If you are into Web 2.0 applications, online desktops and online storage you might enjoy The Onion’s news coverage on the Internet Crash of 2007. Most people store data-online in some form or another, the most common examples are online email, webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. Although the likelihood of the entire “internet” going down are slim. One should definitely look beyond the laugh and consider backing up things once in a while.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On another note The Onion News Network actually has some impressing quality video-productions.

(Via LifeHacker)

The word “Prosumer” is a combination of the words producer and consumer. According to Duncan Riley of TechCrunch; Prosumer “perfectly describes the millions of participants in the Web 2.0 revolution.” – The Rise Of The Prosumer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Riley also links to the above YouTube video. This “Future of Media” video by Davide Casaleggio raises some very interesting ideas of what the created expects of the future. Personally I think that some of the ideas in the video could become a reality, though in general I shrug and hope that it will not turn out like this.

This is apparently the first feature film to be uploaded on YouTube. Though according to their countdown on FourEyedMonsters.com it will only be on YouTube for the next 53 days (until August 15th).

The movie has already receievd a number of awards and is currently holding a 6.7/10 user-rating on IMDB. The Four Eyed Monsters movie is compiled and based on a video blog (series of video podcasts). I only had time to see the first couple minutes now at first, but hopefully I can eventually put off some time to see the whole movie online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Via TechCrunch)

I found a delightful video-clip yesterday thanks to TechEBlog with some computer geek humor. Seems like the clips may be a couple years old, nevertheless it gave me a good laugh.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is apparently a whole series on YouTube of “Nick Burns Your Company’s Computer Guy” if you are interested.

I was going to check my Yahoo! Mail and was faced with an unusual sight. This message: “The owners of the domain name yahoo.com are accepting offers from interested parties willing to obtain ownership rights over the domain name. You may learn more about how to place your offer by clicking HERE.”

See full size image Yahoo.com for sale screenshot.

First I thought I had typed the wrong address, but I checked my spelling: mail.yahoo.com , correctly spelled. Checked again a couple minutes later and seemed to be working again. Anyways interesting phenomenon.

Wayne Smallman the writer behind Blah! Blah! Technology passed his 300th article marker earlier this week and launched the new domain and site.

Smallman’s blog has been one of my early inspirations since my entry to the blogosphere several months ago. He has also been an active contributor with comments and advice here on stepheno.net. So if you are interested in the latest and coming technology trends and in-depth opinions and follow-ups of them, check out blahblahtech.com .

Critical Metrics monitors recommendations from various musical “authorities” such as magazines, bloggers, music tv networks and newspapers etc. And generates neatly a serious list of some of the latest good music out there.

They include samples for most of their recommended music, as well as where you can buy the song. You can listen to the songs individually or as part of a playlist.

(Via LifeHacker)