bitdepth

Garden State

Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

It’s good when people take a chance. Zach Braff is primarily known as an actor on the tv series “Scrubs“, but with Garden State he also shows that he’s a talented director. It’s taken me a while to see the film, but I’m glad that I did. It’s visually clever and has a great script that follows a depressed actor as he returns home for the first time in a decade. What I loved in the film were the performances and the gaps. The spaces between people and the gap between who you are and who you were. Coming home is always interesting with what you remember coexisting with what has changed. Have your memories changed, has the placed changed or are you seeing what was there, but you couldn’t see it when you were there. What helps the film work is that it happens over a series of days as our hero returns home. There is a great cast with solid chemistry and characters who are more complicated than in most mainstream films. I’m convinced that any artistic endeavor that is taken on by a cast crew that is excited and committed to the project will have a great time and make some great work. I got that sense from Garden State.
The other fascinating thing about the entire project is the web site for the film that also features a blog by Zach Braff that is sporadic, but really written by the busy actor. It’s nice to see someone working a bit outside of the more traditional publicity infrastructure and really blogging and connecting with people.
technorati tags: film, reviews, gardenstate

January 30, 2005 film, gardenstate, review

Technorati Tags

One of the signs that things are maturing with information on the Web is that things are becoming much more closely linked together. A few days ago I was thinking that Technorati‘s watchlists were cool and today they unleashed their tags. I’m very impressed. One of the things that I’ve been wanting for a little while is a way to tag blog entries. Categories are good, but after using del.icio.us and Flickr I’ve started to realize that having more than one way to classify is a good thing. But having multiple tags doesn’t really do a lot for you unless you can do something with it and now you can. I’m sure that blogging systems will quickly evolve and you’ll choose tags and categories (there are already plugins), but it’s fascinating to watch the development of folksonomy happen so rapidly. It was neat when I was able to see my Flickr photos show up beside my things on 43 things. But that’s nothing compared to looking at Flickr photos, blog entries and del.icio.us links all together on the same page. I really fell in love with tags when I looked at the view of tags on Flickr where the font size of the tags reflect their popularity. Technorati has the same thing and as more people tag stuff it will be a great way to visualize what people are talking about. It’s developing so rapidly that Technorati Tags have rolled out before it was completely done, so there aren’t RSS feeds yet.
Another example of how fast things happen now: from the time the first notice I saw in my feeds (on Joho) to the afternoon, Matt from Oddiophile whipped up a bookmarklet to create tags (and I have to change my stylesheet to incorporate this new class). I used it for my first tagged post over at bitdepth digest and I’ll use it to paste the code in this entry as well (which I’m writing in BBEdit). Tags and Technorati – this rocks so hard.
technorati: tags, folksonomy, web, blog, technorati

January 14, 2005 43things, blog, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, tags, technorati, web

Napoleon Dynamite

Just follow your heart. That’s what I do.

After many people telling me to see the film and few people describing it much, I finally saw Napoleon Dynamite. Well… It’s an odd film that I enjoyed far more than I thought I would or maybe than I even should. There isn’t a lot to the film, not much dialogue or plot, but a lot of character. I laughed out loud many, many times while watching the film. Then I watched it again and laughed again. The tone is odd with an 80s feel, but it is contemporary with characters that seem to be stuck in the 80s. In a very odd way I identified with Napoleon and the high school scene. I don’t think that I was as quite as much of a misfit as the guy in the film, but there were elements.
Jared Hess directs Jon Heder as Napoleon and through most of the film you aren’t sure if there is a cruelty to the way that the characters are set up and treated. But I got the sense that the actors and crew knew what they were doing and hit the tone just right. It’s in the territory that the Coen brothers charted in Raising Arizona and a less intellectual neighbourhood than that explored by Wes Anderson.
Napoleon Dynamite is set in odd emotional space in high school where you aren’t sure what you are supposed to do and how you fit in to the world. Nobody understands you and you’re really interested in science fiction or computers and you just want to drive your bike over sweet jumps or use computers… but that’s getting a bit too autobiographical. The film triggered odd memories in me in my junior high and high school days. Once I quickly drove my bike up to the top of a snowbank at the end of my street and then flew off the top into the muddy snow below. It’s something that makes sense at the time, but looking at it from some distance makes it seem strange. That’s how Napoleon Dynamite works and I liked being in that world for a while.

January 13, 2005 film, napoleondynamite, review

Weaving a Web

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m increasing my presence online. I don’t know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren’t as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn’t an RSS feed, I’m not as interested in it as I don’t want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren’t technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we’re moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It’s exciting when you don’t have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it’s even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).

January 8, 2005 43things, bbedit, bitdepth, blogger, blosxom, flickr, netnewswire, screenarts, technorati

What Happened and What’s Next

The online world was very exciting for me in 2004. Blogging kept plugging away and I rediscovered Blogger which Google purchased. The great thing with the evolution of the Web is that finally CSS started to be embraced. With Blogger there was some great Javascript that made blogging even easier and faster. They also removed the ads on the Blogspot hosting, but opened the possibility of revenue from Google ads if you want.
The other cool Google-related discovery for me was Gmail, which has changed the way that I look at email. I try to keep everything organized and I’ve been using email for a long time and I don’t easily switch email programs. While I use Apple’s Mail a lot, I find that I’m using and loving Gmail a lot now and I think that I’m starting to use Gmail more than Apple’s Mail program. The Gmail beta is fascinating as it is viral. You can’t really sign up, you have to be invited by someone who has it. It’s an interesting way to beta test something like a mail service as you want to have people who use it and the alpha geeks who are testing it will tell other alpha geeks about how cool it is.
The biggest chunk of my time online recently has been spent in the completely addictive Flickr. When I started it was just to share a few pictures with family and friends, but when some of the public photos that I posted received comments I started to get more of a sense of the community that was there. I didn’t think that I would like the social component of it, but I started to realize that I shared a lot in common with the people who were looking at my photos. It’s a great way to communicate visually and I notice that the community is more international than many communities that depend on language as the primary means of communication. The response to the photos that I post shape what I now choose as a subject. While I only joined Flickr in August, I posted 1424 pictures last year. My posting (and photography) increased dramatically as the year went on to the point where I posted 700 photos in December. I don’t think that I’ll continue at that rate, but I will probably post over 2000 images in 2005 I gladly paid for a Pro account which gives me a gigabyte of uploads every month (and my 700 photos last month got close to 50% of the capacity). I just realized some of how Flickr works thanks to the antenna blog which points out the Flickr is based on online gaming code. It’s like a game where the object is the share your photos. You have quests with fellow group members and share your triumphs. It’s great to be part of the community.
The tags on Flickr enable lots of connections between the images that you have uploaded and the images that others have classified in the same way. The tagging on Flickr is based on the tagging that takes place on del.icio.us where you create your own tags to classify links. It’s been called a folksonomy and now I store a lot of my bookmarks in my del.icio.us space to keep track of things. The next step for me is to use my del.icio.us bookmarks with some of the other stuff I’m doing on my blog.
Viewing the web and keeping track of what’s happening on sites and especially blogs has been made much easier with NetNewsWire, which continues to evolve and is the other program other than Mail that I constantly run. Now if I site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it isn’t as interesting to me. While there are many options for RSS readers, I love how NetNewsWire works and as MarsEdit (a weblog editor) evolves I think that I’ll use it more and more as well.
The combination of RSS with audio enclosures caused podcasting to burst out onto the world. It’s an exciting development that is really only months old, but is evolving incredibly rapidly with Adam Curry at the forefront with his Daily Source Code podcast setting the pace for what a podcast is, as well as highlighting what is happening in the podcasting world which is a close cousin to the blogging world. It’s changed things so fast that the latest beta of NetNewsWire supports podcasting and now I’m using it to download podcasts. Podcasting will be very big in 2005.
Yesterday I began to explore 43things, which I looked at before, but now it really clicked as I became a member. 43things is like Flickr for to-do lists. You share your list of things to-do and things you have done as well as leave messages and comments about what you want to do and what others have done. With gentle prompting and an understated interface, I realized right away that I’d be spending a lot of time there. It connects you with people through tasks and tags and collaboration seems to be built into the DNA of the site. While I just started yesterday, I’ve already connected with strangers and realized that the whole thing is a way that people who may not blog or want to blog will be blogging without knowing it. I’ll write more about 43things later, but I think it will be another big thing in 2005. Exciting times ahead online as we focus less on the technology and more on the people and community.