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Right now, I’m following the CNN/Facebook, CBS/UStream, and USA Today/Livestream feeds.  Here’s a look at my desktop.

Aside from a much-needed break from creating shows, I got some play with my DSLR camera that I got for christmas, the Canon Rebel XS.

There were three types of photos that I particularly enjoyed.

Closeups of Kids Faces

Since I got the camera for Christmas, I’ve been taking tons of pictures.  It’s great to know that I’m capturing all those memories and will have them for years to come.

So with that in mind, I started taking lots of pictures of the kids in my family and I noticed something amazing: closeups of kids faces create amazing pictures.

I’m sure any seasonsed photographer out there knows this already, but it was a great realization for me.  Take a look:

Long Exposures

Having fun with fireworks is even more fun when you can see what’s going on.  These pictures were taken several hours after sundown with 10-30 second exposures.

They’re blurry because they were hand-held, but I’ll definitely use a tripod next time.

Zoom Lens and Sports Mode

Right before I left, I went on a boat ride where we took my brother and cousin tubing.  So I put on the 55-200 lens and fliped the dial to Sports Mode.

To really see what’s going on with these shots, be sure to click the “All Sizes” button and look at the original image.

Update: We sat next to a woman returning from a diving trip to Panama. She said there were over 50 species of shrimp there.

As @ev explained on @oprah today, the term twitter comes from the sound birds make when they’re communicating.  It symbolizes chatter; quick or light conversation.

So now that the rest of the world is catching on to Twitter, how do we “veterans” get them to understand what it’s really about?

I got an email today with the following question:

OH YEAH…I want to brand and market. I just haven’t wrapped my head around developing the content for it. I have some vague ideas. I’m sure you know by now that I am a content developer. Give me an idea and I will hone the topic and I will give you the world (if I can). That’s what happened at [my former job as a game designer]…they gave me a subject and I developed and produced software.

There’s so much out there right now for “foodies” etc.; I kinda put it aside for a few years because I wasn’t sure how to deliver it… there was a new venue going on at the time…what now IS, and I didn’t know how to get to that.

…Twittering…Facebook, whatever…and I’m wondering how to integrate my ideas about that, and what I could do, and thinking of targeting a certain audience.

I’m still bakin’ it. But…good news…I know have enough stuff behind me in terms of content development, etc. to do it once I know it. I need to focus.

Okay, so maybe it’s not a question, exactly, but I felt compelled to resond anyway:

One idea that might help you to focus a little bit: community

The cost of distributing, broadcasting, delivering (whatever you want to call it) content is basically $0.00 – zero.  Many people are making content all the time and there’s no friction to get it out there.

I think along with content comes this question…  How do you build/engage/evangelize a community around which your content is a central point?

One reason that Facebook, Twitter, etc. are so strong is that they facilitate community.

You and your followers are a community.

So…

What’s the community’s purpose and passion?

Taking the foodie world as an example, here’s how I would start.  Find the top 10 foodie blogs, read them regularly, comment on their posts, and engage in conversations with other readers and writers of those blogs.  Hangry Pants is one that’s run by my business partner and his girlfriend.

Then find the foodies on Twitter, follow them, see who they’re conversing with, join in the conversation.

Do the same on Facebook.

Find the foodie networks on Ning.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

Before you know it, you’re part of the community.  And to bring it back full circle, you CONTENT will be valuable to that community.  It will fuel conversations and ideas, and you’ll be giving something of value back.

How do YOU explain these concepts to people who are new to all of this?

How do YOU teach your mom why Twitter is so vauable?

But this one actaully irritated me because it pretended to be personal, even off-the-cuff, but ended up looking like careless spam.

Take a look:

From: XXX XXX [mailto:xxx@salesforce.com]
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 12:55 PM
To: Tim Kress-Spatz
Subject: Quick question?

Hello Tim,

Does n/a have any plans for a CRM project in 2009?

With our fiscal year-end approaching on January 31st, now is the best time to look at our technology and discuss a solution that meets your needs for the upcoming year.

Do you have a few minutes this week to discuss? Or, if you’re not the best person to discuss this, would you kindly refer me to who is? Thank you.

Regards,

XXX XXX
Salesforce.com
(647) 258-XXXX

“Does n/a have any plans…”

N/A?!?!

Really?!?!

Attention SalesForce.com: You make software for selling things and managing mailing lists.  IMHO, you should make that a priority before your AppExchange and whatever else you’re up to these days.

I’d like to point out the irony of that service’s name: High Speed

For starters, let me tell you how I ended up with this particular service.

I used to be subscribed to TWC’s Road Runner High Speed Online service. I called last week telling them that I was going to cancel my service, but before I did that, I wanted to see if they could offer me better upload speeds. After waiting on hold for a few minutes, I was told that they could switch me from Road Runner to EarthLink and reduce my month charge to $29.99 per month for 12 months.

My first reaction was to think this was a bad deal. Essentially, I was going to be getting the same service from a different provider, but my issue of slow upload speeds remained unresolved. After a minute, it occurred to me that the ratio of speed to price was improving in my favor. Not quite a great victory, but a small step that didn’t leave me any worse off.

The service advertises, “Speeds of up to 10 Mbps downstream and up to 512 Kbps upstream.” I frequently run speed tests, and they generally come in at 90% of these advertised rates. The download speeds are not fantastic, but at least they’re usable for most websites and streaming video. The upload speeds, however, are completely useless for anything other than sending an email or making and HTTP request. Come to think of it, these speeds have hardly increased at all in the many years since I first subscribed to a high speed internet service.

The web has grown to include so many rich and interactive sites that facilitate social networking and the sharing of photos, audio, and video. But while the amount of content and interaction has grown exponentially, bandwidth has stayed locked in at speeds that are only 1 order of magnitude faster than the last dial up modem I had in the mid 1990s, in the case of uploading.

How are we supposed to share photos and videos when it takes me almost 2 hours to upload 80 pictures to Flickr from my family get-together last weekend? How are we supposed to use Skype Video calls when the image quality must be severely limited by unreasonably small upload caps?

Clearly the marketplace is leaving a huge gap for someone to come and offer even modestly better service. I hear great things about Verizon FIOS and can’t wait for the day it’s available at my apartment. The most frustrating part is that I get similar upload speeds on both my cell phone and my “high speed” internet connection while the peer bandwidth sharing agreements amongst the big ISPs essentially reduces their bandwidth cost to zero.

It’s a good thing that, when I called and threatened to cancel, they didn’t know that FIOS wasn’t available in my building. But hey, at least I’m saving $15 a month, albeit on crappy service.

This is a very straightforward article which highlights a lot of best practes for styling HTML form elements with CSS. The end result is a clean form, both visually and syntactically.

I stumbled across WebAppers which is a great blog-like catalog of free and open source components for web developers. The have a section just for upload components, and I quickly narrowed my search down to SWFUpload and FancyUpload.

The first thing that caught my eye is that these component developers don’t like to use spaces in the names of their products .

I didn’t really have time to experiment with both of them, so I searched around for some quick reviews and it seemed like they were both excellent. Eventually I settled on SWFUpload because it looked a little more mature.

All in all, it was fairly easy to implement thanks to their straightforward demos. I had a functional upload component working in about 20 minutes which only needed minor tweaks.

It uses a hidden flash applet to accomplish the actual upload. It also polls the server and updates a progress bar on the page so the user doesn’t get too impatient.

A word of warning though. There did still appear to be some bugs, so I had to spend a few minutes searching for solutions. For the sake of Internet Explorer users, I would recommend using absolute paths when specifying the locations for the Flash applet and upload page.

This component does require some intermediate knowledge of JavaScript and PHP. For example, there are some common pitfalls when doing form-based uploads in PHP. Also, it relies on JavaScript and DOM manipulation to update the progress bar, so you’ll need to break out those JavaScript and CSS skills to customize it to the look and feel of your site.

All in all, SWFUpload is a solid product. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and crank out some JavaScript, CSS, and PHP, you can do some great stuff with this.