News: Amazon To Produce 6 Original Comedy Series Pilots, Viewers Decide Which Shows Survive

Amazon Studios, the online retailer’s department responsible for sourcing scripts and developing original video content, today announced the development of six original comedy series pilots. When production is completed, the series will air on Amazon’s Instant Video platform, which delivers video content like TV and movies to users’ set top boxes, phones, tablets, and computers.

[…]

Here is a list of pilots to look forward to on Amazon:

Alpha House – Alpha House was written by Academy Award nominee and Pulitzer-Prize winner Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury, Tanner ’88). Alpha House follows four senators who live together in a rented house in Washington DC.

Browsers – Written by 12-time Emmy-winning comedy writer David Javerbaum (The Daily Show) and to be directed by Don Scardino (30 Rock), Browsers is a musical comedy set in contemporary Manhattan that follows four young people as they start their first jobs at a news website.

Dark Minions – Written by Big Bang Theory co-stars Kevin Sussman and John Ross Bowie, Dark Minions is an animated workplace series about two slackers just trying to make a paycheck working an intergalactic warship. The pilot will be produced by Principato-Young (Reno 911).

The Onion Presents: The News – The Onion Presents: The News is a smart, fast-paced scripted comedy set behind the scenes of The Onion News Network that shows just how far journalists will go to stay at the top of their game. The Onion Presents: The News is from The Onion’s Will Graham & Dan Mirk (The Onion News Network, The Onion Sportsdome).

Supanatural – Supanatural is an animated comedy series about two outspoken divas who are humanity’s last line of defense against the supernatural, when they’re not working at the mall. The series, written by Lily Sparks, Price Peterson and Ryan Sandoval, will be produced by Jason Micallef (Butter) and Kristen Schaal (The Daily Show).

Those Who Can’t – Written by Andrew Orvedahl, Adam Cayton-Holland and Benjamin Roy (Grawlix), who were discovered through Amazon Studios online open door process, Those Who Can’t is a comedy about three juvenile, misfit teachers who are just as immature, if not more so, than the students they teach.

Read the entire article

News: Google releases new YouTube Capture app for iOS/iPhone/iPad

Just saw a Google+ post linking to the announcement of this new YouTube Capture app for iOS. (Film and share videos instantly with YouTube Capture for iPhone and iPod touch) It is designed to allow you to quickly capture videos, add stabilization and color correction and then upload it to YouTube. Additionally, it also can send links to Google+, Facebook and Twitter announcing your upload. 

I just did this quick test of the app. The lighting was a little low, but it is a Real World Example of how the app would work in general use.

 

Can’t see the video above? Watch “YouTube Capture Test Video” on YouTube

Download the YouTube Capture from the iTunes app store

Podcasting/New Media Advocacy Group – A Public-Facing Group Designed to Promote Podcasting and New Media Content to the Public

Podcasting/New Media Advocacy Group – A Public-Facing Group Designed to Promote Podcasting and New Media Content to the Public

One of the things I have always found lacking in the Podcasting Community is a public advocacy group dedicated to promoting podcasting (and other forms of New Media such as YouTube Channels) to the general public.

While this group, and others, do a good job of podcasters supporting each other, we all seem to be left on our own wen it comes to introducing our shows to the public, as well as the concept of New Media in general.

With advances like the AppleTV, Roku, Boxee and smart TV’s, it should be easier than ever for podcasters to get their shows before the non-technical public who are just interested in good content. I have often said that one item required for podcasting to grow into a more powerful medium is to “get on the TV!” By this I don’t mean get purchased by a television network, etc, but rather “get on the box” that is in nearly everyone’s home already.

In that regard, I am proposing the creation of a New Media Advocacy group specifically to promote podcasting and New Media to the general public. If there are other interested people, we can set up some online structures to start this journey and begin got move forward as 2013 begins.

I can offer some more thoughts on this topic if people are interested. It is something that has been on my mind since 2004.

Interested? Let’s start a conversation!

WordPress Wednesday: WordPress 3.5 is released!

Wp logo

The latest version of WordPress press, 3.5, has just been released. Following my usual WordPress Wednesday, it’s time to look at your blogs, update your plugins and try out the new 3.5. 

For a complete list of new features and other changes, visit the WordPress Codex.

A few of the changes…

New Media Manager

  • Beautiful interface: A streamlined, all-new experience
  • Create galleries faster with drag-and-drop reordering, inline caption editing, and simplified controls
  • Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click

New Default Theme – Twenty Twelve

  • Simple, flexible, elegant
  • Mobile-first, responsive design
  • Gorgeous Open Sans typeface
  • Uses the latest Theme Features

Admin Enhancements

  • New Welcome Screen
  • Retina-Ready (HiDPI) Admin
  • Hide Link Manager for new installs
  • Better accessibility for screenreaders, touch devices, and keyboard users
  • More polish on admin screens, including a new color picker

…and much more!

New Media/Social Media Jobs Available – Search by Location and Keyword

Check out our list of New Media jobs (and others) available via SimplyHired.com.

Enter your location for jobs close to you. You can also search on other keywords.

Newmedia jobs

Real World Example: Lorilyn Salamanca hosts “Foundations for Healthy Generations” on Hawaii Public Access

Lorilyn salamanca

Lorilyn Salamanca has been a close friend of ours since she was completing her Master’s Degree at nearby Cal State Northridge (CSUN). She was originally the student and friend of our friends, Helen and Enrique, but quickly became a close friend in her own right.

Lorilyn has heard me preaching the New Media gospel for years now, and I have been coaching, consulting and cajoling her to use her own talents to get the word out about those issues which most concern her. Since moving to Hawaii over 8 years ago, she has worked for the WIC program, helping underprivileged families raise healthy kids.

Just today Lorilyn let me know that she had stepped up her New Media “visibility” — as I have been pushing her for years — and is now the host of “Foundations for Healthy Generations” on the Hawaii Public Access channel, ‘Olelo. Like all good Public Access programs, ‘Olelo also makes all their shows available, on demand, from their web site. They can also be easily shared and embedded in blogs and other web sites.

It is so great seeing Lorilyn extend her influence using a combination of traditional media and new media on the island. I wish her great success! This is exactly the type of Real World Example I would love to see other’s pursuing.

Foundations for Healthy Generations – Episode 4

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Can’t see the video above? Watch it here!

Watch more episodes of “Foundations for Healthy Generations” with Lorilyn Salamanca

New Media/Social Media Jobs Available – Search by Location and Keyword

Check out our list of New Media jobs (and others) available via SimplyHired.com.

Enter your location for jobs close to you. You can also search on other keywords.

Newmedia jobs

Is that a production studio in your pocket? – Logitech’s New WiFI webcam works w/ iPad/iPhone/Mac

So, it looks like Logitech has been watching a lot of uStream and a lot of Google Hangouts lately. Their new webcam, the Logitech Broadcaster ($199 US) , is a WiFi connected webcam that allows for secondary angles during your web stream. It can also record that second angle to be used for a later edit in iMovie. The Logitech Broadcaster can be controlled from an iPad, iPhone or your Mac and you can use a combination of all the available cameras in your stream or recording.

 

 

Here is a video from Logitech showing off some of the features.

Can’t see video above? Watch “Logitech Boradcaster” on YouTube.

 

The case of the Logitech Broadcaster does double-duty as a magnetic base for the camera, allow you to position it where you need. It doesn’t look like it has a traditional tripod mount, but that is a little hard to see from the video and pictures provided.

If you are looking to take your web streams and video productions to another level, the Logitech Broadcaster could be an interesting piece of kit to add to your gig bag.

News: New Media Expo Announces Scholarship for Content Creators #NMXU #NMX

Nmxu logo

New Media Expo Announces Scholarship for Content Creators #NMXU #NMX

There’s no denying New Media Expo offers valuable learning opportunities. With almost 90 educational sessions presented by the leading experts in new media content creation, podcasters, bloggers and webTV and video producers always return home inspired and ready to put what they learned to good use. We love that our attendees take time to share with us that we’ve provided such a valuable educational opportunity, but we also hear from content creators who would love to attend our event but can’t get here for a variety of reasons.
We’re about to make it easier for one person.

Throughout the month of October, we’re accepting applications for the first ever (and hopefully not the last) New Media Expo University scholarship. Offered as part of our new New Media Expo University (#NMXU) educational project, this scholarship will provide a complete educational experience at NMX in Las Vegas from January 6th through 8th 2013 for one lucky recipient.

[…]

Read entire article

New Media/Social Media Jobs Available – Search by Location an Keyword

Check out our list of New Media jobs (and others) available via SimplyHired.com.

Enter your location for jobs close to you. You can also search on other keywords.

Newmedia jobs

News: Google Releases New YouTube App for iPhone and iPad

Youtube app

As promised when Apple announced they would no longer include their YouTube app with all iOS devices, Google today released its new YouTube app. As I expected, it provides a much better YouTube experience than Apple’s (older) YouTube app. In fact, I stopped using that app months ago and switched over to using the mobile web version of YouTube as it allowed me access more features and provided a better overall experience.

After using the app for an hour or so today, I can say I like it! It is clean, functional, streams video well over 3G or Wifi and generally does what I want it to do. My list of subscribed videos is neatly present in a format very similar to that used on the Google+ App with large thumbnails and a bit of descriptive text.

Download the new YouTube app from the Apple App Store

Here are a few screen shots of the new YouTube app

2012 09 11 15 48 28 2012 09 11 15 49 04

News: New Liveblog plugin for WordPress turns any post into auto-updating liveblog

This news just came through my RSS feeds. It seems that Automattic, the developer of the WordPress blogging site and software, want to make it a bit easier for bloggers to “liveblog” events. The new WordPress.com VIP Liveblog Add-On allows bloggers to write entries, including text and graphics, directly from their site to users pages. These pages are then automatically update for anyone who js monitoring the liveblog.

Wp liveblog

Liveblogs are often seen around breaking news stories and events like Apple product announcements. More an more, bloggers are covering these events live and want to get the word out as quickly as possible. This new plugin makes it simpler than ever before. 

Here are some bullet points about the new plug-in directly from the WordPress.org web site… 

Post updates right from the front-end of your site (no need to use the /wp-admindashboard)
Viewers of your Liveblog get new entries served to them instantly and automatically, without needing to refresh their browser.
Your authors can drag-and-drop photos right into the Liveblog area, without needing to navigate to separate browser tabs or windows.
There’s no need for a separate site dedicated to liveblogging: every post can be a liveblog, even existing ones.

You can download the Liveblog plugin directly from WordPress.org

Article: How To Create A World: Skyrim’s Director On Building A Never-Ending Fantasy

Interesting article. I am collecting articles like this to share with my son who has entered the Tech/Game program at his new high school. I had been wondering myself how you went about creating a game as complicated as Skyrim and this article is a good place to start. I am trying to give him a good understanding of all the work — and all the different types of work — that go into creating a large commercial game.

How To Create A World: Skyrim’s Director On Building A Never-Ending Fantasy
By: Kevin Ohannessian

Skyrim

The fantasy world of Skyrim is notable for its scale and level of realism. Game director Todd Howard explains how his team at Bethesda Game Studios approaches the creation of a world.

[…]

Read the entire article

News: Blue Microphones Mikey Digital takes iPhone and iPad recording up a notch

From TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Blue Microphones Mikey Digital takes iPhone and iPad recording up a notch

[…]

When it comes to microphones for the iPhone and iPad, I have to admit that I haven’t been too impressed with what’s been delivered over the past few years. For example, the original iRig Mic from IK Multimedia was quite noisy, although the iRig Mic Cast improved on that somewhat. The original Mikey from Blue Mics was also an improvement, but now the company is shipping the new Mikey Digital (US$99.99) that works with recent iPhones and all iPads to capture stereo sound with clarity.

[…]

Read the entire article

I am always looking for cool, new, new media tools and Blue seems to keep a fairly constant flow of new recording tech. I personally own a Blue Snowball microphone and have many fellow podcasters who use their Yeti product. It will be interesting to try out the Mikey and see what it can do.

New Media/Social Media Jobs Available – Search by Location an Keyword

Check out our list of New Media jobs (and others) available via SimplyHired.com.

Enter your location for jobs close to you. You can also search on other keywords.

Newmedia jobs

Elsewhere: Radio Killed The Podcasting Star

I definitely agree with some of what this article has to say. Non-mainstream podcasts have the potential to change things dramatically, but without a unified method of discovering and monetizing podcasts most languish in obscurity. Apple’s podcast directory is woefully inadequate and dominated by mainstream radio and it contains no way to monetize podcasts through subscriptions or advertising. Secondly, there is no unified ad market where podcasters can turn for monetization. YouTube, with its connections to Google Adsense and easily monetization options is a far better environment for making money with your podcast — if you happen to produce video and not audio-only programs.

For greatest chance at success, it has to be as easy to watch or listen to podcasts (and discover them) as it is to turn on the television or radio. Until the time that there is some parity between entertainment doing from a variety of sources, podcasts will always be second class citizens of the media world.

Radio Killed The Podcasting Star

Podcasters are to radio what bloggers are to newspapers: independent voices taking attention away from mainstream media. At least that was the theory, when professional podcasts and blogs were getting started in the 2000s. But unlike blogs, podcasts by indie voices have not gone on to seriously challenge the mainstream media incumbents. Where is the Ariana Huffington of podcasting? Can you name a political podcaster who’s had the same impact as Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo blog? Sadly, there are no podcasting stars – and it’s all radio’s fault.

Read the entire article

New “Interactive Transcript” button appears on YouTube videos

A noticed a new button had popped up when watching some of my own YouTube videos this evening…Interactive Transcript (highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below).

Youtube transcript

Clicking the Interactive Transcript button opens up a timecode synced transcript of the video you are watching. YouTube has been offering automatically generated captions for quite a while now, but this lays out the automated transcripts in such a way that the user can click on individual lines to just to that part of the video automatically. Machine transcription is far from 100% accurate, but with good audio Google’s algorithm can do quite well.

Thus bodes well for making video and audio searchable in Google’s index, something that is not really possible today. I would assume though that since they are creating these transcripts anyway, it won’t be a far step to slurping these transcripts into the Google indexing system so that people can find videos simply by searching on word used in the video. One missing feature is an easy way to export the transcript, even from your own videos, so that you could share it on your own web site along with the video.

Let me know if you are seeing the Interactive Transcript button on your videos. Google often rolls out tests to random users in order to judge the popularity and effectivness of new features, so it might not be available for everyone.

News: Twitter tweets no longer appear in LinkedIn timeline

Twitter bird light bgs Linkedin logo

In a move which seems to foreshadow a movement away from linking social media sites together, LinkedIn announced via email today that your Tweets will no longer appear automatically in your LinkedIn timeline if you previously linked your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. From the wording of their email, it appears that Twitter is the cause of this new policy.

LinkedIn status updates CAN be automatically sent to Twitter if users click the “Twitter” checkbox when composing a status update.

For myself, I have turned off a lot of the automatic linkages I had set up in the past. For example, my Twitters no longer appear automatically on my Facebook account. I think this shows that social networks are seeing that such linkages can effectively “spam” the timelines of other sites without any further action on the user’s part. Google+ has yet to provide any API for cross-posting Tweets or updates from any other social networks and there has been some discussion that this may never be part of the G+ API, to prevent just such issues.

It will be interesting to see how other social networks react to this decision and start turning off their own cross-posting API calls.

Email from LinkedIn

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter? Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn? Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,
The LinkedIn Team

Apple podcasting changes cause problems with GoDaddy-hosted podcasts

Update (July 10, 2012): I have written up an entire post about my experiences moving web hosts due to the problem below.

You can read it at Real World Example: Moving to a new podcasting web host and why — Douglas


This week, when Apple released their new Podcasts app for iOS, I sadly noted that one of my podcasts had gone missing from the iTunes Podcast Directory. I am still gathering information as to why the podcast disappeared, but in trying to re-submit it I came across an even larger problem.

Despite hosting my sites on a GoDaddy Shared Server for years, changes at Apple and limitations at GoDaddy have combined to make it impossible to host a podcast using GoDaddy Shared servers.

Over time, and on-going, I have had issues with my web server sending “Connection Reset” error to the various services I use, including Feedburner and various RSS feed services. This also presented itself when attempting to re-submit my podcast. It often took 10-15 attempts for iTunes to access the RSS feed.

Itunes connect

Once iTunes could see the feed, though, another, much larger problem arose. I recieved the following error:

Itunes byte

“There is a problem with your feed. Your episodes are hosted on a server which doesn’t support byte-range requests. Enable byte-range requests and try your submission again.”


It seems this might be a new requirement in the iTunes Podcast Directory, as I don’t remember running into this problem in the past. According to GoDaddy this IS a new requirement from Apple and, even worse, they cannot/will not provide the byte-range request services on their Shared Server hosting plans.

“The error that you are receiving is being caused because our shared hosting servers do not support the format that your podcast is being added as. This means that you will not be able to use this method to broadcast your podcasts.”

So it appears that GoDaddy shared servers are no longer capable of hosting podcasts. While you may not experience any immediate issues with your show, it could be in danger of being dropped from the iTunes Podcast Directory and should that happen, you will not be able to re-submit your show, due to Apple’s requirements for byte-range requests.

I am now in the process of finding a new web host and moving all 20GB+ of my site to the new server, as well as moving 6 WordPress blogs that are hosted there. If  you are hosting on a GoDaddy Shared Server, you may want to consider doing the same before you are caught by this issue.

New YouTube Dashboard rolling out

I just logged into my YouTube account and found that a new dashboard has been enabled. Here is the new layout.

Youtube dashboard

The new dashboard creates an easy location to see videos, stats and comments all in one screen. You can link to the full view of all of these, as well as reply to recent comments.

I think this is a good start, but could envision more information that could be added here. Still it is nice to have a nice overview to work with on a daily basis.

When the dashboard is available on your site, you will receive a pop-up note asking if you wish to enable it.