Wayne D's Blog

One of the people I follow on twitter pointed me to LivingSasquatch.com. If you have a webcam, a laser printer and patience you can try out this Flash based augmented reality site. Print out the foot print, point your webcam at the footprint and if things are just right an image of a sasquatch will be overlaid on your webcam image. You can sequence six actions along with text bubbles from 30 pregenerated actions including emotions, movement and fighting moves. One of my sons put together a short movie of the sasquatch attacking a plastic cup.

My low quality webcam made getting the sasquatch to appear stable quite a chore, the lighting needed to be just right, the camera angle that works best was hard to maintain and the text bubble doesn't point towards the camera. This makes getting what you want pretty fiddly especially if you don't have a lot of patience and a small tripod handy.

Now here is where the problem starts, although you can save your short movie on the sasquatch site you cant download it, embed it otherwise or share it with your friends other than through a link to the page. Your augmented reality creation is stuck in the walled garden set up by the beef jerky company sponsoring the site. I expect the beef jerky guys don't want people doing rude things with their sasquatch but if they really want him to go viral they have to loosen the iron fist.

One other thing that would be great for version 2 is a walking animation that would be triggered by moving the target footprint. EEEPC 701 users, when I tried to load the site on my EEEPC the hard drive light came on solid, I guess 512M isn't enough.

During the live webcast of This week in Tech episode 191, Corked I was in the show chat room and had a short discussion with another TWIT listener over an article I had heard about which suggested fewer scholars were being cited more frequently in academic papers. The authors argued this decreased the breadth of knowledge in academic research. Unfortunately I couldn't remember where I had heard it. I spent about 10-15 minutes in a fruitless Google search so I decided to give Mahalo answers a try. If you've heard of Yahoo answers Mahalo answers is almost exactly the same with one important difference. Mahalo answers lets the questioner assign a tip to the question. The best answer to the question earns the tip. Tips are expressed in Mahalo dollars which cost one real dollar. After earning $40 dollars you can get your tip money back in real dollars at 75 cents on the dollar. An added wrinkle is that for questions that don't have a tip value assigned by the questioner Mahalo is providing a $1 tip, at least for now. To help increase interest in Mahalo questions Mahalo has temporarily bumped the value on the questions they are providing tips for to $2.

I suppose I could have asked the question at Yahoo answers too to give a better comparison but I didn't. I posed the question "I heard about a study showing fewer scholars are referenced in academic papers since the advent of electronic journals. Looking for paper." I added the following additional information "The study purported to show that fewer scholars were being cited more frequently in academic papers. The authors argued this decreased the breadth of knowledge in academic research. I'm looking for a reference to the study."

A little more than 12 hours later I received an email from Mahalo telling me that someone had answered my question. The answer was:

It is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5887/395

To quote the abstract:

Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship.

Unfortunately a flood at my local library has shut down the periodical room so I haven't had a chance to read the original article which appeared in the July 18th, 2008 edition Of Science.

The upshot, crowd sourcing works and the Mahalo idea of setting up a system of micro payments to give people added incentive to answer questions is a winner. My wife likes to help answer the math questions on Yahoo answers and if enough people move to Mahalo she may get the added benefit of earning a few dollars. As long as Mahalo continues to offer tips to answers questions it's worth the time to drop by and see if you know the answer to a question someone is willing to pay for.

I was hanging out at my local and saw Susan Boyle come up on the CBC National news. The sound was off but I was curious enough to note her name, When I came home and Googled her this is what I found.

Updated April 19th, 2009

Evidently the video owners have decided that they don't want people embedding there content so you have to go to Youtube if you want to watch the video.

Susan's Boyle's last performance

updated April 14th with a link to the Rabble TV coverage of Mesh. other additions are marked

MeshU and Mesh are history for another year and I survived both. Fueled by coffee, Redbull and lots of yummy snacks I spent three days at Canada's web conference.

I met so many great new people and heard so many interesting speakers I can't recommend enough that you go if and when you get the chance. Both conferences sold out this year so for those who didn't get a chance to go I thought I'd do the elevator pitch version of MeshU and Mesh.

I will attempt to sum up in one sentence what I took away from the panels and keynotes I attended over the two conferences. These will not be the next best thing to being there. The presentations and presenters were dynamic, nuanced, thoughtful and my short description will attempt to encapsulate what I took away from their talks, not necessarily their main point or theme. You can find video of some of the keynotes and sessions at media.meshconference.com and Mesh TV. Here is a link to Rabble.tv coverage of Mesh. What you don't get from my comments and the videos is the wonderful food, great socializing and all the great interesting new people you will meet.

So we begin with MeshU. The format, first presenter, then the name of the seminar and then my take away.

Ryan Singer - Value Judgments in Interface Design - Designers need to be able to quickly and easily modify the user experience, the MVC methodology still rules

Brydon Gillis - Building Software the Obama Way - Lead with action and change, not policy.

Leigh Honeywell - Break it to make it: writing (more) secure software - Security is very important but we are doomed anyways, but try to be as secure as practical.

April Dunford - Segmentation, Positioning and Storytelling: How a Smart Market Strategy Can Drive Growth - Pick a target market and tell your stories, spread yourself too thin and you are history.

Now on to Mesh
Mike Masnick Keynote - Dinosaurs you need to change your paradigm or my paradigm will eat your lunch.

Jessica Jackley Keynote - Helping other to do good is a wonderful way to live.

Tyler Crowley - Professionalizing Pro-video content - Making great video can be done really inexpensively but making money is very difficult.

Hyper-local media: Does It Work? Panel - Yes it does but don't expect to get rich doing it.

The Future of News Panel - The business of news is in flux, there are many people trying to figure where it is going.

VC Keynote with Howard Lindzon and Paul Kedrosky - Canada's VC system is broken, go south young person.

Bonin Bough Keynote - Pepsico is very bullish on social media and you should be too.

David Miller Keynote, Open government data is important and improved transit is the future hope for Toronto.

Phil Gomes - Managing Personas Online - Don't switch off your brain when you go online, think twice, type once.

Jeff Quipp - Search Engine Optimization 101 - Build lots of pages with great content and search engines will beat a path to your door.

Mark Evans - How to Integrate Social Media Into Your Marketing Plan - You haven't missed the boat, everyone is still experimenting but don't piss off the Mommy bloggers.

Thanks for taking a chance and joining my grand Mesh09 branding experiment. I'm creating two T-shirts. One with IMetWayne.com on it and one with wdawe.com on it. The first one I'll wear during MeshU09 and the second I'll wear on the first day of Mesh09. I'm curious to see how many people will take a flyer and type in my URL to see what I'm all about based on a T-shirt. Are T-shirts effective marketing tools, or are all those beer shirts I have collected not worth the cotton they are printed on from a marketing perspective? Feel free to add your comments on T-shirt marketing.

Feel free to browse the eclectic content contained herein. This is a blog without a theme. You can also follow me on twitter at twitter.com/wdawe where I promise I will not market, advertise or otherwise take advantage of you.