Tag archive for "google"
Google is giving away Free wifi for the holidays
When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.
Here are the participating airports:
Last year Gary Vaynerchuk declared April 3rd Good People Day! This year he said that you had to write a blog post or make a video to talk about Good People. Seeing that today is my 1 year anniversary of randomsarah.com, and that I started this blog with a Good People Day video last year, I thought it was only fitting to do a post this year to talk about all the GREAT people that I have met over the past year.
Gary Vaynerchuk, I would not be writing this post if it wasn’t for you. You were the first person who told me to trust in my community when you pushed me to raise money for the Thunder Cruise and you have been very supportive ever since. So thank you for starting good people day, and for being a great person yourself.
I wanted to focus on people that have really helped me feel more comfortable in this space, and who have given me a great chance to grow.
Matt Knell. You were the first person to ever come up to me, already knowing who I was, at a Mashable event back last summer. It was one of the most flattering moments EVER. Since then you have become a great friend and provided me with some great advice over the past year. You have never stopped believing in me and pushing me to be the best person I can be.
Rob Blatt. You have always believed in What’s it all About from the very beginning. Thank you for taking a chance on me and helping me produce and edit the show. You have been a lifesaver. And Amber (I know you don’t want me to use your last name) you have been wonderful over these last few months, you are a great writer and you inspire me to be a better blogger every day.
Tim Kress-Spatz you believed in What’s it all About, and decided to help me with the show by bringing the show into the Ambush TV family and I could not be more thankful to you. You are a great entrprenuer and you inspire me.
Jonathan Dingman, simply @dingman to most people. Jonathan you have taught me so many things, from how to love Google, to understanding SEO, and the art of kicking a** and taking names with WordPress. You are a great friend and an even better WordPress developer!
Who can describe Brett Petersel, Oz Sultan, Micheal Gruen, and Nater Kane. You four have made this entry into the New York Tech Community one of the best experiences of my life. It’s been a crazy ride, but I am ready for another year.
Chris Brogan… there are no words for how awesome you are. I can only aspire to be a fraction of your awesomeness, but it’s something I work toward every day! Thank you for your words of encouragement every time we see each other.
Jeff Pulver, I have to thank you for always believing in me, and for giving me all the opportunities that you have to succeed. Thank you for believing that I am a rock star, and lifting my spirits every time I see you.
Whitney Hess, you are an amazing woman. People just couldn’t wait for us to meet each other and we clicked the second that we did. I am proud to call you my friend and I am thankful for all the great advice you have given me.
Walt Ribeiro, YOU ARE AWESOME! When you first met me, you came up to me and said “oh my god, it’s Random Sarah!” Like I was the best person on earth! You are a great musician and a wonderful friend. You are a true rock star!
Finally Cali Lewis, you were my person for Good People Day last year, but you need to be on this list again. I wanted to thank you for all the great help, advice and feedback you have given me over this past year. Thank you for inspiring me to start doing online video and for continuing to be a great mentor.
And to all of my friends and family who knew me before I was blogging, and before I was on twitter, and who were reading my blog daily when no one else was…you guys are what keeps me going every day! Thank you for being so supportive.
Some of you may know that for the last few months I have been working on my podcast called What’s it all About. In late December I partnered with Ambush TV, the company that is producing Gary Vaynerchuk‘s new show Obsessed, with Samantha Ettus, and we started the process of re-launching a show.
You may remember when What’s it all about first premiered. It was back in September during Web 2.0 week in NYC. The first episode we did was explaining twitter, and it got quite a bit of attention. I was surprised at how people responded to a show that I put together in my bedroom with my iMac, but the response was good. At one point the show was featured in iTunes “New and Notable” category.
It was very exciting. However I soon came to realize that I wanted to do more with the show and I did what I never should have done and that’s doubt myself. I realized that I couldn’t put out the kind of quality show all by myself, without funding, from my bedroom. (I probably could have if I really tried, but I doubted myself and I didn’t try) I only made two episodes of the show before I got discouraged with technical difficulties and no one to help me fix them.
So I started to look for a way to make the kind of show I wanted. Ambush TV came to my rescue! My friend Tim Kres-Spatz was starting Ambush TV with his friend Mark and I thought it was the perfect solution.
Ambush.tv creates original video content based on the passions of fresh faces from across the internet. We transform great ideas into high value, high definition productions of broadcast television quality.
Ambush TV has a studio space not to far from where I live, and they had the equipment to help give me great production quality for the show. I still needed some help with the techinical side of things. I wrote the show and hosted the show, but my editing skills were never that great (I was using iMovie) and I had a vision for the website for the show that I could not exicute on my own. So I brought in my friend Rob Blatt. He is an award winning producer and has been a podcast guy for years. Rob is now co-producing the show with me, he edits the show, and he did all the design on the blog. He took what I had in my head and helped make it real and for that I am very thankful!
The show is still in the developement stages but we want to develop it with all of you. We want to hear from you about what you would like us to cover on the show. We want your feedback, and anything you could do to tell people about the show would be greatly appreciated.
The other day I was watching that first episode and I realized that in September when originally launched the show I had less than 300 followers on twitter. (These days it’s close to 1,400) it made me realize how far I have already come and I have this great community to thank.
Well here is the first episode of the show for your viewing pleasure.
Media is one of those really broad terms that can refer to just about everything we do these days. There is old media, new media, social media, digital media, mass media, internet media, and the list goes on.
Mass media is probably what we all deal with the most. You read it, you watch it, you listen to it.
(via wikipedia)
Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. It was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, although mass media (like books and manuscripts) were present centuries before the term became common. The term public media has a similar meaning: it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across media such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting, which may require union membership in some large markets such as Newspaper Guild, AFTRA, & text publishers. The concept of mass media is complicated in some internet media as now individuals have a means of potential exposure on a scale comparable to what was previously restricted to select group of mass media producers. These internet media may include:
The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The term “MSM” or “mainstream media” has been widely used in the blogosphere in discussion of the mass media and media bias.
We all consume media in different ways. You may DVR a bunch of shows for the week and sit down for a nice long Sunday afternoon watching them all. You might constantly hit refresh on your favorite blog while sitting at a desk at your boring job.
We all have different media habits, but the ways in which we consume and even create different types of media make us all unique. A little more than a year ago if you asked me what was the first thing I did when I got online in the morning I wouldn’t have said, checked my email, I would have told you that I read my feed reader which, at the time, was full of only apple rumor sites. That was the most important type of media to me.
Many people think that consuming large amounts of media is a waist of time. I have heard many people say that throwing away their TV added hours of productivity to their day. But what do you do when it becomes part of your job to keep up with all this media? How do you keep up with it all?
Many of my close friends find it fascinating that I can go on and on about popular culture at it’s connections to mass media at the time. They wonder how I keep all this information in my head. Well that is easy:
#1 I am a Media Studies major, so while everyone else is taking chemistry, my professor’s would reference last weeks episode of the L word so it would benefit my grade to know what was going on.
#2 I make it my job to read tons of technology, pop culture, and social media blogs every day. Why do I do this? Because that knowledge becomes valuable when I can make connections to why some things work and others failed. For the same reason that we study history (so that it won’t repeat itself) we all should keep a closer eye on the patterns in Media.
I decided to take a look at the tools I use to keep up with all the media that we all see every day. Inspired by a post by Chris Brogan who was inspired by John Jantsch I decided to write out my “social media system” Mine is a little more inclusive however to describe how I keep up with other forms of media as well.
The Workflow:
In the background:
In order to watch as much video media as I do there are some very important tools I use. iTunes is how I manage all my podcast subscriptions. This way I can always catch up when I am away from my computer on my iPhone.
While I do have a DVR, sometimes it just isn’t enough. It can only record on two channels at once and on Monday nights that just doesn’t cut it. I use a great program for OS X called TVShows. TVShows is an application that automatically downloads torrent files for your favorite shows. Manage your subscriptions and preferences from within the TVShows application, and TVShows takes care of the rest: a background process is automatically launched at a regular interval to check for new episodes. This allows me to keep up with shows I watch regularly and watch them on my computer via Boxee anytime I want.
So that is how I keep up with all the media that I consume. What is your media flow? Write a post on your blog and post a link!
this is a reblog via fimoculous:
So here we are again — playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture — with 36 predictions for 2009:
1. Hatahs: 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.
2. Facebook: By the middle of summer, you realize that you’re logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it’s so damn convenient.
3. Politics: After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.
4. Newspapers: At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
5. Yahoo: Fuck it, Lycos buys it.
6. Twitter I: Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter’s big plan “to make money.”
7. Twitter II: But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the “Twitter professional” will somehow become a reality.
8. Twitter III: A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed “Twitter Shock.”
9. Starbucks: After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new “buffet” option, which is a surprise hit.
10. Daughter Moguls: In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.
11. Magazines I: Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of… yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark’s apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.
12. Magazines II: Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.
13. Magazines III: Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.
14. Gossip Girl: In the Christmas ’09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.
15. Subscriptions: Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.
16. Where The Wild Things Are: You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don’t get it. They’re kinda right.
17. New York Times: After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.
18. Online Video: Something’s gotta give. Two of the “big” three — Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks — cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider’s headline is “Funny Or Dead In 24/7.” Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.
19. Terrestrial Video: Something’s gotta give. One of the “big” five is morphed into a cable outlet.
20. Daily Beast: Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.
21. Tina Fey: First woman knighted. Now Oprah’s pissed too.
22. Google: They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.
23. FriendFeed: Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don’t either.
24. Publishing: 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.
25. Music: Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island’s album debuts platinum — the only album to do so this year.
26. Lara Logan: Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.
27. Gawker Media: Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.
28. Mad Men: After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.
29. Diablo Cody: Released in September, Jennifer’s Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.
30. Words: Webster’s Dictionary names undershare word of the year.
31. Online Media: Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of “me too” small startup publications launch. They will call themselves “online magazines,” but they will be blogs.
32. Microsoft: They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won’t. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)
33. Apple: After Biz Week’s “Is The Innovation Over?” story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.
34. Education: 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.
35. Digg: It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.
36. Rupert Murdoch: He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O’Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch’s cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney’s frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.
I’m falling in love with wordpress all over again because of wordpress 2.7. One of the reasons is the ability to install plugins right from within wordpress. (this is a beautiful thing people!)
One of the plugins that I discovered is wp-greet box. It’s a great plugin for blogs that get a lot of random search or referrer traffic. The plugin will load a small message at the top of a post if someone has arrived on that post as the result of a link. But the plugin goes beyond that. It recognises where the traffic came from (google, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter, etc) and give the visitor a customized message based on that.
If the visitor is on your site because of a random google search (I get traffic like this a lot) It will let the visitor know that they can subscribe to your rss feed if they like what they see. But it also has the ability to display what they were searching for on google and show other posts on the site that they may be interested in.
I have my twitter updates feed into my facebook status. Because of this I get a lot of blog traffic from facebook when I tweet a link. This plugin will give your facebook friends the option to share the post they are viewing on facebook.
As many of my readers know, I love twitter! So you can imagine that I was happy when I saw that this plugin had twitter support. The message will let readers tweet a link to the post using TwiThis. The plugin also puts a link to follow me on twitter if perhaps you found the link through a re-tweet and you weren’t following me already.
Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!
video of me talking about the new public transportation directions on google maps.
via cnet
The online map service now has data from New York’s Metropolitan Transit Agency, one of the largest, most complicated, and most widely used transportation systems. It includes data from buses and subways, the Long Island Rail Road, the Long Island Bus, the Metro-North Railroad, and the MTA Bus Company. And it connects to regional systems, including New Jersey Transit’s commuter rail, light rail and bus service, the Staten Island Ferry, and the Port Authority’s PATH Rail, AirTrain JFK, and AirTrain Newark.
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