OurMedia is a new web service that launched last week. If you haven't heard about it yet, you will. It's making waves. The intention is to promote the dissemination of media to the world at large, no strings attached. Create something; a video blog, a song, a short story; and upload it to OurMedia where it will be hosted... for free, for ever.

"Create. Share. Get noticed. That's what Ourmedia is about.

Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We'll host your media forever -- for free."

OurMedia has identified a gap in the onslaught of sites devoted to user generated media: video. Vlogs are an idea that seem likely to never come of age, but with OurMedia making it easy, intuitive, and free, the could finally hit the bigtime. Although the site welcomes all forms of digital media, it's support for and free storage of video will be what sets it apart.

According to Mike Davidson, this could be the "single biggest development in the history of the medium." According to me, it's a huge deal, but let's not get carried away. I expect to see a lot of low quality camera phone fodder that is only amusing to the author, but everym revolution has a beginning.

So I put this challenge to you, my loyal reader (get it?): Create something. Create anything. Create one piece and share it with the rest of us at OurMedia.org and let's see if we can get behind a genuinely good idea.

Yahoo's new search engine will only return results from pages containing a Creative Commons liscence, meaning that the content is intended for limited reuse and redistribution.

Very cool.

Yahoo Creative Commons Search Beta

The Decemberists are one of my very favorite bands. You may have read on Micki's blog about how we were supposed to see them play Thursday night, but missed out on tickets.

Well, it turns out that their van and all of their gear was stolen that morning.

Please visit their page and help them out in any way you can. They are taking PayPal donations.

The Decemberists Fund

Since moving Receptacle from Blogger to Movable Type, I've noticed a sharp decline in my readership. This may also have to do with the few weeks I took off during the transition, or the general inconsistancy and overall crappiness of my recent posts. It may also have to do with the number of people who get their daily Jason fix via an aggregator of some sort. For me, it's Sage, for other's it Bloglines, PubSub, or FeedDemon. Some are web-based, some are client apps, some are plugins... Public feeds, private feeds... too many damn options. Honestly, sometimes I kinda miss just perusing the web in a hopeless hunt for something I'll never find, only to come across a dozen things that interest me more.

Link aggregators! LOVING the concept, but not being so sure I was into the whole Del.icio.us scene, I took a look about and found Furl. It's truly outstanding and I've begun Furling everything I come across. Check out my page.

Anyhoo... my recently diminuitive readership makes me hesitant to do this, but I'm gonna ask you guys a question and encourage you to answer it. Right? Right.

What type of news or feed aggregator do you use and why?

Looks like William Hung has some competition.

"Hi, I am Wing! I immigrated to New Zealand with my family about ten years ago from Hong Kong. I have been learning singing in New Zealand and I do performances in Rest Homes and Hospitals and occasionally promotional concerts as I go along."

The samples are truly amazing.

http://www.wingmusic.co.nz
http://www.wingtunes.com

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Yahoo has acquired Flickr, Keith at Asterisk discovers the seedy underbelly of the photo-sharing community: tag spam.

He's right. It was a matter of time.

Let's hope some of that Yahoo money goes towards an intelligent and effective line of offense against those who would seek to soil our beloved Flickr.

It's official. As announced on the Flickr blog, rumors that Yahoo was attempted to purchase Flickr have been confirmed.

They've taken the time to address some of the concerns we Flickrers may have:

Are you going to become Yahoo Photos?

No. Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are alot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good. Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future. Flickr would also suffer from a sudden deluge of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg! so we're going to grow it carefully.

I liked Flickr BEFORE you even heard of it!

You shall be recognized for your discerning taste in web sites!! I bet you also liked the Flaming Lips before they appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, and for that we salute you. Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon.

But I never upgraded!

Free accounts will have more storage and uploads -- pro accounts too -- AND they'll be cheaper.

So... we'll see.

Moreover, congratulations to Simon and Caterina whoim I did NOT meet at SXSWi for some reason. Maybe next year, assuming they don't have Yahoo chips embedded in their necks that prevent them from attending.

Read all about it:
Yahoo Acquires Flickr

So I'm a little late to the table with this one. As you may or may not remember, Jen's brother Liam decided that his nephew needed something special for his first birthday so he made a DVD of songs and videos for him and called it The Uncle Liam Show.

Jen has posted another video from the DVD at her site.

Yes, I was at SXSWi this year. No, I didn't blog it. I didn't blog before I went, I didn't blog while I was there. I didn't liveblog any panels or moblog any parties. I'm a travesty of a new media... guy...

Well, I'll blog it now, as best as I can remember it. You see, the only thing the attendies of this year's SXSW Interacetive Conference love more than terms like 'The Semantic Web' and 'Unobtrusive JavaScript', is booze. These nerds can drink. I, being a wannabee nerd and a relatively new drinker, had something to prove, you see.

Those intimately familiar with the conference are probably not the same people who will be visiting this page, so I'll take it from the top for the benefit of the unfamiliar. SXSW Interactive is arguably the predominant conference in the country on the topic of internet design and development. The majority of discussing and panels are bit bit less technical and a bit more theoretical. For instance, there were a number of panels centering around the current hot button of 'Citizen Journalism', or news blogging. Other panels concerned themselves with Web Standards and accesibility; the reasons why and the logic behind. There were no lessons in C# or photoshop tutorials, thank god.

Beyond the panels, SXSW is a gatherum of old friends and peers. It's a particularly weird vibe... Kind of like Burningman might be if it were held fully clothed in the Austin Convention Center. There's a decidedly bohemian air, even though the majority of shirts in the hallways bear some sort of reference to either and Atari game or the wearer's IP address. At 5pm sharp, the panels shut down and the bars open. And by open, I mean open. Open bars throughout the night every night. From 6-7 at this club and from 7-9 and the next club. Everyone knows when and where the drinks are free and the enrds are going crazy. Combine this with Austin's weekend habit of closing off all the streets in the bar district to traffic and holding a makeshift Mardi-Gras, and you've got quite a different kind of party.

Micki and I had several good friends there with us and managed to meet and greet with a number of other so-and-sos. Perhaps most notably Dunstan Orchard, who's blog I'm just loving, John Styn, who's cuffs match his collar (if you will), and Tantek Celik, who wrote IE 5.5 along with most of the HTML specs I've ever read.

That's it. No revalations, no saucy photos, no torrid details of nerd cross-polination. This is my SXSW wrap-up. Love it or leave it.

PS. - for proper coverage of SXSW, you might check in with Ben at home or at Austinist.

Thought this was kinda handy:

One of the ways identity theft is committed by the crooks is by stealing mail. The mail contains unsolicited pre-approved credit card offers that only require a signature and a reply to the credit card company. You can protect yourself and your family members by opting out of getting pre-approved credit offers. It is a very simple procedure. All you need to do is call 888-567-8688 and follow the voice commands. Once completed, you will not receive unsolicited pre-approved offers for a period of 5 years. Please pass this along to people you know.

Tigran Topadzhikyan
Glendale Police Department
Financial Crimes Detective
Office: 818-548-3101

So it turns out my hard drive is dead. This, mind you, is a server-class drive. When most drives come with a one year warranty, these enterprise level drivers coem with 5 years. I've had this thing less than one. The whole concept behind Serial ATA drives is to be an affordable drive with the speed and reliability of SCSI. Not only have I only owned this thing for 6 months, but it was MANUFACTURED in March, 2004!

This part's gonna get a little more technical. Be ware.
It began with a system crash on Monday morning. Not having time to delve into it, I just went to work. When I returned home, the screen was hung in POST and featured these words:

Verifying DMI Pool Data DISK READ ERROR Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart

After spending far too much time trying to understand what might have happened, I started going about the usual 'my harddrive doesn't work' routine: clearing the CMOS, reseating the CMOS battery, resetting the BIOS, checking all connections, replacing the SATA cable... Nothing. Eventually, I got frustrated and did something bold: a Low-Level Format of the drive using the SATA Host BIOS. I preceeded to install Windows on the newly formatted drive, and the installation went through successfully. I installed SP2, rebooted, and was greeted with:

Verifying DMI Pool Data DISK READ ERROR Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart

Did anyone catch what I did wrong there? I reformatted and zero-filled the drive and that should have taken dcare of any soft defects or boot sector virii... But I didn't run a diag for any hardware defects. I figured there couldn't be any or the system BIOS and SATA BIOS wouldn't be recognizing the drive correctly, nevermind installing software to it. Stupid.

I finally gave in and downloaded Western Digital's Data Lifegaurd Diagnostics tool to a floppy and booted from it.

PLEASE CONTACT CUSTOMER SUPPORT - DRIVE 0 @ PORT 0x900 REPORTED A SMART ERROR

This was followed by the results of several initial scans the software apparently does before a proper diagnostic. My drive failed the first and last scans, showing a value of 1 in each. These tests were: "Raw Read Error Rate" and "Multi Zone Error Rate."

I don't know what this means, other than that my drive doesn't work. Western Digital gave me an RMA and I should get a new drive next week.

End of story.

I'm told there are always signs, if you're willing to see them.

Yesterday morning I noticed that my computer had frozen. Copping an 'I don't have time for this' attitude, I just ignored it, had my breakfast, and went to work. When I returned home, I was greeted with a gruesome site: My computer had attempted to take it's own life.

The monitor was cold and black and bore the random scribblings of a machine mad with dispair. Near the bottom of the missive, one could just barely make out the words: "Disk Read Error."

I tried everything: Resetting the BIOS, clearing the CMOS, mouth-to-mouth recussitation, reseating the cards and cables and even difibulation. There was nothing to be done but start again.

I was lucky to have a copy of my SATA drivers on an old floppy, since at that point, there were no working floppy drives in the house. After some finagling and a few badly timed F6's, I began the long process of formatting my drive and reinstalling Windows.

What caused this terrible tragedy and could it be avoided? Actually, I don't know. I try not to write these sorts of things until I've found the solution. That way I can whine under the guise of 'helping,' instead of.. well, whining. My busiest traffic days have been after posting the solutions to virus and hardware problems (except for that time I mentioned the Paris Hilton video in passing). This time, though... I fear I may never know the truth. Everything seems to be in line, hardware and software alike. If anything comes to light, I'll be sure to share. In the meantime, look forward to a lot of gripes and groans with regard to reinstalling my OS.

PS - Oh yeah. I keep all of my documents on a seperate physical drive which is backed up by a third hard drive. No loss there. Just time.

This is very cool.

Artist Michael Paulus imagines what the skeletons of popular cartoons characters must look like and sketches them out in anatomical detail. The result is a fantastic collection of Mel Brooks meets Da Vinci.

Check him out:
http://michaelpaulus.com

And we're totally cool with that

Sure, we all stopped using Yahoo a while back, but we're not mad. It's cool. We don't hold the same resentment we did when we left Hotmail 5 years ago, declaring Yahoo the new black. It was an amicable split and we're totally comfortable wishing Yahoo well on it's birthday. Seriously!
Just the other day we were out with friends and ended up in the same bar as Yahoo:

Yahoo "Hey stranger."
Us "Oh! Hey, Yahoo. How... have you been?"
Y "I'm doing all right. You know how it is."
U "Yeah, well... you look good. Happy."
Y "I am, I really am. These last years have been really good for me."
U "Me too. Yeah. Well, I should get back to my friends"
Y "It was really good to see you."
U "You too, Yahoo. Take care."

See? Totally comfortable. No sweat. Thank god Gmail wasn't with us, that night!

In related news, if you have a Yahoo account, they'd like to buy you a scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream: Free Scoop