Pluggd: text tagging for videos

WHY? This was the most compelling demo at SF New Tech’s most recent event (other than the cuddly Pleo). You’re watching a 45 min clip from CNN but you just want the news about Iraq. Pluggd inserts text tags in the video at the points where Iraq is mentioned, as well terms they deem relevant like “Iran”, “war”, “terrorism”.

Diigo: social book marking site, also allows users to annotate websites and share with others

WHY? My laptop was taken from me before its time last month, and besides missing having a laptop period, the things I miss most from my clunky old Dell are, in order, (1) the graduate school dictionary I compiled of all the esoteric terms I was reading, (2) my bookmarks, (3) travel photos.

Diigo is my second try at using a bookmarking site. I used Del.icio.us for a while a couple of years back and abandoned it after a few months of use. The unforeseen laptop tragedy has given me a new appreciation as to why it’s useful to have your bookmarks stored online.

TweetClouds: Tag cloud of all terms you use on Twitter

WHY? You don’t already spend enough time thinking about yourself. Visual summary of what you’ve been writing about.

I’ve been using Twitter for just over a month now, see my TweetCloud here: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/ldpodcast.html

Someecards: Writers from The Onion write egreeting cards.

WHY? You need a laugh and/or another distraction at work.

Seeqpod: Find exactly the music you want, stream it to your computer, build playlists

WHY? You want what you want when you want it without having to download songs and viruses to your computer.

San Francisco Web 2.0 Crawl Calendar: Calendar of all Web 2.0 Expo events happening next week

WHY? Some events aren’t listed on Facebook. Thank you Search Marketing Salon for putting this together.

1. Olympic Torch Run
2. Flickr’s launch of video

Scott Beale from Laughing Squid posted some amazing coverage of the run/protests on Flickr, photos and video. Check it out at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/2401435793

For one year — March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007 — he filmed one video entry a day, M-F. His video journal was one of the first widely popular blogs that involved audience participation; he also created an alternative advertising model that involved yellow duckies.

I have not heard of Ze since his last post in March 2007, until this week. One of my Twitter friends wrote something about thanking Ze Frank for orange, and today someone emailed a link to one of the funniest videos:

the show with zefrank: 11-27-06

* Is there a stuffwhitepeoplelike post on Scrabble yet?

Why, I wondered, was Ze suddenly showing back up in my life after a one year hiatus?

Two Google-seconds later I had my answer.

Ze has created the ColorWars 2008 on Twitter. Team Orange, Blue, VERY Green, and on. Players join a color team by choosing a color follow, and voila! you’re a team player! There’s something about Bingo challenges, but with my diminished attention span I can’t be bothered to follow through to figure it out. Point is, user-created challenges, games, and merriment are on Twitter.

GaryVee launched GDP08 (Good People Day) on Twitter today, April 3, a little experiment that saw hundreds (thousands?) of nice messages tweeted about others deemed to be good people.

I hear blogging about blogging is in poor taste. I’ll end here.

Learned a valuable lesson about Javascript and WordPress today — they don’t mix — and Ze don’t do Java.

Regardless, glad to have some Ze back in my life. Go Yellow!