There's a type of spam most people have never heard of, because it's only sent to people who run successful websites. I call it "promo-spam." It's spam sent from dipshits with made-up job titles like "Social Media Gurus." They're hired by companies trying desperately to dip their ladle into the daily click-stream of bored morons with short attention spans by creating "viral" list articles. They've discovered a simple formula.

A follow focus is a mechanism used to adjust the focus ring on a lens without having to directly touch the lens barrel.

Det är den äldre mannen Lars-Henrik som förtvivlat försöker förstå varför Aftonbladet tvingar honom att kommentera. Genom att han är inloggad på Facebook dyker en ruta på honom själv upp (som likt den på Jack Werner i skärmdumpen här nedanför) och en text som uppmanar honom att ”lägg till en kommentar”. Gång på gång försöker Lars-Henrik förklara att han inte vill vara med och kommentera. På artikel efter artikel. Att Aftonbladet måste respektera detta.

Modernizr 2.0 came out more than eight months ago; we’ve not sat still in the period since, and today we’re proud to announce the release of Modernizr 2.5, our biggest update yet!

Unfortunately no official metadata or tagging standard exists for MP4. The MPEG-4 specification just defines a standard place to put metadata, but there is no standard on any fields, except cprt for copyright :). Therefore different metadata styles are possible: iTunes-style metadata, 3gp-style metadata, MP4 ID3v2 tags and more. Most podcasts and audio files use iTunes-style metadata. So far so good, but iTunes-style metadata isn't defined in any publicly available document. Its format is determined by the types of files that iTunes and the iTunes Music Store produce and provide (see AtomicParsley, MPEG4 Files, bottom). Some open source projects assembled a list of currently known iTunes tags: iTunes Metadata (mp4v2) and Known iTunes Metadata Atoms (AtomicParsley).

I've done some significant experimentation with different options for encoding MPEG-2 video from a live video source with ffmpeg. The objective was to create video that was approximately 3 Mbps at a "decent" resolution; this video would be manually edited and then converted to Web quality. By "decent", I mean a high enough resolution so that the video can survive the transcode to Web resolutions without too many re-encoding artifacts. When encoding a live source, performance is critical; if ffmpeg can't keep up with the live frames being captured, you may as well not even try to encode the video; your live capture buffers will quickly fill up and bring down your encoding system. Obviously, you can't use any sort of two-pass encoding, either.

Jag har följt ett antal seminarier på ISA:s (International Studies Association) konferens i San Diego som behandlat frågan om vilken betydelse sociala medier som Facebook och Twitter haft för demokratirevolterna i Nordafrika och Mellanöstern, den så kallade Arabiska våren. Här följer min tredje och avslutande, syntetiserande text kring sociala medier och politisk mobilisering, från min vistelse i soliga San Diego. Som ett mantra upprepas att den Arabiska våren inte skall beskrivas som en Twitter- eller Facebook-revolution. Här finns en närmast politiskt betingad oro att ett sådant namngivande reducerar de arabiska folkens insatser i störtandet av de auktoritära regimerna i t ex Tunisien, Egypten och Libyen. Jag delar inte den oron. Som jag skrivit i ett annat sammanhang så förändrar den digitala revolutionen förutsättningarna för politiskt motstånd överhuvudtaget. Framväxten av sociala medier skapar nya möjligheter för politisk mobilisering. Dessa nya möjligheter innebär ju inte att de sociala förutsättningarna för ett uppror försvinner, eller att insatserna av de människor som deltar i kampen förminskas. Men att framväxten av sociala medier verkligen har förändrat förutsättningarna för politiskt motstånd går inte att förneka.

Vad skiljer Facebook från Twitter som redskap för politisk mobilisering? Igår gav jag som exempel att sökordet ”Iran” förekommer nästan 30 gånger så ofta på Twitter som på Facebook, trots att det finns mer än fyra gånger fler Facebook-konton än Twitter-konton. Hur skulle vi förstå skillnaden? Några var kritiska mot exemplet. Deeped skrev en bloggtext på temat och Hampus Brynolf liknade det vid att ”jämföra äpplen med grisar”. Själv menar jag att det är ett utmärkt exempel om avsikten är att synliggöra vad som skiljer Facebook från Twitter som plattform eller som verktyg för politisk opinionsbildning. Alltför ofta talas det om ”sociala medier” utan att skillnaderna de enskilda sociala medierna emellan beaktas. I fallet med ordet ”Iran” kan skillnaden sannolikt förklaras av Twitters retweet-funktion där samma meddelande sprids som ringar på vattnet och att Facebook genom sitt upplägg har ett starkare fokus på det personliga eller kanske till och med det privata.

We’ve teamed up with some of the best and brightest sites online to help make sharing and discovering music even more seamless.

Nu kan du testa och tycka till om nya SVT Play. Än så länge är det en ofärdig så kallad betaversion. Vår förhoppning är att få utveckla den tillsammans med dig. En godbit som vi bjuder på redan nu är en funktion som gör mobilen till en Play-fjärr!

I took it the night we put up our Xmas decorations. It wasn’t posed — it just was, so I snapped it, applied a filter, and uploaded it.

Looking at it now, I realise that this photo not real. It’s disconnected and somehow false to claim the photo as mine. This is not an artefact, or a record, or a representation of a real moment — it’s too massaged, too false to be any of these. It’s a thing that looks a little like something I once saw, but nothing more.

Applying Instagram’s filters is just a clever-clever, bullshit attempt at imbuing largely sterile and pedestrian photos with a sense of human warmth and a “uniqueness”. (There are only so many ways you can to take a photo of the fucking sushi you and 10,000 other people had for lunch.) The filters are a lazy visual shorthand for authenticity — algorithmically applying strange flaws that are common in photos of our parents when they we young. We use technology to try and impart that distant warmth in our day-to-day lives.

By doing so, we’re missing the point: the flaws we so deliberately recreate were never intentional and never wanted. The fuzzy glow and odd colour-shifts were to due limitations of the film and processing techniques used; they’re accidents, not a part of the photo. Previous generations would have given their eye-teeth for the clarity we so casually disregard.

In our attempts to imbue that nostalgic warmth, we miss the real reason we treasure our old photos: they’re artefacts, hard-copy memories of our lives. Their true value is in the way they make us feel — a good photo can take us back to the place it was taken, and invoke in us the feeling we had at the time. That’s something no filter, no matter how brilliantly implemented, can ever recreate for us.

Tied into this is the general devaluation of photographs over the last decade. Previously, you might take three or four rolls of photos while you were on your holiday; now, you can take three or four rolls’ worth every single day of you holiday and still spend less that you would have spent on a single roll of film. The result is hundreds or even thousands of photos, and the chance of finding the one photo that evokes the feeling you had on that holiday drops dramatically — that one photo gets lost in the flood.

We end up drowning in photos, and the burden of cataloguing and sorting them increases exponentially. Our ability to filter the good from the bad almost disappears — compare your iPhoto library to the albums your parents kept of you growing up. One is curated carefully and very deliberately; the other is a mass of events, with little-to-no critical selection. Your iPhoto library is perhaps more honest, less groomed, but that was never the point of personal photos: they’re a family mythology, somewhat idealised, rather than a strictly factual record. Applying Instagram’s filters becomes a way for us to try and make some of these photos stand out — filtering in situ rather than ex post facto.

Our motivation for “sharing” them is same as it’s always been — we want to show people our lives, share with them the moments that were important to us. Fundamentally, it’s the expression of our social nature. The ease with which we can broadcast our uncurated photos has two outcomes. People are less interested in them due to sheer volume of photos from acquaintances and people we went to school with or once worked alongside. But, even knowing this on some level, we still feel the pressure to “contribute” constantly, to avoid being lost in the deluge. And so, to counteract this, we end up taking hundreds of photos and sharing them on Instagram to fill the void and feel, just for a moment, that we’ve made an impression.

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a password strength meter on almost every signup form I’ve encountered. Password strength meters are on fire.