seesmic – Climb to the Stars

Cats Online: Quintus and Tounsi [en]

[fr] Photos et vidéos de chats 🙂

Being a proper cat lady and an expert in social media I of course make sure my cats’ online presence is at least decent. Twitter doesn’t work too well because we only have one phone for the three of us, and I get to use it most of the time. On Facebook, I have thankfully (for my friends) joined a francophone “cat people” group where I post most of the kitty photos I take. Quintus and Tounsi do have their own presence on Facebook, though it’s spotty at best. (Do please like them, it’s good for their egos.)

During the last module of the social media and online communities course I direct, Thierry Weber came to give a couple of hours of training on YouTube and online video. I “played student” for the occasion, which inspired me to tinker a bit more with video in the future. I actually did some “videoblogging” early on, and was a rabid user of the initial Seesmic, but never really got into YouTube. Probably because I joined it early on (my username is “steph“, that should tell you) when it was still really crappy. (Which is why I used to post more to DailyMotion or Viddler.) I’ve also always found messing around with video formats and codecs and upload size a real nightmare, but now it’s much easier. With an iPhone and a programme like iExplorer to get the videos off it (warning: you have to pay), I’m actually looking forward to making some videos while I’m in India next month. Oh yeah: video editing… not so much for me. I shoot short sequences, throw them online, and that’s it.

So, without further ado, cat photos (Tounsi and Quintus) and videos from the last days.

Enjoy!

Suw and Steph Q&A Session on Seesmic [en]

[fr] Sur seesmic, Suw et moi-même répondons à vos questions!

A few minutes ago, we kicked off the first “Suw and Steph Q&A session” on seesmic:

Come and join us! We’ve already had a few good questions and we’re looking forward to more.

Trying the Seesmic Video Plugin [en]

[fr] J'essaie le plugin seesmic pour mettre de la vidéo dans mes articles. Il paraît qu'on peut laisser aussi des commentaires vidéo!

When I visited Seesmic in San Francisco, Loïc told me they were working on a video comment and posting plugin.

Here I am, trying it out.

{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/NrZQ4aKmSu_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”My First Seesmic Video Post with the WordPress plugin.”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/0i66jwr6zE”}}}

Lunch at Seesmic [en]

[fr] Apparition dans le Seesmic du Jour suite à mon passage dans les bureaux de la startup de Loïc Le Meur hier. Je passe les commentaires sur mon accent vaudois... 😉

I was invited to drop in at the Seesmic offices yesterday for lunch and a chat. Lunch was really nice — sushi in a place where you can tell the chef to serve you what he wants. My dream come true! We need more restaurants like that. Where we don’t need to choose what we eat.

But anyway. Over lunch, Loïc was mentioning that his e-mail had become unmanageable, and that the only way he actually managed to deal with “stuff” was to do things immediately, when he thought of them. There’s something to be said for that — I’ve been doing it more and more with e-mail myself. Anyway, poor Loïc seemed swamped (and Vinvin chimed in with similar feelings), so I asked if they’d heard of/read Getting Things Done. Yes, they’d heard about it, but had never really investigated.

I heard about GTD for a year before actually heading over to 43 Folders, reading up, and ordering the book. Many people had sung the praises of Getting Things Done to me, but I kept thinking “just another over-hyped magical self-help productivity solve-all-your-problems snake-oil method”. I guess one person too much told me about it, and once I read the book, I really kicked myself for not doing it earlier. It’s changed my life, even though I keep falling off the GTD wagon — but one nice thing about it is that it’s a forgiving system.

It takes a certain amount of commitment to learn and get on (if you’re not commited enough to read the book, fuggedaboudit), but once it’s in place, it’s not that hard to get back on when you fall off. In my opinion, it can also be beneficial even if imperfectly implemented (which is my case: I have an overflowing inbox, my lists aren’t up-to-date, and I never really managed to get the daily/weekly/monthly review thing going — but I strive towards that).

So anyway, Loïc immediately decided he was going to have me talk about GTD on the daily Loic.tv show. Here we are, then, me trying to actually get some information across (not easy with the two French clowns) in Seesmic du Jour 107:

I got to say a few words about Going Solo too, which was nice 🙂

Unfortunately they left out the bit where I hit Loïc on the head with my teaspoon, and nearly whacked him with my MacBook. He spent his whole time interrupting me, and then complaining that I wasn’t saying anything! I actually got him to leave the table so I could say a few words about Going Solo with a reasonably straight face…

Thanks for the invitation!

About a Date [en]

[fr] La journée de conférences Going Solo aura lieu le 16 mai et non le 9. Mes excuses à ceux auprès de qui j'avais confirmé la première date.

Oh. Sorry to disappoint you — not that kind of date. Yeah, just a calendar one. Before Christmas and end-of-year festivities interrupted my blogging about Going Solo, I wrote about the headache involved in picking a date for an event.

Over the last few days quite a few people have been asking me if the date I announced (May 9th) was “final”. My answer was: as final as it gets at this stage.

I met yesterday with my sales partner, and amongst other things, we double-checked the date. Two problems popped up: the first — and not the least — was that she would be in Africa on a business trip at that date. Oops. The second is that there are quite a few bank holidays around the 9th. The French are off on the 8th (victory WWII I think), and Monday is a bank holiday in Switzerland as well as France. Not mentioning that the previous week-end is a four-day week-end.

So, we looked at other dates. 16th May was good (there is even a possibly exciting collision with a music festival here in Lausanne in the evening — I’ll tell you more when I can) except for the fact that the Next08 conference is the day before in Hamburg. Well, the public isn’t exactly the same… so it’s not such a huge deal. My apologies, however, to the conference geeks out there who would like to make both of the events and who will end up having to squeeze travel in between.

So, please pull out your calendars, and scratch out 9th May (you’d written it down, hadn’t you?) and replace it with May 16th, the next Friday.

More news? Coming. I’ve been wanting to blog about the content I’m planning for Going Solo for quite some time now (always “tomorrow” — bad, I know) but “other stuff” seems to have developed a habit of getting in the way. No more of that, I promise. You can expect regular “Going Solo” news from now on — shortly on a dedicated blog which will be ready for public consumption as soon as I’ve imported all these posts and added a little content.

Aside from that, I met with a designer this afternoon to talk about visuals (a huge scary and opaque domain for me, I want to blog more about that) and we’re narrowing down on a venue.

Should I also give you some Going Solo updates via Seesmic, I’m wondering?

An Experiment (Seesmic and The Black Swan) [en]

I love reading, and I have a pile of interesting books waiting for me to dig through them. I’ve just picked up The Black Swan where I left it over a month ago.

One of my frustrations with reading, I realise, is the difficulty in sharing the interesting stuff I discover. Being an online person, I’m used to being able to share all the interesting stuff I find or think of very easily. Going from printed book to the web is not that simple.

I painstakingly typed up quotes in my tumblr but honestly, it’s not the best solution. Maybe somebody will offer me a pen-scanner one day (that would be fun!) but in the meantime, I’m a bit stuck without a good bridge between my dead-tree reading and my online community.

So, I just did an experiment with Seesmic. I read out quotes and commented some of the stuff I was reading. There are two videos because (as I just discovered!) Seesmic cuts you off at 10 minutes. In total, here are 16 minutes or so of me rambling on and reading quotes to you.

The Black Swan I

The Black Swan II

Sorry for those of you who can’t see the videos. For those of you who can, do let me know if you think this is a good idea or not.

Update: more videos…

The Black Swan III

The Black Swan IV

Seesmic Tips [en]

[fr] Quelques tuyaux à partager après quelques jours sur Seesmic. (Traduction intégrale, pour une fois.)

Allez directement sur http://www.seesmic.com/Seesmic.html pour éviter d'avoir à vous re-loguer à chaque fois.
N'essayez pas de tout suivre. Comme dans la vie, on ne peut pas tout suivre. Autant l'accepter tout de suite, sous peine de sombrer dans la folie.
Pour le moment, il n'y a aucun moyen simple de voir à quelle vidéo répond une autre vidéo, ou bien où sont les réponses à une vidéo donnée -- sauf en faisant manuellement le tour de la timeline publique à la recherche de vidéos du même nom. Mais ils bossent dessus.
La qualité vidéo est merdique, mais n'y prenez pas garde. C'est une Bonne Chose, en fait. Ça nous libère des soucis de qualité technique pour nous encourager à nous concentrer sur le contenu.
Pour éviter que la fin de vos vidéos soit coupée, attendez sagement que la bare de progression grise dans l'écran de prévisualisation ait atteint le bout de la barre (illustration). Parfois, il manque quelques secondes à la vidéo quand vous la prévisualisez, mais dans mon expérience, la vidéo finale est complète (pour autant que vous ayez attendu!).
N'annoncez pas toutes vos vidéos sur Twitter. Soyez sélectifs. Ou ouvrez un nouveau compte rien que pour ça.
Quand vous cliquez sur "follow xyz" à droite de la vidéo, ça donne l'impression qu'il ne se passe rien, mais en fait, la personne est effectivement rajoutée à vos amis.
Essayez de regarder la caméra, et pas votre image sur l'écran (plus facile à dire qu'à faire!)
La webcam reste active après que vous ayez fini l'enregistrement. C'est un bug Flash, pas de la faute à Seesmic (donc vous en faites pas, ça tourne pas!) Si ça vous dérange ou que vous avez besoin d'économiser vos batteries, rechargez simplement la page.
La timeline est parfois capricieuse, ou certaines entrées n'y apparaissent pas. Dans le doute, rechargez la page, ou visitez les pages individuelles des gens pour être sûr.
Si vous en avez marre de devoir subir les annonces de vidéos dans des langues étrangères qui vous échappent, cliquez sur la petite terre à côté de "Post a video" pour les filtrer.

Voilà, je crois que c'est tout!

A few tips after a few days using Seesmic.

Head for http://www.seesmic.com/Seesmic.html directly if you don’t want to be asked to log in each time.
Don’t try to listen to all the videos. Just like in life, you can’t follow everything. Accept it now or it’ll drive you crazy.
There is no way for the moment to easily find which video another video is replying to, or where the replies to a given video are — short of going through the public timeline and clicking on anything with a similar name. They’re working on it, though.
Don’t worry about the fact the video quality is bad. It’s a Good Thing. Forces you to concentrate on content rather than technical quality (a daunting prospect, when it comes to video).
Prevent Seesmic from chopping off the end of your video by making sure you wait for the grey progress bar in the preview screen (after recording) reach the end. The preview may be cut before the end, but in my experience, the final video isn’t.
Don’t Twitter all your videos. Be selective or set up a separate Twitter account.
Clicking on the “follow username” link on the right actually does make you follow that person, even though it seems nothing is happening.
Try to look at the camera, and not yourself on the screen (easier said than done).
Your webcam will remain active after recording a video. It’s a Flash bug, not Seesmic’s fault (don’t worry about your privacy, it’s not recording). If you need to save power or if it bothers you, just reload the page.
The timeline sometimes gets screwed up, or some posts don’t appear in it. Reload, or visit individual user pages.
If you’re sick of having your timeline “polluted” by foreign languages you don’t understand, click on the little earth icon (next to “Post a video”) and filter them out.

There, I think that’s it!

Seesmic Addiction [en]

After the initial doubts, addiction:

I’ve lost count of the number of videos I recorded. I’m drowning in them. I’m afraid you can’t easily track them down if you’re not the lucky holder of a Seesmic account (it’s still closed, though they’re working on opening it — there are 15’000 people on the waiting list for invites).

I did a short piece on WoWiPAD. I talked about upcoming posts here on CTTS. I spoke against conversation threading. I participated to the collective dissing of the expression “social graph”.

I left a nice message for Loïc, in French, to tell him I liked his service (I usually complain about his stuff more than praise it, so it’s worth noting).