Weekly Wrap 44 and 45

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. As has happened several annoying times before, we’re covering two weeks at once here, and the National Broadband Network seems to have dominated.

For some reason I usually have an unproductive spot of poor health in the first half of April. It seems 2011 is no exception. For two weeks of work this all looks a bit thin, and I daresay that’s going to make a mess of my cashflows in a couple of weeks.

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Monday 4 April I was one of the guests on an episode of ABC Radio National’s Australia Talks on the NBN. The audio is available via that link just there, the one you just read past.

Corporate Largesse

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Wentworth Falls railway station, photographed yesterday during some light rain.]

Live video streaming — from your phone!

I just saw a very cool thing: a demo of a new service called Qik which lets you stream video from your phone and “broadcast” it on the Internet. Here’s what it looked like as Lachlan Hardy chatted with us on his Nokia N95 while walking through Leichhardt.

Screen grab of Qik.com video stream in action

Qik automatically records what happens, so you can watch the replay. We could type in questions, he’d see them on-screen and reply. The lag was only a few seconds.

OK, it’s still in alpha mode, so dunno when this will be ready for real life. But it’s certainly going to be one of those things which changes everything. Again.

[Update 22 March 2014: Technologies come, and technologies go. Qik is no more. Its video messaging functions have been absorbed into Skype, and Qik will cease to exist on 30 April 2014 — although videos embedded in websites are replaced with the message “video unavailable”.]