Brent.fm • a technology mixdown

Yes, tv whitepsaces or, as Minnie likes to say, “wi-fi on steroids.”

Time to grab your yagi. The “man” is coming for your unused air “waves”. The “tax man” is standing by and the whole system is having technical difficulties. The FCC is directing the show and the advertisers are taking the lead role. What the hell is going on?

Ya know, the squandering of bandwidth here in Hawaii is at least as harmful as the Jones Act is to shipping. Do we really want to pay, to earn the right to pay, so we can use air?

Maybe just watch the video and check out the site. Even if you’re only “aware” of the issue you’ll make the right decisions. Let’s free the airwaves Hawaii.

What would you do with free wi-fi?

For many of us that work half our time online, it could mean greater energy efficiency in our lives. It would also effectively remove the first of five critical success factors for strengthening Hawaii’s digital economies, outlined over here.

Look for smaller chips and sensors to change the way use and reinvent the way we use wi-fi. For example:

An Old Favorite—WiFi— Preps to Disrupt Smart Meter Market
Today at 10:57 AM by Michael Kanellos

Get to know Wi_fi and you’ll be amazed at what it can do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi

August 22nd, 2008 | Tags: broadband, FCC, unlicensed spectrum, wi-fi | Category: Surfing, social-mixdown | Leave a comment

Aptly named title of Matt Mullenweg’s presentation Saturday at WordCamp SF. This event will be a model for our upcoming Wordpress events. Before reading further, if you’re interested in learning more about Wordpress, attend this month’s sustainable web class at the Hawaii Innovation Center on the 19th -pls preregister here. If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of online marketing and social networking, two additional classes are must-attend events on the Big Island:

• Internet Marketing Workshop Coming to Hilo in September
  In two hours you’ll learn the best techniques for marketing your business online.
• Social Marketing and Networking 101 Coming to Hilo in September
  In two hours you’ll learn the latest Web 2.0 tips, tricks and techniques for marketing your business online.

Back to the State of the Word.

If you’re a WordPress user, you can go read something more exciting, like better coverage of the recent event, here. If you’re new to WordPress stick around.

The facts are staggering. We all know about the “other” Internet, called, “Facebook” and the other one called, “MySpace” but did you know that WordPress is also a top-five social networking site?

That’s right and now that WordPress is being treated as a platform, we will essentially have access to our own version of a Facebook community. That’s a stretch at this point but at a minimum, Wordpress will cause Facebook to “go open” or “go extinct.” not even Google has this much potential for creating large amounts of positive change within the social landscape.

We’ll actually, currently, you’ll need BuddyPress to make that happen. I’ve been following BuddyPress for about a year it seems and it’s not quite ready for the sustainable web community but it will be considered in the future.

Bullets from the presentation:

• Security - Over 20 government agencies use Wordpress.
• Plugins - There are 4.96 average plugins per blog.
• Developers - 11.1 million downloads this year, 2.8 million downloads last year. One new release per month. Over 1,000 commits (changes).
• WordCamps - 20 worldwide. Look for a WordCamp event on Oahu October 24th-25th , see Podcamp Hawaii.com for details.
• Spam - 5 billion spams caught for a 99.925% accuracy rate.

Interesting quote from Om Malik, “I think the big impact would be lots of bandwidth. In the Internet Age, bandwidth is what processors were in the PC age.”

We agree and we’re focusing on strengthening Hawaii’s Digital Economies. Hawaii (Island) is already at 37% renewable energy sources for our electricity. As our local sustainability efforts lead the State into self-sustainability we’ll be looking to our ohana on other islands to proliferate the digital economy we’ll need to get to the next step in paradise.

August 17th, 2008 | Tags: buddypress, wordcamp, Wordpress | Category: Reviews | Leave a comment

The research below was inspired by first trying to find a date of one of the Macromedia Conferences way back when. The event I was searching for was, UCON 1997″. It was a career and probably a life-changing event for me and probably a lot more folks out there.

A remember what seemed to be a large clan of MacroMind Director users that read every page of the Lingo Programmer’s Journal and nearly every post on Direct-L. We worked with a lingo dictionary or bible on one side and the Director manual open on the other side of the keyboard. Many of us also read just about everything that came out in print about, “multimedia”.

The web still has that same level of excitement and inspiration. Like my introduction to Smart Sketch when I knew something just changed. I had no idea the tool would become FutureSplash and no way of knowing what that meant but you could feel the web becoming animated and interactive. By mastering FutureSplash I had just learned to sustain myself using multimedia on the web.

Here’s some of the resources I came across.

• We Band of Director Programmers - Darrel Plant (change agent)
  http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=567
• Early MAX - John Dowdell (change agent)
  http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/10/early_max.html
• Happy Birthday Flash
  The history of Flash splash pages
  The history of Flash from the Flash Team
  The history of Flash from the horse’s mouth…AKA John Gay founder of FutureSplash
• MSN goes online with FutureSplash Animator (it’s gonna be big!)
  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1996_Dec_10/ai_18929971
• Grandmasters of Flash: An Interview with the Creators of Flash

July 8th, 2008 | Tags: future splash, macromedia, multimedia, smart sketch, UCON | Category: social-mixdown | Leave a comment

We’re looking for writers that meet the following requirements:

• You often use okinas and kahakos in your blog posts
• You know basic html (can be very basic)
• You’re willing to compile and send us feedback regarding the beta
• You’re willing to sign a confidentiality agreement

This is an important project to us and we want to release the code when it is ready. If you believe helping bloggers accurately use the Hawaiian language in their blogs is important too, please let us know by filling out the form below. Mahalo

cforms contact form by delicious:days

June 18th, 2008 | Tags: Hawaiian, kahako, Language, okina, Theme, Wordpress | Category: Consulting | Leave a comment