Tag Archives: youtube

Do We Publish Anything With Meaning and Longevity Today?

How much do we write that has meaning and longevity today? While we aren’t, and can’t, all be Mark Zuckerberg (see Mark Zuckerberg and the Biblical Meaning of Success), it got me thinking about the value (and noise) we add when it comes to our photos, videos, and our writing today. Much like photography when the digital camera boom happened, there was a flood of “uncle Bob” photographers that rushed on the scene, flooding every corner of the Internet with second rate photos. Now 10 years later, photographers, pros and amateurs alike, are adding a staggering 200 million photos to Facebook PER DAY, or around 6 billion per month, and that’s just Facebook, Flickr from February and March 2012, has reached the pace of 1.8 million photos a day, that is up to 28 photos per second in peak times. Same goes with video, YouTube is now receiving 72 hours of video uploads per MINUTE, and I’m sure the same goes with the music industry.

So what about writing? WordPress (the blogging platform of choice for many writers and bloggers, added 937,374 new posts, 1,492,356 comments, & 197,044,567 words TODAY on WordPress.com, which doesn’t even include self-hosted WordPress blogs making that number about double. When you add Twitter in at something in the range of 300-350 million tweets per day, you really start to see the massive amount of data we put out each day. Perhaps volume of information written degrades the overall quality of our writing? Would someone who wrote in the 15-17th century have actually had an advantage to writing in the 21st century? Less noise, less Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, Instagr.am-ing, etc, would probably have given Calvin or Luther more time to write, and write well, right?

This morning I received a notification from the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale that Wipf & Stock Publication has released previously unpublished writings of a series of sermons preached by Jonathan Edwards between 1737-1738. Here is a man who wrote profusely when it couldn’t be done on a computer. He had to write by hand, and even at that often times he didn’t have paper and had to use any scrap he could locate. In fact, he wrote so much that a whole team and museum of people are still sifting through his writings, trying to compile them into volumes. I wonder how much he could have written in the 21st century world. Maybe it would have been less… and not nearly as inspired as it was?

Apple iPad Goes Mainstream with Mom’s Birthday

Photo-Video Year in Review for 2009

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2009 was a busy year that saw a lot of changes in our household. Throughout each month of each year for the past 15-18 years or so I have taken photos every chance I get, but it has only been in the past several years where I have taken photos of just about everything my wife and I do as we go about the year. This puts a new perspective on the year when you look back at an entire year of photos and see what all we were able to do.

People often think you need special equipment or expertise to be a good photographer, and in some cases that is probably true, but for every day events, any picture is better than no picture. Most cell phones have cameras now and they are around the 2MP range which is certainly good enough to shoot a passing smile. In fact, a good majority of the photos you will see in the video below came right out of my iPhone camera. It has taken some practice but I have gotten very good results with just using my iPhone camera, and there are many photographers that have made a point to compose a gallery here and there using their iPhone camera.

This video below is a combination of about 1,200 photos over about a 5 minute period, hope you enjoy it, happy new year to everyone. If you want to watch the video in a larger window just click 2009 Year End Photo-Video.

How to Create a Twitter Favorites RSS Feed

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If you haven’t had time to get into Twitter yet you might want to jump over there and do a Twitter crash course before you read this post, but for others who are already knee deep in Twitter, how effectively are you using this great service? There are so many aspects to Twitter that can be utilized that the deeper I go in Twitter the more I find.

One thing I started really using lately is the “favorites” feature on Twitter. If you haven’t given this much thought, the favorites feature is a great way to start to bookmark those really great posts you see and don’t want to forget. Once you start to mark tweets as favorites (or star them) you need some good way to get back to the information at some point. I was marking the posts on Twitter I didn’t want to forget but never went back to look at them. So, this is how you can take the Twitter favorites and pull the RSS feed from Twitter into your favorite RSS feed reader.

First thing you want to do is start marking your favorite tweets. You can do this in TweetDeck or in the basic browser application by clicking on the star icon when you mouse over a tweet. Then, follow these steps below to start pulling your Twitter favorites feed (if you want the short version just read step 1 and that should do it).

1. Create the Twitter Favorite Feed in RSS Reader

This doesn’t seem to be published on any Twitter help pages or anywhere else, but you can grab your favorites feed (or anyone else’s for that matter) by using the address: http://twitter.com/favorites/%5Binsert_your_ID_here%5D.rss , so to pull an rss feed of my twitter favorites, you would place the url http://twitter.com/favorites/scottfillmer.rss. Just drop this url in your feed reader and it works just like any other feed.

For more information on actually pulling RSS feeds from Twitter that are posted by Twitter (that would be the friends timeline, profile page, @replies page, and the home page, you can visit How do I find my Twitter rss feed? from Twitter support. You can also read an older post of my called Add Value to Your Blog, Offer an RSS Feed in Reverse if you really want to look at some different rss feed stuff.

If you question after reading this is what in the world is an RSS feed Brad Ruggles has compiled some of the popular how-to YouTube videos on what is an rss feed, twitter, and blogs. You can see that here.

2. Make Your RSS Feed Public (optional step)

You can now use it in any way you would use a normal rss feed. So do some cool things with it like make it a public feed or as a blogroll on your site. You can see the results below, those are live and updated as I mark items as favorites.

You can do this (if you use Google Reader) by going to the “manage feeds” link in your reader, then choosing the tag where you placed the rss feed to be public, then either choose to “add a clip to your site” or “add a blogroll to your site” and it will give you a piece of code to use where ever you like. The list below is my last 5 favorites (when they are placed in your RSS Reader they won’t clip after a certain number of characters like they do below).

3. Use What You Have Created

One reason to use the favorites options is to mark the genius in Twitter. There is a lot of information to be gained from Twitter, but it isn’t really from Twitter, it is from the people who post to Twitter. Many people take the time to post very useful information and actually create value in their 140 characters. You can find new websites, new ideas, new ways of doing things that you may not have ever thought about before seeing them on Twitter.

Update March 2011

Obviously much have changed in the way twitter functions over the last few years, but I think you will find this information still relavant and useful. Another great post on the subject can be found over at ProfHacker called Managing Twitter Feeds as well.

Dave Ramsey :: Life is Not a Snapshot, It’s a Movie

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Back in October 2008 I had the great privilege of being able to attend an event where Dave Ramsey was speaking. I had a chance to shake his hand and take some photos of Dave speaking but most of all I was able to hear what he had to say and apply it to my life. What was great about the session was it was his normal financial engagement, it was on business leadership, and it was great. If you think Dave is animated on TV or radio, you should see him in person. The photos below are just a sample of his session.

I was listening (or actually watching) an interview with Dave Ramsey a few days ago on Fox News where he was speaking about a couple in pretty dire shape at the moment. His comment about their situation was, “just remember, life is not a snapshot, it is a movie”. It is amazing to me how one person can have so many different pieces of great advice, but he is absolutely correct, our lives are not a snapshot, a single moment in time, they are fluid, and moving through time, not just a piece in time.

I went back and looked at one entry I did May 1 2008 called Time Lapse Video of My Work Day // What’s in a Day where I did a YouTube time lapse video of my 8 hour work day. At the time it was a typical day. Now, some 8 months later it is just a shell of what my normal day is like and as each day goes by, that snapshot in time is more and more outdated, especially in my current position.

What this means is whatever your current situation is, it is only what it is right now, but don’t look at it as if can and won’t ever change. If it is good or bad, it is still going to change as time goes by. If things are so dire right now that you can’t imagine how your life will get any better, just hold on, time will move things along like it always does and your situation will change.

Great words from Dave Ramsey. Not necessarily new or earth shattering, more like obvious, but sometimes it takes someone saying it out loud for it to sink in and become a permenant part of our thinking. Surrounding yourself with motivated and intelligent people like Dave does doesn’t hurt either.

A Texas Roadhouse Dinner and a Movie :: Friday Feet

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This week was one of the more crazy weeks in the past few months, but today Deb and I went over to Georgia and had dinner and that is my friday feet this week. The movie in case anyone was interested is With Honors (because my friend hasn’t let me borrow Dead Poets Society yet). One thing I have been trying to get to this week was to shoot a new profile photo (you can see the finished pic here) for various avatars and networking sites. The second shot here was when I got interrupted and Ebby joined me for the photo shoot. She certainly did not help at all, but makes for a cute photo I guess. Time to enjoy a few hours of Friday night and some work outside tomorrow. Being that it is two days from official winter, it will be over 70* tomorrow, time to cut some fire wood.

Time Lapse Video of My Work Day :: What’s in a Day

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Another beautiful day down here in the south. This is such a great time of year in this part of the country, but we all know it will be short lived. Hot scorching days are just ahead. Today was one of those days I didn’t have to go anywhere at all and was able to get some work done here in my office.

Welcome Video and Some Time Lapse

First thing I did this morning was finish up my welcome video for my blog pages. I had been putting this off for some time and finally got it done. Instead of me rambling on, after watching this from another blogger it game me the idea to use it in my video. I put this video together yesterday and finished it up today. The refresh rate on the parts where I am talking are not as good as I would have liked, but I think it worked out ok, let me know what you think in the comments below. This is the only time I am going to actually put this video in a blog post, but since this blog post is my “daily post”, this is part of what I did today.

That was pretty much my first try at time lapse but once I saw found out how to do it I was a little enamored by the whole thing. You can really find out a little more about yourself by watching some of these videos. First thing Deborah said was she didn’t realize that I was actually so left hand dominant, me neither.

Scott Fillmer Resume Endorsement Video from Scott Fillmer on Vimeo

Everything Else

I did manage to get in my 4 miles of walking today and a long day of general work. No wildlife today other than or normal neighborhood of squirrels. Something neat I found today blogging wise was this new application that will allow you to use video comments, called seesmic. You can see their latest post here, Thwirl with Friendfeed released, you can also sign up for their alpha test at seesmic.com. I am going to try their wordpress plugin and see how it goes.

Update: I ended up removing my time lapse from YouTube and haven’t been able to get it replaced yet, but I replaced it with the video above.

Scott Fillmer

Life in Faith & Photos