Playing for Keeps is a free novel delivered via podcast in audio and PDF form. It tells the story of Keepsie Branson, a bar owner in the shining metropolis of Seventh City: birthplace of super powers. Keepsie and her friends live among egotistical heroes and manipulative villains, and manage to fall directly in the middle as people with powers, but who just aren't strong enough to make a difference. Or that's what they've been told. As the city begins to melt down, it's hard to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad.I have been following this novel via the podcast "I Should Be Writing" since Mur began writing it. She shared the experience writing, editing, and submitting it to agents over the last year. When it wasn't picked up, I was secretly glad. While a publishing deal would have been amazing for Mur, I feel that her audience is going to get a truly marvelous experience through the simultaneous publishing of the book as an audio book and text through podcasting/RSS. The revolution to independent open media is upon us, and this is going to be another shining example of what can be done out side of the traditional publishing/studio system.
I was just able to fix some unknown error in my MovableType install that wasn't allowing me to post anything to the site. Whew! That only took two weeks.
If some of you aren't aware, we are going to have our second baby min the next few weeks. I will be posting the announcement as soon as it happens, but in the mean time my presence here and at Reel Horror may be a little light. I am thinking that things will calm down once we see that the baby is 100% thanks to everyone for the support on the last eight months.
If I do end up going dark for a bit, check me out on twitter - http://www.twitter.com/michaelsbecker.
Very big weekend planned for me. Erisa has given me time off to go and be a development Geek and mingle with the fine folks at DrupalCamp. I'm very excited about the theming and front end track, although I would have thought I would have been more for the developers. Ah well, all the Coldfusion during the day is making me bi-lingual.
that was bad. it's late and my brain is fried.
I have been looking at a bunch of technologies recently, and I am trying to determine which is going to work best for the myriad of sites. I am going to bring Becker-Byrd back online, and I think I need a "river" of my specific feeds.
Right now I'm updating Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, Blip.tv, Facebook, and Reel Horror. Jaiku pulls from all of these, but I would love to have a single point of contact for all of it on this site.
Here is what I need to have - contact listings on the various social networks, an overall feed of all of my postings, and a seperate blog.
I certainly hope the One is on the way b/c the Matrix is here.
I'm working on a project while having Twitter update me with the select people (mostly new media types) that I am following, while sititng in an IRC channel watching the next itteration of Call In shows be built before my very eyes. Chris Pirillo is putting together what appears to be the ultimate new media "infotainment" show. The pieces he has assembeled include
- Call ins via voice conferencing which can be accessed through Skype
- Notifications of show topics and time via Twitter
- Live streaming with user feed back (text based) via IRC and Flash
In every way this is almost the fulfillment of the independent media revolution. He has just created Larry King live using all (practically) free services that are available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
And as a heads up - I'm going to be moving my New Media commentary/watch to a new blog, probably next week while I'm in Florida. Will be called The Wasted Potential and will include blog and video podcast (may do some audio as well).
Exciting times we live in.
Technorati Tags: matrix, chris pirillo, twitter
I am very excited about what is coming out about Apollo. It looks like the Rich Internet Application may actually finally be realized in a way that makes so much more sense than embedding your product inside another.
That's been my major complaint about Web 2.0. I can only access sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Upcoming through a third party app, namely a web browser. We can now look at these problems and not only create NetApps (very much like Alex Lindsey has been calling for on TWiM) but they can truly stand alone, and work on any platform.
Concerns about Apollo at this point: Documentation. First and foremost Macromedia (before it was acquired) was not the best documenter. I brought this up during the Beta of Coldfusion 7, but it's especially critical for Apollo, since Apollo will be Adobe's "switcher" app for programmers. What I have seen of Flash CS3's documentation is a promising start, but the docs in Apollo will be the make or break in keeping this from being another Central.
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