Creekside Chatter

Fall is the unofficial start of conference season for professionals looking to get together, learn more and network with one another. I've personally been to four conferences in the last month alone, some about technology and business, and one for journalists.

Regardless of industry, there is one age-old relic of professional networking that refuses to die: the business card. Even at the most high-tech and cutting edge of events, you still can't mingle without collecting a pocket full of paper cards. Surely, this can't go on forever. The business card is ripe to be disrupted. But what will replace it?

There are a few other interesting lessons out of this. First is that, contrary to what some people claim, you don’t have to be a "big name" to make these things work for you. People have a sense of when someone has been genuinely wronged, and they step up. So, Monica was able to get attention for this, despite not being "famous" in the conventional sense. Second, contrary to the claims that the various "online mobs" that hang out in places like Reddit "just want everything for free," various online communities have always shown a willingness to stand up against situations where they feel someone was genuinely wronged. And that should give you an idea of what they really think of various situations where some record label complains about file sharing. It’s a totally different situation, and people react accordingly.

Cooks arrogance in this is breath-taking. Fortunately, a large number of people agree - and have a voice to express their displeasure.

Just in time for the food-filled fall and winter holidays, WordPress.com has launched the simply awesome and hunger-inspiring FoodPress.

FoodPress features the best food-related posts from WordPress.com’s network of over 14 million blogs. The posts are hand-picked “by scouring food-related tag pages like food, recipes, baking, cocktails, and more,” so don’t forget to tag your posts!

I hope that FoodPress is the first in a long line of GenrePressing WordPress.com blogs, and I hope that technology and photography are next.

Take a look - it's delicious!

Dear Lifehacker,
I remember reading about some sketchy wallpaper apps, along with other concerns about security in Android's somewhat Wild-West style app Market. How can I keep my phone (and myself) safe from bad apps in the Market and elsewhere?

Call it ingenious, call it evil or call it a little of both: Copyright troll Righthaven is exploiting a loophole in intellectual property law, suing websites that might have avoided any trace of civil liability had they spent a mere $105.

That’s the fee for a blog or other website to register a DMCA takedown agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure bureaucratic prerequisite to enjoying a legal “safe harbor” from copyright lawsuits over third-party posts, such as reader comments.

It's sad that people have stooped so low . . .

Once a year around this time, Brightcove rolls out a bunch of new features to its online video platform and calls it a new release. With Brightcove 5, this year the service is becoming even more Apple-friendly than ever before. Not only is there more HTML5 goodness baked in, but it now supports Apple’s HTTP streaming for video apps and also offers a template for creating video apps on the iPad.

Brightcove started paying closer attention to how videos play on Apple products last year with Brightcove 4, which added support for an iPhone video player. Then as it became clear that Apple would not support Flash players in its mobile devices, Brightcove started transcoding to HTML5 and laying out a roadmap to add support for analytics, advertising, and custom players.

Now, with Brightcove 5 it adding in more HTML5 features. When media sites and other customers create branded video players, they now look the same in Flash and HTML5. And Brightcove’s analytics now keeps track of views in HTML5 players alongside Flash players. It also supports APPle’s new HTTP streaming for videos in iPhone and iPad apps, as well as HTML5 browsers (but only on Apple devices). Finally, it is going to start pushing its iPhone app for video producers and reporters to be able to shoot, edit, and upload video straight from their iPhones to their Brightcove accounts.

In addition to the HTML5 and Apple-specific features, Brightcove is also adding YouTube sync, which lets video producers push their Brightcove videos automatically to their YouTube channel or manage which videos they would like to promote there. Overall, video uploads and processing should also get faster for pro and enterprise accounts with some new file transfer acceleration technology Brightcove is licensing from Aspera.

CrunchBase Information

Brightcove

Apple

Information provided by CrunchBase

It's only a matter of days now before our iPads have multi-tasking!!

AirPrint is Apple’s wireless printing service. By the time it ships, it should be able to send pages to almost any printer on the same Wi-Fi network, or to certain printers directly (HP ePrint have already been announced).

This is a good overview of the new iPad features in iOS 4.2 due out in November. The clip shown above makes me wonder if they will be implementing Wi-Fi Direct in this version . . .

My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.

The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city — with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.

Great article! Read it all.