The day that I was flying to San Francisco, Simon and Nat were flying to New Zealand for Kiwi Foo and Webstock so we shared a bus to Heathrow. They both look knackered because they had attempted to “get on New Zealand time” by staying up all night. We parted at the airport: See you in Austin I said. Good luck decentralising the social graph he replied.

Since arriving in San Francisco, I’ve spent most of my time trying to meet up with as many people as possible. A hastily-convened microformats/geek dinner helped to accomplish that.

Now I’m in Sebastopol for the SG Foo Camp. The letters SG stand for Social Graph, which is unfortunate—I’m not a big fan of that particularly techy-sounding term. That said, I’m really looking forward to hearing more from Brad Fitzpatrick about the new Social Graph API from Google. It isn’t the first XFN parser but it’s the only one with Google’s infrastructure. The data returned from spidering my XFN links is impressive but the fact that it can also return results with inbound links is very impressive, although it takes significantly longer to return results and often times out.

For most people, today’s big news was Microsoft licking its lips at Yahoo but that was completely eclipsed by the new API for me. While I was waiting at Tantek’s for Larry and Chris to drive by and pick us up, I spent my time gleefully looking through the reams of information returned from entering just one URL into the API. Just now, I was chatting with John Musser from Programmable Web and we were thinking up all the potential mashups that this could open up.

I’m not going to build anything just yet though. I’m far too tired. I need to find a nice quiet corner of the O’Reilly office to unroll my sleeping bag.

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Tagged with sgfoo2008 sanfrancisco api socialgraph

Say you've come up with a stellar concept for a whole slew of ads for a large company. And you make an appointment with them and present everything as a pitch properly on boards. How would you protect yourself from this company if they simply decided to steal your ideas instead of recompensing you for your time and efforts?

A lot of people ask me how I do the MetaFilter Podcast (warning: the podcast makes no sense to anyone outside of MetaFilter uberfans). I know they don’t mean “how do you do it man, you’re making magic over there every week!” but rather “what software and hardware does it take to make a decent sounding podcast?” After almost a year of regular podcasts and trying out different software and equipment, I’ve gotten the workflow down cold and I wanted to share the my way of making a good sounding podcast on the cheap. This works perfectly well for me being in Oregon and talking to my friend Jessamyn in Vermont over Skype, recording at both ends, then tossing it all into Garageband to complete the podcast.

I read a lot of podcast how-tos when I set out to do my own, and almost all of them are mired in technical details about microphone quality and USB vs. mixer board audio wankery. Most every tutorial about doing a podcast interview focuses way too much on studio-like sound quality achieved through your equipment instead of through software and a bit of clever thinking. So without further ado:

How to record a good podcast between two mac users on the cheap

Software required:

• Skype (free)
• Call Recorder for Skype ($15/each or 3 for $30, plus free 30 day demo)
• Garageband (included with most Macs, or $79 for iLife)

Hardware required:

• Logitech USB headset microphone ($35 from Amazon)

Though you might have heard bad phone interview podcasts with Skype before, having Call Recorder running on both sides of your interview will mean your interview partner will have a crystal clear recording just like yours. The cheap headset microphones are brain-dead simple to use on a Mac (plug-in, change audio prefs to use the headset for input and output, adjust the recording level) and produce perfectly good vocal recordings. I’ve used $250 higher-end microphones and had little audio quality improvement.

This process assumes two people, each running Skype, Call Recorder, and having a USB headset microphone.

The Interview Recording:

1. Start a Skype chat between you and your partner
2. Both parties hit the record button on their Call Recorder (I record on high quality, low compression AAC)
3. Conduct your interview normally
4. When interview is complete, end call, stop recording
5. Call Recorder includes a directory of mini-apps called Movie Tools. Have your partner locate their recording file and tell them to drag it over the “Split Movie Tracks” application
6. Have partner upload Track 1 of the split movie files to a server you can download the file from

Assembling the podcast in Garageband:

1. Drag your copy of the interview recording over Split Movie Tracks to turn your recording into one file for each side of the Skype conversation
2. Drag each resulting .mov file over another Movie Tools app “Convert to AIFF”
3. Drag your partner’s half interview (that you downloaded from them) .mov file over Convert to AIFF
4. Open Garageband, start a new podcast
5. Duplicate one of the vocal tracks (my partner is female so I duplicate the default female track
6. Drag your own Track 1 AIFF track into a Garageband track (my goes into the default Male Voice)
7. Drag your own Track 2 AIFF track into Garageband, perfectly aligned with our Track 1 (this ensures the timings are exact for each side of your own interview recording)
8. Drag your partner’s Track 1 AIFF track into the duplicated track in Garageband
9. Garageband quickly analyzes each track and makes visual soundwaves to go with each track. “Line up” your Track 2 and your partner’s Track 1 audio files. The peaks and flat quiet area should look really similar (click screenshot below, view notes on the image itself)

   

10. Once your partner’s vocal track is lined up (press play to hear all three tracks and your partner should sound like an almost perfect echo from their two tracks), delete your own Track 2 track. You now have two high quality recordings from each respective source, ready for continued editing into your podcast (you can level out the volume if one person was louder, clip out pauses and coughs together, etc)

How does it sound?

To give you an idea of how it sounds, consider the following three sample recordings.

The first is the worst possible: recorded Skype conversation where I dialed out to a phone and recorded the entire thing on my end (mp3 sample 1 96kbps)

Second, here is what a standard recorded Skype call sounds like, where I recorded both sides of the conversation on my end, so my partner was recorded through Skype and even on my high bandwidth fiber connection, it does have artifacts (mp3 sample 2 96kbps)

Third, here is the same interview segment as the second part, but with my partner’s local recording track thrown in and my recording of her track thrown out. Much better and to me, sounds like we could be in the same room, even though we are 3,000 miles apart. (mp3 sample 3 128kbps)

Conclusion

The basic premise of this approach is you can record a Skype interview without actually needing/using Skype. You are actually recording audio on each end independent of Skype, so you won’t suffer any sound quality problems due to Skype transport. So that’s it, for about $100 or so, you can have a pretty damn good podcast that sounds like two people sat in a room together talking and recording, even if they’re on opposite sides of a country.

I'm not being big about this, my entry has had plenty of votes. There's some really good entries now but too many stinkers in the crucial top 20.

by Brian Fichtner

Before relocating to Los Angeles, David Brady cut his teeth on the Colorado art scene, exhibiting at RULE Gallery, Gallery Sink, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Known primarily as a sculptor (in the broadest 21st Century view of the discipline), Brady is to have his second solo exhibition at L.A.'s High Energy Constructs opening tomorrow.

Titled "Genesis," the multidisciplinary exhibition will explore creation and existence through a myriad of materials such as custom wallpaper, bulletproof glass, industrial grade tow chain, acrylic fingernail tips, man-made crystals, and computer-generated models. Combining highly skilled craftsmanship with seductive form, if past work is to be any indication, this new show is a must-see.

Genesis Opening Reception: 2 February 2008, 7-9pm
2 February-8 March 2008
990 N. Hill Street #180 Los Angeles, CA 90012 map
tel. +1 323 227 7920

I've got a new post up on io9 about a military invasion of the Earth's interior... So go check it out!
And expect more posts on BLDGBLOG soon. Happy February.

During the summer of ‘07 the AIM Product Design Group was lucky enough to have Art Institute student Gian Cruz join us for our first internship. Sharing a handful of duties from designing web experiences and participating in brainstorming to inflating chairs with a bicycle pump, Gian was a welcome temporary addition to our team. Thankfully, he’s recently accepted a position and will now be joining the team full time. We knew Gian rocked but not many of us knew he could rock! Check out this video of our newest team member playing “With A Little Help From My Friends” by Joe Cocker and The Beatles:

Please join us in applauding Gian’s many talents and welcoming him to the AIM design team.

Man, I can barely watch Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman's shtick gets old, but goddamn this is funny shit.

By Christina Panas

Just five years after opening their flagship Williamsburg boutique, and on the heels of a Park Slope outpost, Oak co-owners Louis Terline and Jeff Madalena are making that first East River crossing with sleek new digs in NoLita, a shop that opens officially on Monday.

"It happened quickly," says Terline, when asked how long the latest store had been in the works. "This was the only neighborhood we wanted to be in, so when the space became available, we jumped on it." Tucked away on a narrow corridor between Lafayette and the Bowery, Oak's newest spot is emblematic of the owners' continuing interest in thriving on the fringes. "We tend to buy clothes that are a little bit different, a bit borderline," says Terline.

That means plenty of pieces from Ksubi, Alice Ritter, Jeremy Scott, and the like. Likewise, the store's interior—sparsely furnished and punctuated with a sculptural central fixture—blurs the boundaries between gallery and retail space.

Read more...

Oak
28 Bond Street
New York, NY 10012 map