Voxeo Talks

Recently someone asked me why he wasn’t pulling up all the blog posts he knew we had when he entered a search term in the Search box at the top of the first sidebar on the right of our site. I asked him where he was searching… and that was the key. If you are visiting one of our individual blogs, like this one, Voxeo Talks, and you enter text in the search box, you will search only posts published to that ONE blog.

However, if you go to our main blog portal at blogs.voxeo.com and enter text into the Search box visible there, you will search across ALL public blogs on this site.

That’s the trick to doing a site-wide search. It matters where on the site you are when you do the search. Hope this helps some of you out there…

If you have been watching our main Voxeo blog portal or are subscribed to our “All blogs” RSS feed or are following us on Twitter, you know by now that I launched a new video podcast a few weeks back called “Emerging Tech Talk” or “ETT” for short. Now that the show has been going for a bit and I have most of the kinks worked out of the production process, I thought I’d take a moment to formally introduce the show here and talk about what I’m doing with it.

First, though, I should of course mention that you can follow “Emerging Tech Talk” and receive notification of new shows by doing any of the following:

• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
• subscribing to our RSS feed
• following us on Twitter

THE PREMISE

So what is “Emerging Tech Talk” about and what am I doing with the show?

Primarily the show is a way for me to use video to tell stories about new / emerging communications technologies that I find interesting. I thought about subtitling it “Chasing bright, shiny objects related to communication technology..” and while I may not use that sub-title, that’s basically what it is. A part of my role within Voxeo’s Office of the CTO is to look at the changes happening around us with regard to both the ways in which we communicate and the tools/technologies we use to communicate. I speak about those changes at conferences and write about those changes both here and on my external blogs – with Emerging Tech Talk I can also now speak about those changes in a video format.

Basically I want to share with you through video some of the exciting changes I see going on out there.

Note that this show is not necessarily about Voxeo. Sure, by nature of what I am doing on a daily basis, probably many if not most of the shows will have some bearing on what we do here at Voxeo, and certainly I’ll use ETT as a vehicle to talk about new Voxeo announcements (as I did with the VoiceObjects news) but in general my plan is for the show to cover a wide range of topics related to “emerging communication technologies” – the kind of topics you would see covered at a conference like eComm next March.

In fact, I expect to use conferences like eComm, VoiceCon, ITEXPO, etc. as places where I’ll be doing video interviews to run in the show. As you’ve seen with ETT already, I’ll undoubtedly do some shows from IETF standards meetings. Essentially I’ll just have my camera (or laptop) along with me as I travel to various conferences and see what video is interesting to record at those events.

I also expect to include some “screencasts” of various tools and services I find interesting. I’ll probably talk about some iPhone apps… social networking tools… new VoIP products… basically, again, whatever I find interesting and exciting.

Given that a secondary reason for doing the ETT show is simply to experiment with the video podcasting medium, I expect you’ll see some experiments along the way with different video tools and services. (And some may work well and others may not.)

THE DETAILS

Each show will be less than 10 minutes in length. I’m also uploading these shows to YouTube and the folks there restrict the length to roughly 10 minutes. (I know this all too well. Having successfully uploaded a show that was 10:56 long (ETT #011 on P2PSIP) I got a little cocky and tried to upload one over 11 minutes. Rejected.)

I’m not aiming to do much in the way of post-production / editing. The goal is to record shows that are less than 10 minutes (so I don’t have to do much cutting), pop them into iMovie on my MacBook Pro, do some very basic editing, add text overlays, adjust titles… and publish.

I’ll primarily be recording directly into iMovie using my Mac’s embedded webcam, recording with my small little JVC MG-330 hard disk camcorder or using ScreenFlow on the Mac to record the screen and also the video. (Which is actually how I did the Skype video recording I did with Michael Codini in ETT #010.) I’m sure I’ll use other tools as I come across them. Because of the different tools, I’m sure video quality may vary somewhat between shows.

As far as frequency of shows, I expect it to be highly variable. My goal is to have a new show up at least twice a month… right now I’ve had a couple up each week. I expect that when I go to conferences/events I’ll have more shows going up. I also expect that when I’m buried under some deadline I may not produce a show for some time. The net of it is that I can’t guarantee to you that it will be a weekly show, but you’ll see shows as often as I can create them.

THE INVITATION

So with all that said, I extend to you two invitations. First, as I noted at the beginning of this post, there are several ways that you can subscribe to the show and join in the journey. Please do! Let’s see what we can do with this medium to tell the story of the changes happening around us with regard to communication.

Second, you are definitely invited to contact me with topics you think I should discuss on the show. If you have questions about subjects I cover on shows, areas you would love to have more details on, or just cool new services you’ve seen (or are involved with) that you think I should talk about, please feel to contact me and let me know. You can email me, contact me on Twitter or identi.ca, contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn, or IM or call me on Skype (danyork). I can’t necessarily promise that I’ll fit everything in, but if I find it interesting and it relates in some manner to communication technology, I very well may.

[NOTE to PR people: Before you pitch me, please read the blogs on this site as well as my Disruptive Telephony and Disruptive Conversations sites to see if your clients' new whiz-bang product/service is even remotely along the lines of the things that I write about. Thank you. (Can you tell I'm really sick of being pitched by people who don't even bother to take 30 seconds to look over my sites to see if it is even appropriate to pitch me?)]

Now, let the journey begin…

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS or following on Twitter.

---

Technorati Tags: emerging tech talk, emerging technology, emergingtechtalk, ett, technology, video, videopodcasting, voice, voip, voxeo

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

Technorati Tags: applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis

What do you think of our new “Comment Policy” for our blog site?

When we launched the site a few months ago, we didn’t put up a “comment policy”, largely because I’ve been blogging for now almost 8 years and have never had such a policy on any of my blogs (although I’m going to be adding one to my other blogs now). It simply didn’t occur to me to do so. However, some of the recent comments we’ve received have made us concerned that we don’t have a policy in place. We’re all for “free speech” and we want strong opinions to be voiced, but we also want to keep our corporate blog portal “work safe” and “family friendly” (i.e. we want people to be able to browse our site when they might be at home with a young kid looking over their shoulder) and encourage an atmosphere of civil discussion.

Obviously, this site is ours and we can realistically do whatever we want to do with it, including deleting/censoring comments we don’t like. But that’s not the spirit of the blogosphere and certainly goes against our interest in having open and honest dialogue. Bring on the negative comments… we’re glad to hear them. (We definitely like the positive comments, too!) Our intent is to continue publishing any and all non-spam comments we receive… but we also want some guidelines in place so that if we do some day feel the need to delete or censor a blog comment, we have a publicly stated rationale for why we are doing so. We may never choose to do this, but then again we may have someone leave a comment that we feel goes too far over one of the lines we’ve stated.

So I’ve put together our first “Comment Policy” and would love to hear any comments about it. We’re definitely open to feedback. Is it reasonable? Are there things there you think we should delete? Are there things that we should add?

FYI, in creating this comment policy, these were some of the resources I looked at:

• “Does Your Blog Have a Comments Policy?”

• “The Legal Issues with Comments”
• The Blog Herald’s Comment Policy
• EFF’s “Legal Guide for Bloggers”
• Cisco Blog Site Legal Disclaimer
• Microsoft’s “Rules of Conduct” (more than just about blogs)
• Neville Hobson’s “Terms of Use”

Comments are very definitely welcome. (If you know of blog comment policies out there that you particularly liked, those would be welcome as well.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, voxeo, comment policies, comment policy, comments

I am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU – and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with – and answer any questions raised by readers. More details – and information about why we are publishing this blog – can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu