Looking back on my last three posts – each of them an embedded video – I feel, as the last one’s title implies, rather lazy, even a little ashamed.

In addition to the video embeds, I’ve tried two gimmicks to makeup for my negligence of this blog: Ma.gnolia’s daily link posting job (imperfect, but still pretty top) and a Twitter plugin that publishes a daily digest of my (nonexistent) tweets. In the end, both were pointless – not their fault, but mine. Instead of fleshing it out, these tools diluted my blog and confused my intentions, vague as they may be.

The Twitter tool proved useless on two counts. First, I hardly ever use the tool. Second, I found that the digests produced during rare spurts of activity were embarassingly inane and, by nature, always out of context. So much for that.

The Ma.gnolia post job was more problematic. I had chosen Ma.gnolia because it didn’t truncate a bookmark’s description like Del.icio.us does. “Easy,” I thought, “I’ll just translate bookmarking activity into blogging.” I was wrong to confuse the two: there is a difference between simply pointing, and actually commenting. If I am prepared to write at least 100 words on something, shouldn’t I at least commit to giving it its of its own post? Conversely, why pressure myself to write about something I only find fun, or cool, or useful? There are better, faster tools for that.

Last night I reconciled myself to the fact that there is no technological way around the writing process. If I want this site to be a reflection of what I’m thinking or doing, a random video embed or a cronjob is not going to cut it. From here on out, I will only post here when the impulse to share something is compounded by the impulse to say something.

To divide the editorial from the curatorial, I have given in to that wonderful little tool that makes clapping up the tasty bits of the web I find very, very easy: Tumblr. Tumblr is a lightweight blogging platform that has received a good deal of praise recently. Its greatest strengths are its simplicity, ease of use, and it’s bookmarklet, which makes posting quotes, chat, video and photos quick and painless. No need to worry about tags, HTML hotlinks to external content, or attribution – Tumblr takes care of the last two, and doesn’t really care about the first. Click, click, done. Virtual pointing couldn’t be more straightforward.

My tumbleblog can be found at thelayenthusiast.tumblr.com. I will keep – and even maintain – this Wordpress blog for personal riffs. I expect that a handful of things I set aside for Tumblr will interest me enough to treat here, and hope that separating collection and commentary will give me more focus and drive for the latter.

In preparation for my new job I’ve been signing up with a bunch of video-sharing sites. Thing is: I got no video camera. The video on my Fuji F10 is busted, and my iBook predates those with pinholes. One thing I do have plenty of is old-fashioned digital photos. The question, then: how to turn my photos into video slideshows?

Enter Slideroll.com, top hit for Google string “flickr photo video slideshow”. It looked like a legit, layman’s tool perfectly suited to the task. “Free Slideshow Videomaker!” says a button on their site. Fair enough. I poked around a bit, and decided to spring $7.50 for a two month test run.

Unfortunately, I didn’t poke around enough, and overlooked that the “Free Slideshow Videomaker” is, for now at least, only a Windows app. No slideshow videos today. Even so, the service seems very promising so I don’t regret the purchase. It’s been around since 2004 (ample time to develop a Mac version, eh?), and while the coup de grace feature remains out of Mac users’ reach, everything leading up to it feels solid.

The site is logically setup and UI behaves smoothly. In no time I had given it Flickr API access and had all my sets available for upload in a dropdown menu. While I admit I made no effort to explore any deeper features or editing functions, within 10 minutes I had uploaded a thick set of pics from SONAR in Barcelona, picked some music from Sonific (meh), saved and downloaded the whole thing. Not bad. Of course, this “download” is not a video, but a folder that can be processed into video…on a PC…and, let’s hope, eventually on a Mac.

As it stands, Slideroll does offer a somewhat compelling service. Unlike the embedded Flickr slideshows used below, an embedded Slideroll occupies less page real estate. It also takes a little less time to load, assumingly because it’s calling a prefab slideshow from Slideroll, rather than loading a raw Flickr Flash slideshow. Converting Sliderolls to videos, I hope, will make the result even more discrete, useful, and fast-loading when embedded from a videosharing site.

I am not particularly concerned by the 5000-photo upload limit. It’s generous to begin with, and it becomes irrelevant once I can depend upon Slideroll as a photo-to-video production tool – and you can just download, save, and repost the video – rather than a slideshow creation and hosting service. Of course, this imposes a different calculus on the whole situation: $7.50 bimonthly is $45 a year. Considering current freeware and webapp trends, not to mention a market of indie programs that can be had for a song, that’s a stupid expensive proposition for any application, much less an interdependent web-desktop tool. Make it a flat $25 or $30 for the 5000 photo ceiling and the (Mac, please) videomaker and it’s sold.

One thing I must note is that, at its default 360×240 setting, Slideroll is landscape oriented and crops photos rotated to portrait. There are both pan and zoom options, but I haven’t tested them. Increasing the aspect ratio to 360×360 appears to be a satisfactory, even pleasing band-aid, but I have no idea how that plays when converting to, and uploading as, video. Oh yeah, Web 2.0 brownie points for the (adjustable) rounded corners.

The jury is still out. Let’s hope Mr. Gaudreault can submit a Mac version of the Videomaker as additional evidence.

UPDATE: The first attempt at pasting code broke my site…insofar as it ruined my lovely center column layout by justifying to the page. I’m sure my own ignorance is responsible.

UPDATE 2: The “New MySpace Code” works just dany in Wordpress – though I don’t know why the lower corners are cropped.

UPDATE 3: Mr. Gaudreault was kind enough to comment (below). The prices above have been changed accordingly. Thank you, Mr. Gaudreault. I wait with bated breath for the Mac release!

I just discovered Paul Stamatiou’s HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows, and I love it. When I first started using Flickr, I wanted it to serve as both a photo sharing/hosting service and as a remote backup. I often post photos that aren’t great in themselves, but which make nice kinetic sequences when used with Flickr’s slideshow tool. The problem was that I couldn’t make everyone view my Flickr photos as sets, much less my sets as slideshows. Thanks to Paul’s handy little bit of code, I can now choose between embedding static photos to illustrate blog entries, and displaying all photos from the relevant set within a blog post. Thank you, Paul!

Welcome to my blog.

I was born today, October 8th, in 1979.

I am writing this to know myself better.