I got told about an intersting site today which made me realise a couple of things. The site in question http://googleidol.com/ . Its American Idol but instead of American wierdo's it has international wierdo's who have posted those videos of themselves singing pop music infront of a webcam to goole. You all know them. They follow the same formular.

1. Take generic boy band or pop music as the base trac
2. Setup your webcam showing yourself in your bedroom/computer room
3. put on obligatory adidas head band ,with optional cap (with peak flipped so far up so as to make any purpose of a cap void and null, thus making all people who watch the video give you a wierdoFactor++)
4. Sing like you really feel the music and break into air guitar riffs at the hook (extra wierdoFactor*2 for people who actually try to sing vocals into the the base trac)

 But onto what I realised. In web 2.0 (no reference to starting a conference here ) its all about the comunity. And the comunity has been posting these videos for some time now. So hey it really makes sense to identify trends and capitalise on them. Hey even have some fun while doing it. Sencondly what a great business model. Agregate others (google's in this case) content, ustilising thier bandwidth and show it. Keeps your bandwidth cost very low while delivering the content that others struggle to. Google manage's the video for you so theres one less thing to worry about. The only problem I can see is that any site doing this is very dependant on what the content supplier decides to do. But if the TV series is anything to go by the site wont last too long and this point wont really be a problem.

All in all nice site, nice idea, nice implementation. 

Just aquick post. Notice the link in the sidebar of this site. Well I know its the first bit of advertising on this site. And dont worry there isnt more to come. But whats special about this advertising it that by putting that link on my site I got a free copy of Color schema. A very interesting approach to getting advertising on developers sites.

Im not sure how loing ill leave it there,  but I just wanted to see how it worked out. Give it a go if your a developer. Good idea really. 

Want to give it a go? http://www.coffeecup.com/linktous/ 

[Via] www.adesblog.com 

So you know Im hanging out to find out more about Apollo, Adobes effort at breaking away from the restrictions of the browser. I have told you all (all those listening) that its about time someone did. I even had a dable at flash widgets and got a fair way in. But are Adobe planning to take Apollo to the mobile platform?

Steven Webster posted a job opening on his blog for a new position on the Apollo team. In this post he said:

"This new application platform will allow desktop and mobile applications to be built and deployed"

Now it kinda make sense that Adobe would leverage the flash lite player, but PDF on a phone?? I can imagine it "after 10 mins of waiting for it to open I find out I dont have enough memory to render the page as it scrolls" lol. But im sure the Apollo team know what they are doing. Another interesting issue with this is that there is no real standard interface with the many phones underlying OS's so if they start to intergrate it with the phones features I pretty sure well see a stagered release of versions for diferent models and makes…much like the flash lite releases. Anyhoo just an interesting tid bit I noticed from his blog post and thought I would share.

And too the Apollo team….time to leak some details guys….cumon…you know you wanna show off your new toy.

Yep everywhere you look your seeing the lovely relfections. Some say it cam from mac ….who knows but really I do like the look, but am worried it will become the drop shadow and emboss style of the 2000's that we saw too much of in the 90's. I too am guilty of using it on Videmo.co.nz (once again tis a slooow server sitting in my hot water cupboard…I know I know).

there are even javascripts out there to make it pretty:

http://cow.neondragon.net/stuff/reflection/
http://mir.aculo.us/articles/2006/04/27/like-reflections-try-the-reflector
and in flex2 http://blog.benstucki.net/?id=20(thanks for sharing Ben)

Comments? 

Just a heads up with something I found recently, and I hope this gets spidered by google because I was banging my head against a wall.

I have been playing with flash and ruby on rails together alot and today stumbled across a problem. The situation was in rails I was requesting a remote URL through Net::Http class and getting the response, but kept on getting an error which read:

NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
The error occured while evaluating nil.verify_mode

It seems when your updating ruby not all comes out well and I found the answer at : http://brantinteractive.com/index.php?p=53

After removing rails and re-installing all was well. Once again just a heads u, and I hope to reveal the project to the world soon ) It seems once you get past the initail Wow of ruby scaffolding there are plenty of little suprises to catch you out. So its a love hate relationship. I still really miss the great IDE that Visual studio has but am really enjoying ROR again after the initial bang head against wall stage. And if you feeling game check out:

RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 1 & RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2 for a bit of a look in to see how cool it can be. I hope to post a bit of a tut on setting up ROR on a windows box and running it in a clustered server setup with speeds matching lighttpd thats 70-150 req/sec for dynamic full blown rails pages.