• Web Address : http://mrbehi.blogs.com
• RSS Feed : http://mrbehi.blogs.com/i/index.rdf
• Star Rating : 8 out of 10

Blogs are a great way for personalities to shine. Whether you are talking about technology, music or yourself, the key thing is to write the way you speak. Obviously this can be a problem if you are writing in English, when it isn’t your first language, but even then it’s still possible to be true to yourself in the printed word.

Mr Behi is an Iranian currently living in Libya, although he does seem to travel quite a bit in connection with his work. He provides a whole new perspective to Iran, from internal politics, to everyday living. It’s amazing to read this blog, when it’s so in contrast to the Iran we see nearly everyday in traditional news and media. Everyday we’re fed this image of fanatical extremist, but it’s the everyday people who are also tarnished with this image. It’s great to get a kind of inside look, at a country that is shrouded with mystery, as the West is often deemed not welcome, or that’s the impression we get, whether right or wrong.

Mr Behi works in some kind of IT area I’m guessing, for though his description of everyday life is fairly detailed and lucid, you do get the feeling he’s working in part to shroud his real identity. It’s funny, a recent posted (or it could have been as long as a year ago, coming to think of it), had a mention of work in Tehran and bonuses received, for some kind of job or contract was finished and many of the employees received an iPod as thanks. This surprised me in a couple of ways. Firstly I’d never really considered that Tehran was a bussling cosmopolitan. Stupid really, as it is the countries capital city, but again from the media image, it’s just something I’d never thought of before. Secondly, I’d never thought of Iran as having iPods. I know it’s a silly thing to think, but that again is the reality of living this side of Iran.

This all makes for fascinating reading. As well as work and travel, Mr Behi talks often of his wife, affectionately referred to in the blog as Mrs Behi, she even on occasion makes a guest post. Were it not for the fact that this extraordinary couple were in Iran, this would all probably be fairly mundane stuff. However it’s like peering behind the curtain for an inside look.

Conclusion : A great blog, which at times features some incredible photos. It’s so great to get such an interesting view from a person who’s country is often maligned, based on the common media driven stereotype.

SeesmicSeesmic has been gaining a lot of media attention, much of this however has been pretty negative. Mild mannered Loren Feldman (yeah right) of 1938 Media, didn’t hold his punches when describing the service. Being the cynic that I am, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it was all just a front, aimed at raising public awareness, which indeed it has, as they say “all publicity is good publicity”. That’s not to say everything is right with this video conversation service. The user interface is very dated, harkening back to the early Flash based sites. The progress bars in particular drive me nuts, at least integrate them with the rest of the site, so they are unobtrusive.

The real disappointment however is the quality of videos recorded through the site, which not only suck, but for the most part are out of sync with the audio, making the resultant video just plain unusable. I’m pretty sure these issues will eventually be addressed, the site is after all in pre-alpha. You can also upload video, but why would I want to do this, when YouTube does it infinitely better.

The big question however is, who is Seesmic’s target audience. Video conversations just don’t work for me. I’d much rather use email, IM or the good old fashioned telephone. It’s certainly not good enough to use as a video blog. I thought it would be good to use as a way to capture quick hellos to my family back in England and friends around the world, this is only just passable, given the current state of the service.

Seesmic is certainly a service to keep an eye on, however there are many other companies vying for a piece of the video action and many of them have much nicer interfaces and services. Video is an interesting space at the moment. As bandwidth goes up and prices come down, higher and higher quality is now possible. 2008 is certainly going to be an interesting year.

I remember with sadness the day the guys behind iPodderX got their cease and desist letter from Apple in December 2005 and withdrew from the podcast aggregator software scene. It wasn’t long however before we got wind of their new name, Transistr, chosen by a public naming contest. The new Transistr was due to be release by March of 2006, which slipped and then word had it, that a release by the end of 2006 was going to be happening. This cam and went, but tantalizingly, the website still showed their new graphics and “coming soon” message. Alas this has now been replace by a standard TextDrive coming soon page, so things are not boding so well for Transistr.

I did do a whois on the transistr.com domain and it is still registered to Ray Slakinski, one of the people behind iPodderX, so maybe all is not lost. Time will tell.

Chris Penn at the Financial Aid Podcast has just released a great guide to help podcasters get the word out about their show. It’s also a great guide for listeners, giving them a way to help their favorite podcasts become more successful. You can also get a PDF version here.

So here it is, another social networking application, hoping to eek out it’s place as your social tool of choice. Twitter is still my favorite, even though I find myself not using it half as much as I used to. I also joined the Jaiku bandwagon, but I think for me, the first app I chose wins.

Pownce is an interesting deviation from the other tools, allowing you to send files, as well as messages, links and events, There’s no denying the desktop application is pretty. It also uses the new Adobe Air development environment. One of the major irritations I have with the desktop application is the inability to minimize to the system tray. There’s also a lack of web and mobile phone integration, but I’m sure they will be addressed in due course.

While this application comes from a development team that includes Danial Burka and Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, it still has a ways to go, to knock Twitter off it’s mighty perch for me.

For anyone interested, I’ve got 11 Pownce invites if anyone wants one. Just drop an email to pownce@newmedialaunchpad.com

OK so maybe this isn’t your usual New Media Launchpad entry, but I figured it was a nice reminder to ensure you have everything backup. More and more people are becoming reliant on on-line Internet services. While the Internet isn’t likely to go the way of the Dodo any time soon, maybe one of the on-line services you are using could. Backup, backup, backup.

The Democracy player has now officially been renamed to Miro, which means that the new official webpage is http://www.getmiro.com. I’m a big fan of Democracy, having it installed on my Mac Mini, which is nestled next to the flat screen TV in our living room. I’m looking forward to all the exciting things that Miro will bring with it.

With the Joost hype machine cranking into overdrive, this little gem is nipping at Joost’s heels and has barely caused a ripple in the Internet pond. However that’s not to say that this is a site to be dismissed. Whilst Joost is an IPTV solution, it’s still dependent on a separate piece of client software installed on your desktop/laptop computer. This does however have the advantage of giving you a very rich environment in which to watch the provided content. Chime.tv has gone for the totally portable, web based solution and has still managed to pull off quite an interesting and full featured interface all of it’s own.

Both Chime.tv and Joost have a variety of channels from which to choose. Each of these channels has a range of hand picked content. Chime.tv draws it’s selections from the many videos available on YouTube, Google Video, Veoh and a whole host of other video sites. Whilst the content is somewhat limited, it is however of a fairly high quality, in content that is.

When watching YouTube videos, everyone has come to expect less than perfect video quality. On the whole this fails to be a significant problem, when played at the usual default YouTube page size. However when watched via Chime.tv at full screen, the pixelated quality is all to prevalent. If you are watching in your browser at full size, the quality soon gets in the way of the user experience, however when watching via a regular TV, if you have your desktop/laptop hooked up and you are watching from a distance, this is a minor annoyance. It does however become an issue, the higher the quality of your TV display, especially high definition flat screens. On the whole however it’s something you get used to pretty quickly and doesn’t distract too much.

Certainly an engaging site. It will be interesting to see if they manage to keep the available channels fresh and interesting.

New version of Democracy launches and hidden in there, is mention of a name change with version 1.0, from Democracy to Miro… mmm shame, I much prefer Democracy. You can, as always get it here.

New features are as follows :

1. Folder watching.
2. Resume playback. If you’re watching a 15 minute video and stop halfway, we’ll remember where you were when next time you watch it. There’s a preference setting to turn this on and off.
3. Auto-updating for Mac users. This should be the last time that Mac users will need to go to their browser to download a new version. From now on, when a new version is released you’ll be able to install it within the app and relaunch (we’re now using Sparkle). Windows users don’t have auto-update yet, but we’ll be able to give you details about what’s new in each release from within the app (right now it just tells you that there’s a new version, with no details).
4. Minimize to tray on windows– when you click the red x in the upper right, the application will hang out in the system tray. A much requested feature.
5. Windows Vista compatibility. This solves playback issues for some Vista users.
6. Resizing of thumbnails. We now resize and cache thumbnails so that the images displayed are smoother. This also makes switching between channels much faster.
7. More thorough proxy support.
8. Ability to play audio files on mac (previously we sent you out to an external player).
9. Many more keyboard shortcuts on Windows. This will make remote control support easy. Full keyboard shortcuts for Mac are coming soon with the first version of Miro.
10. Bug fixes, memory use reduction, memory leak fixes. Updated Perian on OSX to version 1.0b5.

I found out about this site, quite by chance. I’d read a blog entry over at John (I get no Spam) Dvorak’s site on learning to kiss passionately, which lead to a video on YouTube. No I don’t need any to tips, but if Dvorak covers it, it has to be worth a look, which indeed it was. Anyway the site behind the video, was one I hadn’t come across before. As soon as I hit the home page, I knew I’d found something special.

Basically the video site, VideoJug, aims to give advice and help on everyday things and situations, from computers to parenting, using videos. This in itself wouldn’t be a big deal, if the videos weren’t so good. Check it out. All comments welcome.