We just launched a charity project called Indie Music for Haiti, which aims to help Haiti through the power of indie music. All donations will be going to Voice of Haiti, which was founded by filmmaker/social activist James M. Felter, and Haitian-American businessman/educator Eddy Remy.

Voice of Haiti funds and promotes environmentally friendly, self-sustaining community development projects in Haiti. They are also a conduit for other organizations, individuals, experts and resources that help meet the needs of community initiatives.

The concept for Indie Music For Haiti works like this:

• You can view videos or audio files submitted to Indie Music for Haiti. If you like a particular band, make a donation on their behalf.
• Bands and Musicians can upload music that they wish to contribute to the project, along with specifying a charity that they wish the proceeds from their online performance to go to. If you are an artists this is a great way to get publicity for your band, while promoting a great cause.

Our friends over at Asparagus Media and ServInt threw a benefit concert in Washington DC to kick the event off last month, and we worked to take everything they filmed that night and build it into a website. The charity concert raised $10,000 for Haiti relief and we’re hoping that the website will help to further those donations.

As an interesting side note, the website is powered by our open source project, MediaCore Video CMS. The homepage automatically updates with the latest videos submitted.

Indie Music for Haiti

One of my favourite applications a the moment is fluid.app, which essentially can turn any website you regularly visit into a Mac OS X application. I used to use NetNewsWire for all my RSS needs, but after spending some time with Google Reader I decided to convert.

The main selling point was the combination of using Google Reader with Byline, which is a Google Reader app for the iPhone. Since now I have a laptop, a desktop, and an iPhone one of the main issues I was having was that I wanted to be able to synchronize what I was reading. NetNewsWire didn’t cut it. The only thing that really irked me with using Google Reader was the fact I was tied to using a browser, there wasn’t an app for it (that functioned the way the web app does), and I found the default Google theme to be incredibly dull. After some quick research I discovered Fluid.app and Helvetireader.

Before (Google Reader default):

After (Helvetireader applied):

In this quick tutorial I will show you how I changed Google Reader to use John Hicks’ Helvetireader and build the whole thing inside a Fluid app.

Steps:

1. Download and install Fluid.app
2. Open up fluid.app and fill out the information like in the photo below. Where it asks for the icon you wish to use, you can download a ultra-high-res image of the Google Reader icon. Store the image on your computer, and then add through the file dialogue.
   
3. Press “create” – this will create an application for Google Reader and place it in your applications folder.
4. Startup your new shiny Google Reader Fluid application.
5. Now we will add the Helvetireader theme. Go up to the scripts icon in the menu bar. From the menu choose “open userscripts folder”.
6. Download the following two files: HelvetiReader.user.js and config.xml. Or you can download the zip.
7. Extract them to the userscript folder. If you have to overwrite the existing config.xml do so.
8. Go to the scripts menu in your new Google Reader Fluid app and click “Manage User Scripts” and check off the option for HelvetiReader.
   
9. Go to the scripts menu and hit the “Reload all User Scripts” option and then close and restart your Google Reader Fluid app
10. Everything should now work perfectly and you will have successfully integrated Helvetireader into Google Reader

On a side note with Helvetireader the sharing menu disappears. If you scroll to the bottom of a post and mouse over where the gear is, the menu appears. I now love the minimalism, but it did take some getting used to.

Thank-you John Hicks!

I came across this stunning cinematic short titled “Nuit Blanche” this morning. The amourous slow-motion camera techniques, the subtle details, and the style of the piece just left me breathless. This is exactly how love at first sight should feel. Time stops. Fin.

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Today I discovered some fascinating statics from Focus Magazine on the state of the internet today. It is interesting to see that only 7% of bloggers are aged 18-24. When I saw this statistic I began to wonder if the medium is losing popularity with the younger crowd as Facebook and Twitter have gained momentum. It would be interesting to see this infographic plotted over the last 10 years to see how these statistics have changed. Were people aged 18-24 in 2004 blogging more than they are now?

Posting to Locomotion has slowed down over the past week as my team has focused exclusively on the release of our first big Open Source web application codenamed “MediaCore.”

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience.

• Check out the project, features and docs at http://getmediacore.com
• View the demo at: http://getmediacore.com/demo
• Watch the screencast on how the product works
• Give us feedback over at Concept Feedback

Over the past year we have built the entire platform from the ground-up to create one of the most cutting-edge podcasting and media platforms available anywhere on the net. In coming months we will be documenting the process of how we created MediaCore, the stumbling blocks we hit along the way, and the lessons we have learned in designing and marketing an Open Source project. It has been an exciting road and we are looking forward to the next few months as the project unfolds.

A huge round of applause should go to Nathan Wright, Anthony Theocharis, and Melanie Wright for all their hard work in making this dream a reality for Simple Station. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank the TurboGears development community for the valuable feedback they have provided us with throughout the development process.

We have already enjoyed some early success including a glowing email from Leo Laporte of TWIT.TV, and a whole slew of feedback from various web design agencies. As the project continues to evolve we will be leaning heavily on the community for guidance on design feedback and feature requests.

If you are a fan of MediaCore you might want to consider following us on Twitter or becoming a fan of MediaCore on Facebook

Last year we kicked off our company environmental policy by donating 5% of our profits to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). Today, we are pleased to announce that this groundbreaking environmental non-profit has managed to protect 400,000 hectares of Canadian wilderness in 2009. Some of their major highlights include the huge expansion of the Nahini National Park, and the addition of a massive protected wilderness area near Ship Harbour, Nova Scotia (which is the largest protected area to be added to Nova Scotia in a decade).

Our heartiest congratulations go to all the staff at CPAWS who have worked incredibly hard this year to preserve Canada’s unique wilderness.

*Note: If you are interested in donating to CPAWS more information can be found on their site.

This morning I noticed that Movable Type 5.1 was just announced. As one of the main alternatives to Wordpress what really shocked me was how similar the interface of Movable Type has become to Wordpress.

I think it is always a bad move when you stop thinking about how your product differentiates itself from the products on your competitors, and you start flat out cloning them. Is this redesign the result of a lot of design exploration that just happened to take them in a similar design direction to Wordpress? Or did they just look at Wordpress and think “Wow! That’s pretty good, perhaps we should just change our interface to look like that.” They should be thinking how they can take Movable Type to the next level, not just make it a WordPress alternative.

I’ve often thought that it is unfortunate that camera reviews are done in sterile and unrealistic environments. Take for example most of the reviews here at dpreview, which typically look something like this. Recently, I came across one of the best camera reviews I think I have ever read simply because the photographer took the camera on vacation with him, and wrote a review as part of his travelogue.

I took a trip to the Himalayas about 2 months ago and brought a new camera with me.I had such a blast using the camera I thought it would be fun to review it. But I wondered why are camera reviews always so clinical? We don’t use cameras in clinical settings. As an experiment I decided to combine a camera review with a travelogue. After all, we use cameras on the road, not in a laboratory. I thought you might be interested in the final result. In hindsight it was an obvious idea but I’ve yet to see anyone else do something like this before.

Source: Craig Mod

One of the problems in developing large feature-rich AJAX web applications is that page load times can really suffer once you start using the larger JavaScript libraries such as JQuery, MooTools, Prototype, or SWFObject. Most of these libraries are larger than 50Kb in size and once you start combining libraries you can easily add 100Kb+ to your page loads.

At Simple Station we are adding the finishing touches to optimizing our first big open source application and we have been looking for every possible way to optimize the JavaScript we use. Today I came across google.load(), which promises to significantly decrease JavaScript load times.

The benefits of using Google to provide these libraries instead of your own server include:

• Google’s huge CDN (content delivery network) can deliver the file much faster than your own server(s). Since Google has large data centers all over the world, these files will be served from data centers geographically closer to your users. This helps to reduce network latency and works to increase reliability, scalability, and website speed.
• The more sites that include Google’s google.load() API the greater the chance that a user has already has the file cached, thus enabling your site to load faster as the script will not need to be downloaded.
• You save bandwidth as you no longer have to serve the file(s).
• The versioning system that Google has created makes it easy to include specific versions of these libraries.

All you need to utilize Google’s google.load() technology is this JavaScript snippet:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
google.load('mootools', '1.2.1');
google.load('jquery', '1.3.1');
google.load('jqueryui', '1.5.3');
google.load('prototype', '1.6.0.3');
google.load('scriptaculous', '1.8.2');
google.load('dojo', '1.2.3');
google.load('swfobject', '2.1');
google.load('yui', '2.6.0');

View the complete list of ajax libraries hosted by Google.