After taking a short hiatus from writing for the past few weeks, I had a chance to attend Scott Kirsner’s Tech Blog event last night.  It was great event that was much less of a traditional “panel” and more of an interactive discussion between a group of bloggers.  It was also refreshing to attend a Boston tech event that, as Chuck Tanowitz mentions on his post, did not start with a “what is a blog” section.  If you would like the real play-by-play on the event, you can check out Paul Gillin’s round up or Dan Bricklin’s podcast.

I also had a chance to talk with a few startups including Raj Bala who is currently developing BigSwerve, a very interesting concept that will aggregate the comments posted on blogs via a web crawler.   When they work out some of the kinks, BigSwerve could present a whole new way to track a persons identity through their comments across multiple blogs.  

In addition to Scott Kirshner, the panel included:

- Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft Emerging Business Team

- Jimmy Guterman, Editor of Release 2.0

- Barbara Heffner, CHEN PR Partner 

- Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs CEO

- Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital VC

Event sponsors included Cambridge Innovation Center, CHEN PR, Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton, and Schwartz Public Relations.

I look forward to the next event and will hopefully see you there.

GO RED SOX!  My prediction…Sox in 6.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Massachusetts online video bubble continued to grow today with the relaunch of Miro (formerly The Democracy Player). The Miro service is an open-source desktop software that combines video search, channel guide and media player into one slick desktop application. It also has a BitTorrent and podcast client as well. The free video aggregation service is a product of The Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA) who also operates the video social bookmarking site, VideoBomb.

In a user interface heavily borrowed from iTunes, the Miro software allows you to create video channels from the MRSS feeds primarily provided by over 1,500 very, very long tail content publishers (think of the 1,000 vloggers out there trying to rip-off the Rocketboom, lonleygirl15, “latest video hit” concept). To watch video, you first select to download the video from it’s source to watch locally. Miro comes with only a few pre-loaded channels but users can easily grab additional video channels from the Miroguide. It also has the ability to search and download video from a list of viral video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and Revver.

I am a huge fan of the wave of new desktop video services including VeohTV and Joost for their potential to deliver video content in a way that my current soviet-era Comcast cable box is just not capable. However, my one real issue with Miro is that is suffers from a shortage of top quality professional content. There is a massive amount of video content and I did download and watch today but I am not sure that I would be an avid user just yet.

This also happened when I first played around with the earlier version of service last year, I spent a few days downloading everything I could but quickly lost interest after the novelty wore off. I like the concept and but not the content. Let’s face it, (not unlike my blog here) there’s a lot of crap being produced out there and my problem is not having access to any more of it…it’s having a way to filter it for the video I would actually like to watch.

That being said - It is 100% worth a spin for online video fans and I will install Miro on the laptop that I am connecting to my TVs…is someone going to create a good TV Guide for the video aggregators?

Check out the Miro BUZZ! Here is the other part of the story - just how much blog buzz is going on today for the launch. Check out this sample of the blogs posts covering the announcement.

• Democracy Player relaunches as Miro
• Democracy TV Officially Launches as Miro
• An introduction to Miro
• Democracy Player Reborn as Miro
• Miro launches: Democracy Player evolves into a 1.0 product!
• Miro
• Democracy evolves into Miro
• Democracy Player Is Dead, Long Live Miro
• Democracy relaunches as Miro
• Get Video Podcasts With Miro
• Democracy to be relaunched as Miro
• Miro Player Launches
• Miro
• Miro - free, open source internet tv and video player
• “The Democracy Player” is Now “Miro!”
• Miro: Free Internet TV Player And Downloader
• Open-source Democracy Player relaunches as Miro
• Miro: free, open source video player
• Miro 0.9.8 Pubic Preview 1
• Democracy Player Is Dead, Long Live Miro
• Miro Launched - Formerly ‘Democracy Player’
• Miro

- - - — - - - - - - -

video, online miro, democracy player, joost, veoh, babblegum, youtube, dailymotion, open source, blog, worcester, MA, boston, web, web 2.0, boston 2.0

It’s a great day! I finally took the first few steps to upgrade and move the Wordpress blog that powers 93south.

I procrastinated for a long-time believing that it would be a real pain in the “a__”, however it was just about the easiest web project that I have worked on in recent memory. You really should upgrade your site if you are operating a pre-2.1 (Ella) Worpdress blog. It is just that easy.

It was so easy that I decided to move The Web 2.0 Toolbar website (also built using Wordpress as a CMS) over to the new hosting service at the same time. My upgrade was a bit unconventional but worked for this style website.

This step of the project is very well documented online and I am sure the world will not benefit from yet another cheap traffic attempt from a “Ten Easy Steps to Upgrade and Move” your Wordpress blog article.  For those interested, there is a great “step-by-step” guide to moving your Wordpress blog article directly on the WP site and Zirona’s Instant Upgrade plugin will save you a mountain of hassle.  The plugin will take care of the whole process in one-click!

Next on the agenda (besides getting back to covering local web 2.0)…picking a new theme for the site. I’ve tested a very large number of templates and will have my final line-up soon.

I just can’t resist…cause this is a post that you just can’t touch.  The folks at TechCrunch have announced a new panel of experts to speak at the upcoming TechCrunch20.  Guess who is on the panel?….MC Hammer.

Can’t Blog This

My, my, my, my,
Ajax Hits me oh so Hard,
Makes me say <a href=”"oh My God” >,
Thank you, for blessing me,
With time to write and a Wordpress type,
It feels good…when I know you know Co.,
As a super-dope start-up from the valley and the s-fro,
and I blog as such,
cause this is a blog that you just can’t touch…

…Cant’ Blog this.

I’ve heard a rumor that next week they will announce Arsenio Hall as the show MC.   Raise the roof…woof, woof, woof.

Feel free to finish the lyrics for the “Can’t Blog This” song or enjoy the original I’ve embedded below.

All kidding aside…the panel experts are starting to look interesting including Caterina Fake who is best known as the co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing service that was acquired by Yahoo (according to the TechCrunch post).