The 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be taking place in Vancouver and we are home to some very creative people who will be on the ground, recording and reporting on their experience during the games. For this reason a few days ago Raincity Studios wrote an open letter to VANOC requesting to start a conversation about how we can make sure that everyone will be able to document their Olympic experience:

“In brief, we’d like to have a conversation about how to allow fans and amateur media makers to document their Olympic experience while keeping out of the way of the IOC IP lawyers.”

It remains to be seen what VANOC’s response will be, if any. It would be very nice if everyone could document their Olympic experience and share it with the rest of the world without the fear of getting takedown notices that would make all their efforts useless.

The MostPublic Index identifies the Web’s 20 most visible individuals, those who are engaged in the world around them;

“This is the first attempt to take a group of people and say, ‘Let’s crunch the data and see when somebody says something, how many people do they reach with that message.’ “I think the list will surprise some people,” – Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic

Although I do “keep my head down” in many ways, I’m nothing if not prolific on the web. It’s a great honor to be a part of this list.

The Top 10 from the Vancouver MostPublic Index are:

1. Darren Barefoot         http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/
2. Tim Bray        http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
3. Boris Mann        http://blog.bootuplabs.com/
4. Kris Krüg       http://kriskrug.com/
5. Roland Tanglao  http://rolandtanglao.com/
6. Tom Williams    http://www.givemeaning.com/blog/index.html
7. Megan Cole      http://www.megancole.org/
8. Rebecca Bollwitt         http://www.miss604.com/
9. Arieanna Schweber       http://www.blogaholics.ca/
10. Tod Maffin      http://todmaffin.com/

Check out the full Top 20 here. And have a look around the NowPublic site – if you haven’t seen it since the re-design, it’s well worth some of your time. The header is constantly changing too, which is great fun.

And yes, I’m aware the Vancouver Sun mis-spelled my name :(

Click to enlarge

To highlight, important changes include:

• Contents of text field saved at quit
• Can now take a photo or use an existing photo
• Photos are saved to the camera roll
• More tweets received during refresh (100 instead of 20)
• Added an “everyone” setting from the public timeline
• New location feature (like Twinkle) – with bonus options to add maps to your tweet
• hashtag tweets are now linked to search.twitter.com
• Scroll positions are preserved

I’ll be downloading this tonight to play with it. But it sounds like a major upgrade. If the app crashes less & saves tweets that fail to upload, it may turn into my primary Twitter app on the iPhone.

There are so many ways to Twitter from the iPhone – via SMS, via the web, or via a Twitter app. Currently I switch between two Twitter applications for the iPhone – Twinkle and Twitterrific. I’d much rather only use one application, but am stuck using both for now. Here’s a comparison chart (based on my experience) to explain why:

Neither application makes it very easy to click to people’s profiles that you don’t subscribe to (to follow @name links) or to follow new users. The photo features keep me locked into Twinkle, while the embedded browser keeps me locked into Twitterrific.

What do you think? Do you use either of these applications?

If you want to follow me on twitter, you can find me here: twitter.com/arieanna

In just a few minutes you can customize your own little manga. The settings are easy to use and the results quite unique. The assortment of options is "enough" while not perfect. In the end, you pay a small price to download your personal manga. Totally fine by me, it was a fun few minutes of my day! Here, see the manga I was making for Ianiv:

And this is the Arieanna manga:

What does your manga look like?

Tags: manga, face your manga, faceyourmanga, meme, twitter, cartoon, avatar

LPV4 featured demos for some Vancouver start-ups including Strutta and FundFindr.

 
Photo credit: Ianiv & Raul

You can check our photo set out here.

Tags: launch party, launchparty, lpv4, lpv, the republic, tech, vancouver

What is twitter? The insular resonse would be "like lots of Facebook status updates you can reply to like in IM".

Basically, twitter is really a way for you to say what you’re doing from a very simple web interface (or IM client, or mobile device), and to hear what others are doing. To interact in simple ways. It is incredibly social, interacting with individuals and with communities at once. It took me a while to ‘get it’, but for busy people, it is a great way to stay in touch with people and with news.

So, if you’re on twitter, here’s how you find us:

• Follow arieanna on twitter
• Follow ianiv on twitter

Considering how few updates our site gets, we were tempted to toss our twitter feeds here. But, then it would just become a twitter blog, and that’s probably not ideal ;)

Tags: twitter

I think I am enjoying the site more now than I ever have before. The community that stuck around is fantastic – supportive, interactive, and insightful. The end of the show has challenged me to explore a lot of new ways to develop a television fansite.

As soon as the show ended, I took stock of my categories and completely rehauled them to reflect things I wanted to improve my SEO on: actor names, shows they are in, etc. While my focus was before fairly broad, I made it an aim to seek out a lot of information rather than passively writing what’s in the news.

I started a fun trivia category, dig around for what all the actors are up to, and come up with fun posts about the show – like my Oy with the poodles already post. I have also been, since some time in November, recapping Gilmore Girls from its pilot episode onward every weekday to coincide with its airing on ABC Family – so 5 Gilmore Girls episodes a week. We all watch the episodes together and I tack on some discussion questions to my recap post. It takes a long time to do (at least 2 hours per recap), but I actually look forward to that part of my day. The early seasons of Gilmore Girls were the best ones, and I always feel good after watching an episode.

I provide regular recaps of Aliens in America (with Scott Patterson) and Samantha Who? (with Melissa McCarthy), as well as recaps of any guest spots. Right now, for example, Matt Czuchry is doing a guest arc on Friday Night Lights. I have been contacted by more publicists now than ever before, so I have been able to promote a lot of exclusive stuff and run some great contests.

The whole experience has taught me the value of community and how that community will stick by you, and indeed grow, if you support them and share with them. It has been a great experience, and I love writing this site probably more than any other. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s still one of the largest blogs in b5 ;)

Now, off to watch another episode – we’re mid way through Season 3 now. Stay tuned here if you want to read them.

Tags: gilmore girls, gilmoregirlsnews, b5, tv blogging, community

Facebook is removing the mandatory "is" from status updates. Now your status can be something other than action-related. And grammar nuts like me can breathe a sigh of relief.

No more: "Arieanna is hating the WGA strike"

Instead: "Arieanna hates the WGA strike"

Much better.

The planned removal of ‘is’ will happen tonight.

The news will be warmly welcomed by thousands of activists who have joined more than 500 anti-"is" Facebook groups, including the "Campaign to lose the mandatory ‘is’ from status updates" and the "I die a little bit inside when I see grammatically incorrect status updates" group.

Via wired & allfacebook Tags: facebook, status updates, pet peeves

I was watching a funny video on Darren’s blog and decided to leave a comment. So I fill in my name, email address and blog URL, write my comment and click submit. And this is what I see:

Arieanna’s picture next to my comment! Looks like the picture comes from MyBlogLog and Darren is probably using some plugin to add the photo next to people’s comments. At this point I’m thinking that maybe if I get a MyBlogLog account it will be able to tell that it is me, based on my email address or name. I remember I do have an account I’ve probably logged in to only once when I created it, so I go to their website to try to add my blog information. And this happened:

I can’t set my blog because Arieanna already did. Haven’t they heard of blogs with more than one author? The error message is funny too: of course the blog already exists, if it didn’t why would I want to add it to my profile?

Darren: you should turn that plugin off :)