[Phoenix-pm] phoenix.pm.org wants to aggregate your reddit, del.icio.us, twitter, LJ, myspace

[Scott Walters]

On  0, Darrin Chandler <dwchandler at stilyagin.com> wrote:
>
> I've been talking with one of the MetaBUG people about finding a way to
> do simpler live presentations over the net. Basically, slides synced
> with broadcast audio. We did video a few times, but it's been less than
> great. Stay tuned, and feel free to ping me if it's been more than a few
> weeks...

Sounds like SMIL... but I doubt that's easy to deploy, package, 
or view.  I think it's from the era of the-Internet-is-slow-and-
moving-content-is-upscale.

I'd just shoot audio/video and at the same time record a
VNC capture of the desktop with something like vnc2swf
(but maybe not vnc2swf itself).  

Googling quicklike, I found http://www.sodan.org/~penny/vncrec/
which claims that transcode will convert its output to whatever.
Then just load them up in some movie editing software, take the
audio from the live recording and start splicing screencap
stuff.  Or just put them both side by side for the whole thing.
Or something.

> > specific meetings with fewer people rather than larger
> > meetings that aren't Perl specific -- more like Brock's
> > DCFringe group, where all of the users of fringe langauges
> > meet and hang out.  I'm thinking yes, but I'm capable of
> > being wrong ;)
> 
> I'll throw another nasty thing in here. Lately I've been questioning the
> whole concept of local meetings. We're all on the internet, after all!
> And we're real geeks, after all! There are scads of little local groups
> struggling to keep critical mass going, and it's an uphill battle the
> whole time. Why not cast the net over the whole 'net and bring in a
> bigger catch, creating a more self sustaining community? The biggest,
> and perhaps only, benefit of a local group is that people really do seem
> to feel more part of the community when you can put faces with names.
> OTOH, I've been hanging out in #metabug on freenode.net, and we're
> feeling like a community. So perhaps it's not so much face time as
> interactive time that builds friendships and a sense of community. Not
> sure. But I do know that people seem more ready to chat, to ask for
> help, and to participate in general when the community feel is there.

Question stuff, by all means.  People have started virtual Perl Mongers
groups.  There's one for one of the IRC networks.  There's a corporate
one for AOL which spans its various campuses in various states.  But,
as far as I can tell, they don't do anything interesting or useful.
They're probably too redundant with perlmonks.org (which has a 
chatter box), use.perl.org, perl.com, IRC, and so on and so forth.
There's a vast amount of Perl information out there, some terribly
out of date or just bad (Matt's Script Archive).  So, like I said
in my reply to Andrew, people don't know where to begin, they don't 
know what's relavent to them, they don't know what reasonable 
expectations are, or if they can relate to the person behind it, whether 
their situation is similar or not, and so on.  

On the other hand, the immediate parent to Perl Mongers is YAS
which also also does YAPC.

When people ask me online for suggestions in learning Perl, I always
tell them to find their local Perl Mongers.  On the 'net, there is
an overabundance of people needing help and a dearth of people
giving it.  Too many people congregate on too few.  And it's too
quick and anonymous.  No real level of mutual respect and understanding
is established.  If you can meet someone in real life, explain your
program, and have them interactively show you things, etc.  When
they tell you that you're doing it completely wrong, you're more
likely to listen.  You're more likely to give them a mini-tutorial
on the spot.  They're able to tell that you're not being smug but
instead are earnestly trying to help them.  Etc.

Also, people spend relatively little time talking about Perl at
Perl meetings.  They like to talk about random things, local things,
things they incidentally have in common, the local job market,
traffic...

So, I'm not sure what PerlMongers is really translates over.

That being said, I very much enjoy being part of the larger
community.  That's part of the frustration... I see a vibrant 
community there, full of sharing and helping and people
providing mini-presentations of a sort (in the form of blog 
entries) and I want that for the local group.  

> Anyone interested in a #phoenix.pm on freenode.net?

I'm personally more interested in directed conversation than
random chat, so IRC is low on my list of favored mediums.

> 
> -- 
> Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
> dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
> http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation

-scott