August 17, 2006
Using Audio Recorder with your Mac laptop - A little tutorial for newbies

I've been able to do an amazing amount of recording recently just singing, speaking and playing instruments into my mac laptop with the use of a great little program called Audio Recorder.

I was writing up a little tutorial for a friend of mine about how to use it on my laptop, and it's about the fourth time I've written one up, so I thought I'd upload it here.

Note that I actually use .wav files when I do takes to import into protools, since it's higher quality. These directions are for one of Wide Hive's artists, so he can make a radio plug, so I've told him to select "MP3" as the format. There are a number of formats you can select in Audio Recorder's "preferences" folder.

You can just speak into your laptop - there's a built in microphone already there. Just speak into your left speaker - that's where it is. (I didn't even know it was there until sometime last year. Guess t's always been there.)

1. Download the "Audio Recorder" program here:
http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17392

It's free, and should be easy to install. Just download it and double click on it to be taken through the install.

2. Once it's installed. Double click on it to launch, and it will open up a window with a record, pause, and stop button.

3. Create a folder where you want to save your files. Next, go to "preferences" under the "Audio Recorder" menu, and select the folder you just created as the output folder.

4. Next, select "mp3" as your output format.

5. The rest is easy - Just hit record to start recording.
You can see the levels move in red along with your voice to see it's working.

You can hit the pause button in between takes, and then when you're done, hit "stop" and it will ask you to name the file before it saves it for you in the folder you've created.

Posted by Lisa at 04:27 PM
August 16, 2006
Dabble Gets Mentioned In Businessweek Article


By for Abram Sauer for Brandchannel for Businessweek. (Yeah, I don't the relationship between brandchannel and business week either.)


YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2006/id20060815_988423.htm?campaign_id=bier_innutt

You Tube - Me Watch
Is the rapidly growing video hosting site in danger of being eclipsed by rapidly growing imitators?

Rapid growth, consumer control, hyper word-of-mouth promotion, hungry competitors. Welcome to YouTube's world.

For the uninitiated, YouTube is an online portal through which users can watch and share video content. Currently, it is not just a video site, it is the video site. It has achieved such status so rapidly that it seems fair to wonder where the service will go from here.

Founded in a garage in February 2005, YouTube officially launched to the world in December of that year. Popular media mentions helped the brand rocket to the upper echelons of online pronoun properties with names featuring "I," "Me," "My," and "You."

How high, how rapid? In the month of June, Nielsen/NetRatings data show that YouTube logged 19.6 million unique users; this represents a nearly 300 percent increase from January user-ship. And there appears to be no such thing as a summer lull. For the week of July 9, Nielsen reported 12.8 million unique viewers, up 75 percent from the previous week. That particular week, nearly half of all "Most Viewed" clips were of the 2006 World Cup Zidane "header." Some were recorded TV coverage, but many were user-created original videos such as Zidane head-butt compilation. (Warning: Clicking on the link may lead to countless wasted hours.)

User-created content is at the center of YouTube's web-2.0 pedigree: the idea that the "new" fluid Internet model will be based on user interaction and contribution. But, similar to blogs, copyrighted material is feeding YouTube's success. Copyrighted material for which YouTube does not own the rights. This puts YouTube in a tricky position for the possibility of selling out and compromises its ability to make money through advertising.

Buying out YouTube could put an established media (or other) investor at risk for lawsuits from competing media companies about hosting their content (currently not as big an issue given YouTube's neutrality.)

Advertising could be YouTube's means to profitability. Already, American television network NBC has inked a deal with the site to promote its shows (seen recently in advertising for the film "Pirates of the Caribbean"). But advertisers could seek to interfere with content when it runs counter to their own objectives. Currently it's not clear how much advertising the brand owners are willing to tolerate anyway. Earlier this year, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said in an interview with CNN Money, "We're going to sell sponsorships and direct advertisements. But we are building a community, and we don't want to bombard people with advertising" (May 11, 2006).

This idea of "community," plus the site's reliance on copyrighted material, puts YouTube in a very interesting position as a brand. In the conventional sense, a brand is owned by two groups, the brand owner and the brand consumer. The "brand" is where the owner's desires and the users' perceptions meet. In YouTube's case, there are three brand owners. As in the conventional case, YouTube's actions and communications converge with the audience's perception to create the YouTube "brand." The third element is the copyright owners, who have realized that they can leverage YouTube to create interest in their properties, but are quick to pull content if it is not to their liking. YouTube has to manage its brand based on consumer perception, but it doesn't completely control its own product.

An added difficulty for YouTube is that it is lacking an emotional hook to differentiate itself from a pure functional service (think iPod). Users visit YouTube not based on any of the brand's perceived values, but on its ability to give them what they want, when and how they want it. The service offering can easily be replicated elsewhere, better. Online social network Friendster suffered from this and subsequently lost its dominance to MySpace.

YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.

If YouTube could be said to have a brand position, it might be one of selfless populism. Even if the site's ultimate goal is to make money, the user perception is that it is a power-to-the-people portal through which a community serves each other and the little guy can share and watch for free. Meanwhile, competitor Eefoof's tagline is "Make it. Post it. Profit!" The placement of the one exclamation mark sets a position that the contributor is motivated by more than just an altruistic sense of community.

With a potentially crippling copyright lawsuit on the horizon, it's almost impossible not to compare YouTube to Napster. It's easy to see a future in which YouTube will exist as a brand in recovery, scrapping for survival in a flooded marketplace it basically built. Its very name forever attached to a very short era.

Posted by Lisa at 01:36 PM
August 15, 2006
Kitty Cat Dance Video


http://www.dabble.com/node/409263

yeah this is pretty shameless...what can i say?

Posted by Lisa at 03:31 PM
August 11, 2006
Beverages On A Plane!

Yahoo explains how The new fly rules are no problem at all.

I'm still trying to determine what exactly the new rules are - but it seems to be that you can't bring in water from outside the airport, and you have to check your toiletries and stuff now.

Bad news. Many people never check their luggage because of having one bad post-911 TSA experience or another. Perhaps they are trying to finish off the airline industry once and for all.



(Thanks Cory)

Posted by Lisa at 11:12 AM