So a friend of mine tweeted a link to an awesome video today. I find trying to explain social media, networking, twitter, and on and on and on to folks who are way out of the loop is terribly difficult. Thanks to these guys, there’s now a GREAT source for explaining and I don’t have to do it. Here’s a sample:

Twitter in Plain English
These guys do great work, and that’s why their whole series is on my list for how to watching.

I remember the first time I heard this phrase. It was used in conjunction with a new employee being fed loads and loads of info on his first day of work. I’d never heard it before but it so fit the look on the guys face. He was so overwhelmed by information pouring into his head.

The other day I got a Twitter message from a friend about an interesting application built on top of twitter which is called Firehose - Realtime Twitter Timeline. It’s built in FLASH but shows the flow of Twitter updates going on near to realtime across their public network.

I signed up for Twitter back when it first showed up but have just recently gotten back into it. Not real sure what to do with it yet, but I’m having fun experimenting with how to capitalize on the eyeballs it affords as well as how to mash it up with all the other toys out there. If you are not Twittering… you should be!

Follow me… craigkendall on Twitter!

It seems there’s a growing interest in video on the web and hence many folks looking to figure out how to get into video blogging.

My friend Bill Seaver over at MicroExplosion media posted a simple and user-friendly review of the Flip Video Ultra which seems to be a great solution if you are looking for a way to get quickly into the video blogging world.

How about you… are you using something to create video blogs? What is it? What rocks about it? What sucks about it?

Why is it when I give people my personal email address they look at me funny? Why does the fact that I own my name as a domain and maintain it as my personal email address surprise folks. It’s kind of like I’m a leper or something.

It all begin back in 2002 when I was one of the many bit by the demise of @Home cable company. I awoke one morning to discover the email address many of my friends, family members, and co-workers had used for me for several years was no longer in existence. Sure, Comcast had graciously agreed to provide service to the @Home subscribers displaced by the bankruptcy however, due to no action on my part I suddenly found myself having to get the word out to folks who had me in their address book that I could no longer get email at the address they had always used for me.

That was the day I decided to change my email address to something over which I had almost total control. So I registered my name (craigkendall.com) and the names of my immediate family (juliekendall.com, jeskendall.com, adamkendall.com) and began the journey of managing our own “permanent” email addresses. At first I just redirected at the server level all email to my “permanent address” to my new Comcast account and spoofed the return to my “permanent” address. But, shortly thereafter I ditched the spoofing due to my email being perceived as spam by some servers and started fully hosting my own email address through my web hosting account.

Since then, I have moved the hosting of my email to Google Apps due to their superior spam filtering. It’s a simple yet really sophisticated solution. I point my domain’s MX record to an address specified by GoogleApps and shazaam… my own email address through webmail@craigkendall.com that looks like Gmail, works like Gmail, but is mine. Not an address forwarded to a Gmail account, but my own with all the cool features of Gmail and IMAP functionality to allow me to access my email directly through my iPhone and it stays in perfect sync with my webmail and Thunderbird on my notebook computer at home.

So, it’s too easy to set it all up and you should do the same. Then, you “own” your email address permanently and folks can look at you weird when you give them your email address too.

Thanks TechCrunch for the post about the two new Eye-Fi cards! This stuff is way too cool. Eye (attempt at humor) can’t wait to get my hands on one for my digital camera! Hey, Eye-Fi! How about a Memory Stick model to put in my digital camcorder?

Eye think the biggest news in this is what I’ll call the consumer version (Home they call it) for those folks who always call me to help them hook their camera up to get their photos off of it. Yes, even MAC users on this one. It truly is easy, but for some reason it really scares people connecting something into their computer. If they could make it as simple as plugging in the card to the camera and hitting a “YES” button on their computer they’d have a real winner in the consumer market. Eye think so anyways. ;o)

If you haven’t seen it, you should. If you are a twitter user or not TwittEarth is an amazing application built on Twitter.com, Papervision’s 3D engine, Yahoo’s local API for geolocalisation service, tinyurl.com for the short url API and fasticon for great looking icons representing each twitterer. I came across it thanks to an article by Emily Chang over the weekend and lo and behold I actually saw her Twitt (oh, I guess I should be careful how I say that) this evening when I logged on to get the screen images and write this post. Here’s a screen image from the actual web page: