Instapaper

Posted by Neal Campbell on Apr 26, 2010 in iPad, Web Apps | 0 comments

Jon Wilcox tweeted “@nealcampbell I don’t understand instapaper. Isn’t it just for offline reading of web pages? Or is the ipad app different than the iPod app.” The answer is longer than 140 characters.

Instapaper is about reading Web content offline so it’s particularly useful for iPad with Wi-Fi and iPod Touch, but it goes beyond just providing offline access, if you take full advantage of tools on the Instapaper website. One of those tools is a bookmarklet for you bookmark bar. It’s easy to digest a short blog post in your browser while you take a brake from working. When you come across a long article you would like to read, you can hit that Read Later bookmarklet and it instantly sends the article to your Instapaper account. Your account also has an RSS feed for all the articles you add.

The best part is the way articles are formated for readability on portable devices. It’s much more like reading an e-book than regular Web content. The longer the piece, the more I enjoy reading it on the Instapaper iPad App. I haven’t tried the iPhone or Kindle version, but the iPad version is optimized to provide a great reading experience.

Geek Brief Radio Test Tube

Posted by Neal Campbell on Mar 4, 2008 in audio, Web Apps | Comments Off

Long story cut into really short pieces…We started Geek Brief Radio, an audio version of GeekBrief.TV because Cali kept getting email from people telling her they watch Geek Brief while driving to work. She, like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, is a safety girl.

GeekBrief.TV is written to be visual, so we’ve never really been happy with Geek Brief Radio except when we do a special audio thing like the Macword Postmortum.

Tonight we tried something different. While I was editing the video, we recorded a different audio version of the same show. I think it has potential. I subscribe to the video version of our show, but not the audio version. I would subscribe to this, I think. 

So Excited…I Just Can’t Hide It!

Posted by Neal Campbell on Jan 21, 2008 in Cali/Luria, musings, podcasting, the studio, travel, Web Apps | 0 comments

Macworld, for us, was an amazing week. We met old friends and made new friends. We’re convinced people who watch GeekBrief.TV are the nicest, coolest people we could know. We also learned a lot.

The shows we make outside the studio are not as good as those we make when we’re here. Cali is great in both situations, but I’m not.

At the end of this month, I’ll be doing a four-day bootcamp at the Travel Channel Academy in Washington D.C. My least favorite part of what we do is running a camera. I like the pre and post production stuff, so I hope to learn some shooting skills that will make camera work more interesting for me and for people who watch what I shoot.

When we speak to an audience about what we do, we refer to a video Ira Glass made for Current TV. In the video, he talks about how all video wants to be crap. Making good video is working hard against video’s tendency toward crappiness. He also talks about how your skill doesn’t live up to your taste when you’re getting started. It takes most of us two or three years to start making video that starts to live up to our original imagination. I’m still not there.

I have it in my mind. I know how I want the show to look and feel when we’re outside the studio, but I’m a long way from making that happen. I’m hoping I’ll be closer after the Travel Channel thing.

BTW, Cali isn’t feeling well. She worked hard and didn’t get much sleep last week, so I’m hoping she’ll take a couple more days to rest. I have PLENTY of Briefs in the can, so that should help.

We’re extremely grateful to xTrain.com, Drobo and PodShow for making our first trip to Macworld happen!

Jason Calacanis and Mahalo

Posted by Neal Campbell on Aug 11, 2007 in Web Apps | 0 comments

At Gnomedex yesterday Jason Calacanis gave a presentation about Mahalo, his latest project. The idea is to deliver better search by making it human-powered.

In the Mahalo experience, editors filter out search results that turn out to be SPAM.

Dave Winer thinks Jason’s presentation was SPAM, so Dave yelled at Jason from the back of the room.

I enjoyed Jason’s presentation because he painted a nastalgic picture of the way the Web used to be. Search results used to be not only relevant, but also informative. Now, results may be relevant, but they also tend to be commercial.

Mahalo is new and you won’t get a result for every search, but if it lives up to Jason’s vision, it will become my home page.