Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

“Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
– Barack Obama

“I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and glocal warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s religious beliefs-including my own-on nonbelievers.”
– Barack Obama

We’re really getting into the video blogging thing. It’s definitely a chance to connect with artists in a big way. We’ve enabled Pras to read all of the comments posted on his videos and he takes the time to see what he can respond to. This is something generally unheard of in a standard “I’m a member of the fan club” atmosphere.

As usual, this video is distributed on basically all the major (and a lot of minor) video sites. The key being to bring your content to the users — not the other way around. It’s not their job to find your content. If want it to be seen, put it in front of them in spaces where they’re already sitting. The internet distribution systems, along with ancillary viewing environments (like AppleTV and TiVo’s podcast support) make this process beautifully elegant.

This week Pras was getting honored by the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter which is committed to ending homelessness by providing men and women with housing and support that can transform their lives — a perfect fit for his film Skid Row.

Since its founding in 1982, NCS has helped more than 25,000 homeless and formerly homeless individuals find food, shelter, counseling, employment, and in many cases, a home to call their own. NCS provides a full continuum of services aimed at helping people move from the streets to housing and independence.

We also check up on Miami with 944 Magazine and what went down in Paris.

The latest Vocino Labs media property is PVPlab — a resource and rant-fest by and for pvp ninjas of mmorpgs.

Are you a diehard PvP fan? Want to get paid for posting about your hobby and have an audience to express yourself to? We want you!

PvP Lab is always looking for quality content producers to contribute their knowledge of PvP in MMORPGs. This is a paid gig which will require you to write a minimum of 4 articles per month. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you.

Send an email to info@pvplab.com outlining what sort of thing you’ll be contributing (include sample posts on other blogs or forums if you have them). We’ll get back to you right away with our pay rates if we’re interested.

You might also be interested in the Age of Conan Leveling Guide.

Over at the ‘ol Apple Blog, I’ve posted an interview with Stephen Caudill, Founder of FatJam.

What’s great about this write-up for The Apple Blog is the fact that probably 95% or more of the development, hosting and infrastructure is done on Apple hardware. I know that I love reading about workflows like that. I enjoy learning what goes into a specific site or company that I have respect for. The Apple Pro articles come to mind and are great reads if you’re into that sort of thing.

Read the Interview with Stephen Caudill on The Apple Blog.

Today we launched Pras’ video blog over at Platinum Brand.

For those of you that don’t know, these days Pras is the Executive Producer of the World Music Awards and a principle member of our recording artist branding and marketing technology company called Platinum Brand. With a double major in philosophy and psychology from Rutgers and Yale University, Prakazrel Michel could have traveled in countless directions. But he was destined for music stardom. In the mid 1990’s Pras, lead the Fugees to their huge 1996 crossover success The Score, after which experiencing multi-platinum, international success and recognition worldwide. To date the Fugees retains title of best-ever selling hip-hop group with sales reaching over 30 Million albums.

We’re moving this forward in a big way. Like the Obama campaign, which has been expertly run on the internet, we’re going for market saturation. This initial rollout included Blip.tv, Viddler, Revver, YouTube and Vimeo — with more to come. This video saturation is becoming key to building a subscriber-base. The key being, you no longer expect people to come to you to see your content; instead you have to bring your content to them.

Also check out what Mashable had to say about us:

Musicians starring in Web videos is nothing new. John Mayer’s comedic attempt on Funny or Die comes immediately to mind. And as far as general Internet startups go, M.C. Hammer is only one of many players. 50 Cent, Nick Lachey, and Kylie Minogue are in the fold as well.

It’s big, for sure.

First, I feel it’s appropriate to add a short word of warning. This is a bad article. It violates the Terms of Service on any site you’d deem worth it. Plus, I don’t even do this. Honest. No, seriously, I don’t.

Ok, fine. I did test this on a couple sites just for fun. What?

Firefox iMacros Addon

The first thing you need is the infinitely handy Firefox addon iMacros.

iMacros allows you to automate Firefox tasks. Record and replay repetitious work. “If you love the Firefox web browser, but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every days, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of!” Yeah well, we’re using it for the power of evil, in this case.

Finding Users

For this example, we’re going to use a site called BlogCatalog, but really any site will do.

The first thing you need is a userlist or some way to easily jump from user to user without much fuss. Luckily BlogCatalog gives us a page in their directory that outputs a random assortment of users.

We can reload this page over and over, each time giving us a choice of randomly selected users to choose from. We’re only interested in the first box on the top left though. This will be the link we click to visit a random BlogCataloger’s page each time.

Randomization

As anyone who has done an Armorsmith grind in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day will tell you, a good macro needs some random delays. That’s why I use iMacro’s ability to run Javascript rather than just recording a standard macro.

With Javascript, I can assign my loops as well as generate a random number variable to insert into various PAUSE lines of the resulting macro.

The Codez

Note: You do need to do some editing for this to work correctly for you. Particularly the x and y coordinates for the thumbnail. If you can’t figure that part out for yourself, I question whether you should be participating in this little experiment anyway.

var macro;
var jsLF = "\n";
var i, retcode, errtext;
var MyDelay;
var MyPosts;

/* Define the Looping */
iimDisplay("Loops");

for ( i = 1; i < = 50; i++) {
    iimDisplay("loop "+i);

/* Assign a Random Delay for Hax0ring */
MyDelay = Math.round(10*Math.random());
iimDisplay("Random wait t="+MyDelay);

/* Create the Macro */
macro = "CODE:";
macro += "SET !ERRORIGNORE YES" + jsLF;
macro += "URL GOTO=http://www.blogcatalog.com/user" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;
macro += "CLICK X=19 Y=188" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;
macro += "TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Add To My Friends" + jsLF;
macro += "WAIT SECONDS=" + MyDelay  + jsLF;

retcode = iimPlay(macro);
if (retcode < 0) {              // an error has occured
    errtext = iimGetLastError();
    alert(errtext);
}

    if (retcode < 0) {          // an error has occured
        errtext = iimGetLastError();
        alert(errtext);
        break;
    }

}

Can Has Friends

Basically, what iMacro does is run through my Javascript as if it were running through a standard macro. The javascript sets the variables, such as the loop and delay between actions (MyDelay) from the random number generated.

The result is an output of a new macro upon each run of the Javascript. This new macro has single-use delay values between each line. So, for example, if I’m running the Javascript 3 times, the first run will pause for 4 seconds between actions, the next will be 2 and then next might be 10. How exciting.

Now don’t run off to follow everyone on Twitter, Plurk or the other hundreds of networks out there. Like I said, this is obviously against most sites’ Terms of Service and will likely get you banned if you abuse it.

Use your macroz skillz 4 guud.

I use three 37signals applications: Backpack, Basecamp and Highrise (go go referral links). With these 3 excellent web apps, I’m able to rock out a seriously awesome complete intranet setup for my business.

Just using them is fine but, as usual, I like to take it one step further into better integration with my desktop workflow. That’s where OpenID and Fluid.app come in.

OpenBar

If you didn’t already know, the 37signals apps support OpenID (they call it OpenBar, to be cool). Step one is to go into all your accounts and switch over to OpenID login.

If you’re wondering, I use my custom url for OpenID.

This gives me a convenient bar at the top of all my applications whereby I can switch between them. If you don’t already use this, you’re insane.

Having all of these applications in place really creates a great intranet-type workflow. It’s helpful even when working solo but if you have a small team like me it really shines. I also noticed my people used the various apps a lot more once I introduced them to using OpenID to bring them together — as well as putting it all together in Fluid.app (below).

Fluid.app

So we have our cool kid intranet setup with OpenID. Now we need to go download Fluid.app and turn this puppy into a desktop-like application. Fluid is an SSB (site-specific browser), which is basically just a web browser without all the extras and with a customizable dock icon (I would recommend grabbing these nice icons for use with Fluid).

It’s great for tabbing to your intranet window, adding a calendar entry, and tabbing back to Photoshop, to give a quick example. This is a process that just isn’t as exciting when you’re stuck in Safari.

(If you’re completely insane and not using a Mac, Prism does something similar on the PC)

When creating a new Fluid app for this project, I would recommend setting the url you use the most as the homepage. For me, this is /calendar in BackpackIt. You may be more inclined to roll with one of the Dashboard views in either Backpack or Basecamp though. I’m considering a move to one of those 2 options as well.

By default, when you click one of the links in your OpenBar (to go from Basecamp to Backpack, for example) Fluid will open that link in Safari. It does this because it assumes this is an external link and treats it accordingly — each service has a different URL.

There are 2 options to get around this. For me, it was easy because I use the same URL prefix for every one of my 37signals services: vocino. So what I did was change the URL wildcards in the Fluid preferences to include any URL that contains *vocino*.

If you’ve used different account URLs for your 37signals apps, you could either add each one of simply allow any linked to be opened inside Fluid. The latter option is not ideal because a lot of times you’ll have real links to external sites that people in your intranet have posted and you’ll generally want to view those in Safari so that you can keep your original app pure.

Now you have a stylish intranet app that lives in your dock, complete with all of your 37signals services. Ah, sweet sweet synergy, the web 6.0 word of the future.