Saturday, 6th August, 2005

Naming Conventions

I, like a lot of people, indulge in a spot of clandestine egorati searching late at night when no-one's looking. As Oscar Wilde says in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

(Sometimes, of course, I make specific links to other people, hoping to cash-in on their own egorati tendencies — but that's another story )

It was on one of those self-flagellating searches the other night, that I decided to have a peek at the Technorati Weblog, and spent a while reading up on some of their tag statistics.

But that's almost irrelevant — what was interesting (to me at least) was that they were using ourmedia.org to host a video.

The curious child inside me wanted to know what ourmedia.org was — and after a bit of browsing came to the conclusion that OMG, it's Flickr for video

I don't know how true that is , but I thought I'd give it a go — if for no other reason than they promise unlimited storage, and it would ease the bandwidth of my puny ADSL line whenever someone watches one of my films.

The thing is though, I was all set with the registration form all filled in, when a thought struck me: "I should be doing this as Graham, not Siobhan". I've talked in the past about how I try to keep my two "identities" separate, and how I tend to hide behind Siobhan when I want to do something that potentially opens me up to criticism.

(Actually, I don't think I have talked about that — remind me to do so )

I thought to myself "Hold on a minute. This is your serious, professional work. Not you pissing around with some vague ideas for fun."

But then it occurred to me "If I do this as Graham, and then share the link on my weblog, then everyone is going to know my real name."

Admittedly, most people do. I've noticed one or two people make the mental leap on my Flickr contacts page that I've included myself as a contact. And I'm not sure that too many people are that fussed about things like that — it strikes me that it's one of Eddie Izzard's "yeah, I'm cooking eggs" moments. But it's a big deal for me, so yous'll have to bear with me.

I've had a little regular expression buried in my script for ages that replaces my real name with ******s, and I'm not going to take that off. The last thing I want to happen is for this to appear on a Google search for me — not because I'm ashamed of it, just because I really don't ever want my parents to find it. I've become more and more lax over the years about who knows about me, but the one place I draw the line is at my parents.

They just wouldn't get it.

Anyway, returning to the plot ... here is a link to me. And in the spirit of testing things out, here's a link to one of the films, and here's a link to the MPEG itself.

I'd be interested to know if it works or not All I'm seeing when I look at the film pages is a subframe with a "Page Not Found" thing in it. Which is a bit poo really, considering it only seems to happen for MPEG-4 files — which is what they say they prefer.

Cat in a bag

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

The minute Kath came back from holiday, Murphy climbed into her bag

(crap, that's not in focus )

Well, it seems to be a little rough around the edges, and not nearly as yummy as Flickr is. But I think one of the key things going for it, is that it's linked to http://www.archive.org — they're promising Petabytes of indefinate storage So even though I'm not too excited by the user interface, I get to offload all my big files.