Gizmodo is blogspam: Diggnation’s Alex Albrecht agrees

In episode 24/5/2008 of Diggnation, a story the guys were covering which was linked to Gizmodo highlighted EXACTLY the concern I’ve had about this so-called tech news site for a long time.

Gizmodo seem to present stories they’ve found elsewhere as if they are there own, by making it very difficult to see the link to the original article, at the foot of the page. Annoyingly, they rarely include all the information about a story which you might need to understand it better – such as photographs or technical spec text files and so on; choosing instead to literally bury the link in two or three pages of internal links to other stories on their own site.

I was completely ignored when I submitted a self-reddit on this subject once before – about how it’s OK for big name tech sites to basically steal other site’s stories, but when we independent bloggers do it, all of a sudden it’s blogspam.

Well it would seem that, in attempting to understand more about a story which made it to the Diggnation script (if you can call it that) co-host Alex Albrecht came across the same problem that I’ve been complaining about ever since I first came across Gizmodo.

Perhaps anyone reading from Gizmodo might like to do the right thing and make it easier in future for people to click directly to the story as it was intended to be read by it’s original author, or better yet just stop self-submitting to Digg altogether, trying to make out like the work belongs to Gizmodo.

How to make good looking YouTube clips

I’ve been getting into a relatively new video podcast from Revision3 recently, called Tekzilla.

It’s presented by Veronica Belmont and Patrick Norton, of This Week in Tech and Buzz Out Loud fame and, apart from their slightly annoying, overly friendly presentational style, there is a lot of substantive info and gear news in there to keep you happy.

A tip I gleaned from the latest episode is something that I’ve been meaning to find out about myself recently, so I’m passing it on here – because I seem to remember someone asking me about this a while back and I didn’t follow up in much detail as promised.

Now that (certain) YouTube clips are also available in higher definition (not quite true HD, but vastly improved on the standard pixelated fair of old), what is the best type of file to upload for the highest quality results? Caption says it all…

If your video camera or webcam doesn’t allow you to change the quality settings, not to worry. You can upscale or ‘transcode’ the video using something like VisualHub, FFMpegX or VLC – the latter two of which are open source and therefore platform agnostic – so there’s no tears for those of you who still don’t own a Mac.

If you do own a Mac of course, you can also use the built-in Quicktime video player, to export in any video format you choose.

There’s also an article on YouTube about optimising your video for good looking playback…
http://youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo