jonwashburn: September 2007

Back in April we drafted a blog post titled, "ActiveRain’s Weltanschauung".  The philosophies in this "living" document are things that ActiveRain members can count on.  We took the creation of this document very seriously.  It was created to act somewhat like a bill of rights, for our members. 

As long as the ActiveRain community is alive and vibrant these philosophies will be honored.  That is not something that we are willing to compromise on. Our members are the core of our existence, the guiding light by which our decisions are made. We deeply respect that relationship.

Please read through the Weltanschauung again, if you haven't already had a chance to do so. I would really appreciate it if you would let me know what you think about it. 

-Jonathan Washburn
ActiveRain

P.S.  Having a full fledged membership in ActiveRain is free.  That isn't going to change.  

Warning this is a very geeky centric post, and was written way past my bedtime. This means that this post is not only not relevant, but also likely won't make any sense when I reread it tomorrow morning.  

Google just launched a social bookmarking tool called Shared Stuff. Using Shared Stuff could not be simpler and just involves dragging the "email/share" button into your browsers bookmark toolbar.  From start to finish it took me like 5 seconds.

I already share my favorite (non AR) blog posts from my google reader (rss feed here, or view it as a blog here), but this new service takes it a step further and allows users to share most things that appears on a webpage.  This is big, at least to me.  But probably not to a lot of other people I guess.

Here is a link to my new shared items page: http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff?user=113893706697174019418

Nothing really is on it yet, but expect good things to follow.

From Animoto's website:

"Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer. The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film."

These are the steps I took to make this video and post it on ActiveRain:

1. Take some pictures of my listing. (In this case I stole the pictures from Kevin's page on the EWM website - with their permission of course. Thanks Kevin and Beth!)

2. Upload the pictures into Animoto.

3. Select a song from their song library.

4. Hit the "create" button and watch Animoto work it's magic.

5. Paste the embed code into this blog post.

I was just reading over the comments on the featured post by Paul Francis about ActiveRain's new ad network and I would like to thank all of the members of our community for being so supportive of this new endeavor of ours.  I think it is important that I let everyone know that before we decided to create this ad network we put a lot of thought into the impact it would cause on our members.  We know how hard everyone here works to create world class content for consumers and other professionals and we would never do anything to marginalize that work.

I also wanted to respond to the members that have offered to pay a monthly or yearly fee for access to this site.  While the offer is more than generous, we committed early on to not charge our members for basic access to the site, and we intend to keep that promise.