Qik for Quick Video

I tried having Evan use Qik on my Nokia e71 to record Hayden's music concert. Neither the sound or video quality was really good enough to post. I did take this little snippet to see if I could embed it into the blog.

My Very Own LOL Cat

I found this picture searching through some old photos circa 1997 of our very first cat Ursula. Boy was she a mean one!

Testing Streaming MP3 Players

Evan had some problems using flash mp3 player on his blog superread.blogspot.com so I wanted to run some tests to see if I can find a player that works for everybody. My brother Michael pointed me to this site with instructions on embedding MP3 players on your page. Give each of these a try and post your results in the comments. All songs I used for the test are written and produced by Evan Nork:

Google Reader MP3 Player (Song Title - "Evolve"):



Yahoo! MP3 Player (Song Title - "Instrumental"):




Odeo MP3 Player(Song Title - "Life"):




Well, my initial tests are:

1. Google Player: On the first round had to refresh the page to get the Google player to work, not sure why... I would like this one best if it works consistently. This is the only one with a volume control

2. Yahoo Player: Takes quite a while to load, does not show up right away when the pages loads. No volume control

3. Odeo: Seems to work, but this is the player that DIDN'T work on several other people's computers when Evan used it on his blog

The Newest Nork to Blog - superread.blogspot.com is LIVE

State of the Norkosphere
I started my blog back in 2005 and have been pretty quiet for a long time. Starting the new job at ROI meant that I had to move the blog off of the Mason servers. In that process I started reading some of my old posts and recalled how much fun blogging can be! My brother Michael has been much better about keeping up his blog about life in the peace corps in Romania. He also has a great photo gallery. I recommend you check them out!

BUT the big news is my oldest son Evan is now blogging! We heard a story on NPR several weeks ago about a wovel. What's a wovel you ask... well its the mash-up of "web + novel" = wovel.
Evan is a fantastic writer and has been putting together stories, poems and comics for several years (including the now famous Dr. Bill's Windmill in the Ficsher Gallery). He really got excited about doing his OWN wovel. I'm proud to announce that the blog superread.blogspot.com has been published and he has already posted 5 chapters of his first story tittled "Mars 3000". Do you like science fiction and fantasy? This this wovel is for you! If you check it out, be sure to leave him a comment, he LOVES the interactivity and response to his writing.

Best Way To Manage Twitter Stream

I have been using the social networking tool, twitter for quite a few months now and just posted my 2000th tweet this morning!
When I first started, I was using twitter.com for sending and receiving tweets and quickly moved to using my cell phone. I have looked at several twitter clients and used twhirl for a while. (Techcrunch has posted links to an exhaustive list of twitter software.)
I have found the best tool yet called peoplebrowsr.com.

It has quickly become my main twitter interface on both my work and home computer. PeopleBrowsr has tons of features all straight through the browser (no downloads or installs necessary).
A few of the cool features PeopleBrowsr offers are:

• Tagging friends and other people into groups
  
• Find people geographically
• Search keywords and have a streaming list of tweets with the matching term.
  
• Gather your blog, Flickr Photostream, YouTube channel, Facebook profile and more
  
• Update your networks

I have a column for friends, one for replies, one for direct messages, one search for my company name, and I am in the process of organizing different users into groups each with their own column (i.e. family, retail, technology etc). the only thing it doesn't have is the ability to post tweets from multiple accounts (could come in handy for keeping personal and business accounts separate).

Check out Brian Solis' blog post for a full run down of features. And a cool video demo by Robert Scoble here. Feel free to follow me on twitter @jcnork or www.twitter.com/jcnork

New Retail Optimization Inc. Website is Live

Check it out at www.retailoptimization.com!

Gotta Love The Onion! - Apple Wheel, LOL

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

When we were down in NYC last week I saw a news stand with printed copies of The Onion! Love it :)