deadpooled a few projects

Recently, I let a few domain names expire as the projects that were running there were no longer relevant to me.

As HTML5 was ramping up in the real world (i.e. the video tag), we started to see good momentum for OGG. Firefox supported it natively. Wikipedia and DailyMotion and other sites provided OGG formats. OGG verses H.264 was a popular debate in the Tech Blogosphere. Etcetera.

Then Google bought ON2 and have since open sourced the VP8 Codec under the wrapper name WebM.
This to me pivots away from OGG being meaningful and relative. Not entirely, but enough for me to personally abandon a project I had running at the domain ogg.ly.

ogg.ly was initally just another URL Shortening service but it was specifically intended ONLY to be used for OGG files and the interface did not allow any links unless they were a direct link to a valid OGG File. I mirrored the service to work exactly like bit.ly. I even added the cute shortcut to ‘info’ pages using a plus (+) sign at the end of the short URL. The purpose of ogg.ly was to get a loose community around distributing OGG (primarily Theora video) and tracking the momentum and several other data points of OGG usage.

The idea was good at the time but was also built around idealism and Open Media as opposed to real world importance (Like most of my experiments).
Other projects have tried to encourage and promote OGG for years with little success. And now Google has released what Is supposedly a better codec than Theora (I dont want to get into a tech debate about Ogg Theora verses VP8). So unless OGG somehow evolves away from Theora and wraps the VP8 codec technology, then really I cannot justify spending time on ogg.ly. Even if the OGG wrapper continues to be relevant, I am personally not as interested in this area as a developer or evangelist or user. This is partially a fault in my personality. I move on and move around a lot with my side projects of interest. But at the end of the day, it’s about learning and experience. I am not starting businesses here…. just experiments. And getting my hands dirty is the best way to learn and slapping a name on an idea is the best way to motivate (for me). Besides, a .ly Lybian domain costs $75 a year and this blog post is being published on the other one that I have (vocal.ly) so I really need to cut my costs anyway ;-)

The other project was behind the domain Intermix.me. It was something I threw together to demonstrate using the web as an interactive audio visual instrument akin to VJing. A sample screencast can be found here:

http://sull.blip.tv/file/1440571/

I’ll probably host this off of http://vastmachine.com in the future but I let my .me domains expire (intermix.me and willkill.me). More cost savings! Not easy being a domain junkie you know!

I’m not ready to articulate my latest side interests yet. Still realizing them myself. But I am tinkering with building a new API based on some ideas and then as the ideas mature and the API is ready, I (and others) could build an application using it. More later.

Keep experimenting!

Sull

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