we just did a soft launch of a new health care mixed media publication called Consumer Health Media.

Consumer Health Media provides bare knuckle debate and analysis on todays most important health care issues.

like my friend kenny florian, an ultimate fighter who relies on his mixed martial arts skills from many disciplines to battle his oponents, we aim to overwhelm health care professionals with a variety of media such as live webcasts, on-demand video coverage of health care conferences, audio podcasts, articles, web-based powerpoint presentations from industry professional, and much more.

even more important, we invite health care professionals to contribute, and use Consumer Health Media as a platform to share their ideas with others.

Consumer Health Media is a forum for health care professionals to explore and debate a variety of health care issues.

our starting point is an assumption that our health care system is broken, and we need to fix it. but as a country we should be in brainstorming mode. there are no right or wrong answers. we hope health care professionals will put forward their ideas for all to explore and debate. we can draw on the experience of academcis, innovators, doctors and nurses, hospital administrators, insurance companies, technology and medical device vendors, pharmaceutical companies, employers and consumers.

we hope to bring these constituents together using the participatory media tools and technologies we have been developing here at ScribeStudio.

Consumer Health Media is located at www.consumerhealthmedia.com. A whole bunch of contributors are currently busy writing their articles, recording their audio, or getting ready to come into our New York production studio to get in front of the camera.

our hard launch will be sometime in early November. anyone with ideas or a desire to contribute can find contact information on the Consumer Health Media web site.

we’ve been having some network issues in the office for the past two days. if you’ve been having trouble contacting us, that is why.

first, our entire network went down. we were blocked from the outside world. then our local network went down. so we couldn’t even see or communicate with each other.

like prairie dogs heads started popping up everywhere. confused people, not knowing quite how to keep themselves busy or productive without an internet connection, wandered aimlessly. vocal chords were reactivated as a form of communication. since our phones are voice over IP, they also went down.

chaos and mass hysteria ensued.

it made me wonder what it was like to work in an office before the internet came around.

our network finally went back up through the heroic efforts of our new systems team. i’ve been feeding these guys a steady diet of cocaine, the energy drink, not the columbian gold, to keep them going.

i met the management team of cocaine (www.drinkcocaine.com) at a fashion show we filmed for TV (the beauty and fashion channel). they sent me a case and i’ve been drinking one per day ever since. my iced coffee intake is now down to zero. cocaine up. coffee down.

to me, indulgences are best in tapas sizes. the spanish are right. a little of everything. not too much of anything. sample sizes. that’s how i like my women, my alcohol, my food, my music, my jolt of daily energy, pretty much everything. but enough on the inner workings of my mind. back to our story…

our inbound mail server is still down. so anyone who has sent us an email in the past few days and is waiting patiently by the phone will have to wait a little longer. those inbound messages are currently hanging out in our barracuda spam filter at our colocation facility, which is where the ScribeStudio servers are also located.

good old fashioned phone is currently the best way to reach us. two one two. three five three. zero zero two two. i’m extension seven zero zero one. i miss rotary phones…their existance is the only thing keeping the phone and cable companies from putting us through voicemail hell without ever actually being able to talk to a real person. since they have to account for rotary phones, they need to have, after the 50 menu options, “or please stay on the line and an operator will be with you shortly.”

remember those days??

“Truth in E-Learning” broadcast live to a web audience last week from our New York Studio.

As with any live production, there were the last minute concerns and near-heart-attacks for fear that something had broken at the last second, but on the whole the broadcast went extremely well.

I think it’s difficult to really appreciate what happens at these live webcasts without being there in person.

Try to imagine all the technical complexity of running a webcast (say just for argument, one that you are doing from your home webcam) with a chat room, slides to alter and display, uploads coming from other users, on top of accounting for all the bandwidth your dozens of users will be eating up (this is of course assuming that you are a very popular person.)

Then consider what it’s like running a live television broadcast. There’s the camera people to cue, the talent to cue, the script to work from, the set, the lights, the pressure…

Believe me, the list of things only gets exponentially longer.

Now ram both the live TV broadcast and the webcast together.

Boom. That’s what ScribeStudio does.

Me? What was my job during this little adventure? I got the pleasure of being the guy that made everything run.

Despite how daunting such a task can be. It really can be a lot of fun. At Scribe’s New York Studio, we have the right people with the right technology and the right equipment to make it all come together and actually work.

We look forward to “Truth’s” next live broadcast and invite you all to tune in (or in the webcasting age is it “click in”?) to watch.

I went to the Jazz Standard in New York City the other night. Hadn’t been there before but will be back again. The acoustics are good and the food’s great. They music? Obviously depends on who you’re there to see.

I saw a violinist. A college friend invited me. I was more interested in seeing my friend than I was the music for the very simple reason that of all the biases I’ve developed in my life, one that tops my list is that the violin is not a Jazz instrument.

It just doesn’t swing. It doesn’t have the vocal earthiness of a horn. It doesn’t have the stomp and swagger of piano.

That’s not to say the violin isn’t a good instrument. It is. It obviously has a place in an orchestra. It’s beautiful in a string quartet. It can play raucus bluegrass.

But my point is that while it has its place, that place is not in a trio, or a quartet or any other scenario where it leads a form that swings. Instead, it works where the music is straigh-ahead no matter the time signature or tonal dissonance.

I’m not sure why this is. A violinist can make beautiful runs, can get behind and ahead of the beat, can do all the other things that single note instruments like trumpets and saxes can do, but it ends up sounding flaccid in a Jazz setting.

This might be a string instrument thing. Few guitarists outside of Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery have really left their mark. Sure, you can point to people like John McLaughlin but I’d argue that his improvisational innovations and excellence fall outside of Jazz. And when I say ‘fall outside of Jazz,’ I’m simply alluding to the fact that while Jazz is improvisational, not all improvisational music is what we typically think of when we think of Jazz.

(I recognize that’s a giant soggy towel of a statement, and I’m going to sidestep it and let it hang out there to dry since if you want in on a dirty little secret, I’d argue that all improvisational music is Jazz, that Jazz precisely means improvisation and that it further means dialog amongst many members who navigate their own voices as they come together in a collective give and take conversation.

(What I’m saying here though, is that despite the very large and significant exception I just outlined, when we discuss traditional Jazz forms, the violin just doesn’t cut it… and don’t even get me started on the flute.

(Thus ends my giant hedge.)

It might be a timbre thing, because when I mention strings I’m exluding bass. Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Eddie Gomez, Dave Holland and so many others that have had us bob and weave our heads. Nuff said.

This might be more on point because as I think about it, and all apologies to Benny Goodman, but the clarinet doesn’t grab the gut either. It’s too thin. Too reedy.

I won’t mention the violinist by name because golden rules say that if I don’t have nice things to say, I shouldn’t. Besides, when she came onstage I recognized her. I’d seen her play before in an Americana roots band and her playing in that context was lovely and admirable.

Her pianist is impressive. His name is Jason Moran and his style ebbs, flows and splashes with short phrases and lines. He then stomps, rags and strides before emerging with tonal sheets laid atop one another like McCoy Tyner’s done throughout the years.

What’s important though is construction, of creating wholes out of disparate parts, and of understanding the parts or ingredients used to construct and create the whole. What’s important is choosing the parts that come together to form the whole. This is true be it music, visual art or software.

Software? Yes.

It’s a creative art that comes together to create a platform or environment on and within which users (i.e., audiences) interact.

I choose software deliberately. It’s a provocative art and our code slingers are poets to the highest degree.

They write a syntactic language, they abide by, break and create new rules, they alter and modify, they edit and purify, they create the altogether new, they open up unique possibilities of understanding and interacting with the world with their discoveries.

It’s a shame that most don’t see the craft behind programs but only the programs themselves. This would be like not being able to see Goya’s brush stroke, hear Hendrix’s guitar riff or watch Almodavar’s video frames pass by.

Artistry is hidden in software. Even more, the poetry of code has two distinct anamolies working for and against it.

• It’s obscured, meaning few see it. Possibly only other coders on a team in closed systems. More, obviously, in open source systems.

• It’s foundational, meaning that while code is poetry with its own logic and syntax, it also serves as a basis upon which others create objects that are totally unrelated in language if not necessarily in purpose.

For example, the code of Final Cut Pro allows for a music video. The code of Photoshop allows for an image. The code of Abelton Live allows for music. The video, the image, the music are all creations on top of creations and highly significant in that they could not exist if the orginal wasn’t birthed into place by poets slinging, then refining code.

Let’s add this to the mix: Code as collaborative art. Code as Jazz. Developers as a band that brings their unique take together to create a whole.

The reason I suggest this is because the art of software necessitates not just layers, but the interplay of layers. That interplay is an interlocking of back-end and front-end and all possible layers in between.

There’s someone who’s tuned a database and someone who’s written code to get and put information from and into that database.

Then there’s what we interact with. What we “see.” This is user interface. It’s the pretty design colors and buttons we press and how forms act and react to our choices and interaction.

Taken all together is an orchestrated piece, a program. And taken together it’s code as Jazz. It’s a navigated dialogue between the front-end and back-end.

Keeping things simple, the back-end and database is our rhythm section. Our drum and bass. It needs to be tight, it needs to be fluid and can’t falter or fall apart.

Graphics and general user interface — our front-end — are our soloists. The work together to create melody and harmony. They work with the rhythm section to create a composition.

Which brings me back to the violin. As said, it’s a very good instrument but has its place. So too in the Jazz of code.

Just because techniques, languages and other whizbangery can be done doesn’t mean it should be.

I thought i’d take a little time to share what we’ve been up to in the way of video production here in our New York studio. today I worked on our bi-weekly filming for Source Media, a publishing company, and ScribeStudio customer.

Source Media has many divisions and many publications. the group I worked with this morning uses ScribeStudio’s New York production facilities to create regular web-based video newscasts for visitors to their Managing REO (www.managingreo.com ) web site visitors, who are professionals in the real estate industry.

Each segment they film in the studio is short (3 to 5 minutes). the importance lies in being able to deliver information in their video newscast quickly and efficiently.

We fully support the concept of creating web-based multimedia content that is short and sweet. We typically recommend to our customers that they chunk their content, making small 3-10 minute pieces of content. A web site visitor will typically not stick around to watch much more at a time. We often help customers break up hour long presentations into shorter segments.

If you can present an end user with an hour of web video in a DVD style player with chapter markings, where each segment is clearly labeled, they can have an enjoyable experience with the content and find what they want to find and not have to sit through the parts that aren’t of interest.

In contrast, think about how many people put video online, especially long video, with simply a play and a stop button. That’s not very user friendly.

How do I get to the question and answer part of the presentation? I can’t. But if you chunk it up and put it in a nice player and label each segment, the end user can easily get to the content they want.

ScribeStudio works with Source Media to make the process of filming their web newscasts simple. they show up to our New York production studio (we’re conveniently about 5 blocks from their office), we shoot, we do post production, and we upload the video.

Since I’ve been here, ScribeStudio has really built out our technology and our studio capabilities to account for the ever growing and more techno-savvy needs of our customer.

We have started using green screen effects for our clients looking for something ‘a little different’, we’ve added all new lighting equipment to give them the best possible images, we shoot on state of the art 24pA capable cameras, and we’ve also acquired a new video mixer for broadcasting, multi-camera, multi-angle, live events from our studio directly to live web audiences – what we call WebTV.

And webcasting has certainly become a huge part of ScribeStudio’s marketability. People can literally walk into our New York studio and broadcast a live two camera webcast to the world. recently we kicked off a new webcast series called ‘truth in e-learning’ which is set to air its second episode on wednesday september 6th.

Since ScribeStudio is also a technology company, we have a webcasting solution called ScribeLive.

By using our production studio and our webcasting capabilities, broadcasting through ScribeLive, ‘truth’ not only gets the professional studio setting they need for broadcasting hour long live webcasts, but they can benefit from the ScribeStudio web architecture to power their broadcast to hundreds or thousands of live users, all while recording a web-archived version for those that couldn’t make the live broadcast.

As an editor/video producer, its always fun to work with a new client and new technologies. since no client ever wants the same thing and is always looking for that extra edge they need to draw in their users, its a consistent challenge re-tailoring your work, and to be willing to do a little experimenting, in order to create new ways of helping them to achieve their individual goals.

For the past few weeks we’ve read about the solution to some math thing with a French name that we don’t really get.

The Poincaré is a topographical conundrum that deals with measuring three-dimensional spheres. So perplexing was the riddle that the Clay Mathematics Institute selected it as one of seven Millenium Prize Problems and offered a million dollars to whoever could solve it.

Enter Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician variously described as reclusive and/or enigmatic. After posting a number of papers online and having them vetted by his peers, it appears he’s solved the Poincaré.

As Dennis Overbye wrote in The New York Times:

Now [mathematicians] say they have finished [reviewing] his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.

As a result, there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.

“It’s really a great moment in mathematics,” said Bruce Kleiner of Yale University, who has spent the last three years helping to explicate Perelman’s work. “It could have happened 100 years from now, or never.”

As a result of his achievement, the International Math Union awarded Perelman mathematics’ highest honor, the Fields Medal, and invited him to its quadrennial congress to receive it. Perelman refused the medal and declined to make an appearance.

And this is what gave the story legs. Add Perelman’s reclusive refusal to articulate why he’s declining the award and we have ourselves a media mini-event. Add a dash of eccentricity — he has really long fingernails— and the story has legs. Not quite John Mark Karr legs but legs nonetheless. You simply don’t turn down the Fields Medal. It’s like turning down the Nobel Prize — which Le Duc Tho did in protest during the Vietnam War and Jean-Paul Sartre did just because — and leads to a lot of head scratching and introspection. What’s gone unwritten and mostly unnoticed are a few words that usually appear with most of the stories: Perelman posted his Poincaré proofs on the Internet.

This makes it sound like he took out a MySpace account or some such haphazard thing. While that would be nice what he actually posted it to arXiv, an open resource run by the Cornell University Library with funding from the university and the National Science Foundation. It contains some 380 thousand science papers that anyone can view and review. This is precisely what some of math’s leading minds did when Perelman alerted them that the first of his three papers was on the server.

This, of course, is untraditional. Academics and scientists submit to peer-reviewed journals. Publication gives them the ever important stamp of legitimacy. Just ask Hwang Woo-Suk. The disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist is in the middle of a court battle fighting fraud charges that could lead to a ten-year prison sentence.

Since Perelman didn’t publish in a traditional, peer-reviewed journal, others such as Shing-Tung Yau could (the one he edits, actually) and attempt to lay claim to solving the Poincaré. You can catch up on a whole cast of characters with reputations to maintain and build if you read Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber’s Perelman profile in this week’s New Yorker (August 28, 2006).

There’s no small irony in the Web/ journal divide. All these Webs got their start as a way for academics to share information and collaborate. That’s all old news.

What’s new news, and what’s missing from the words so far spilled in the traditional press, is the significance that most mathematicians are having none of Shing-Tung Yau’s claim on the Poincaré.

They may find Perelman a little odd — and may be perplexed that he hasn’t sought the imprimatur of an established journal given the significance of his achievement — but the peer review enabled by an open source like arXiv carries enough significance that they credit him with the Poincaré solution.

And while the length of Perelman’s nails and his joy for long walks are all important humanizing details in the Poincaré-IMU congress story line, it’s the way Perelman put his intellectual capital out there, how he delivered his content, openly and freely that will be this story’s lasting legacy.

The story of open source software has been told. It’s lead to tremendous applications and solutions.

The story of content put in the public domain, either freely or under licenses such Creative Commons is a sleeper. But a sleeper with incredible cultural ramifications.

Might be lastest, but certainly not leastest, Why the Lucky Stiff from RailsConf 2006 in Chicago.

Humor, music and animation all in a little over an hour of keynote video goodness.

This video has been moved to a permanent home at ScribeMedia.Org

And that, dear friends, concludes the RailsConf 2006 Keynote Series. We hope you’ve enjoyed… even the buggers who complained about the Flash players we’ve been using to present these two you.

Speaking of which, I did a search to see how many incoming links there are to the RailsConf Keynote Page. The magical number: 1,236.

That’s just plain nutty. I think back to something I think Rich said at the conference, maybe it was Dave Thomas, not really sure anymore, but someone said it: just a few years ago the interest in Rails was neglegible. It just wasn’t known and so few were learning it, studying it, working on it, mastering it, you get the idea.

Our shop, which has/had been Java (cue the boo/hiss) is releasing its first Rails commercial application with more to follow. If you’re interested in learning more, visit the Rails page and scroll down.

for their encore performance, our young stars mix in a little shakespeare…

i’m always intrigued by different businesses, how they do things, what their processes are, etc.

about 2 times per week i order lunch at the subway in our neighborhood. generally, i like variety, which is the one thing i miss about our old neighborhood on 20th and 5th avenue.

our new neighborhood, downtown between the south street seaport and wall street, doesn’t quite have the lunch time food scene. there are some plain vanilla delis, mcdonalds, wendys, subway, papa johns and other fast food staples.

the food ordering system at subway is like a conveyor belt of efficiency, something henry ford would be proud of. it’s like a chinese factory of efficiency (that’s my cue to mention that we’re webcasting a department of commerce event on doing business in china next friday).

i’ve mastered my part too…

they have this funny middle age jamaican guy who starts the process. he’s the person at the beginning of the assembly line who asks you what you want.

what do you want today?

“12 inch italian herb and cheese bmt toasted with provolone.”

i challenge anyone to convey everything he needs to hear from me in a more succint way.

i always listen to the people before me or after me. typically, they’re unprepared, not getting why he asks the questions he does, not anticipating that he needs to know basic information to make them their sandwhich.

what do you want today? “give me a turkey sandwhich.”

what size? “i don’t know. what do you have?”

small or large. six inch or twelve. “give me a small.”

what kind of bread do you want that on? “what? what kind of bread do you have?”

do you want cheese on that? “yeah.”

what kind of cheese? swiss, american or provolone. “swiss.”

do you want your sandwhich toasted? “yeah.”

anyway, on the efficiency of a transaction, there is a lot to be desired. and this is only the beginning. as soon as the jamaican guy gets the basic order started, he grabs the bread (small or large size), cuts it open and passes it to the next person in the assembly line.

he needs to convey to that person what he learned from you so far and that person then, in turn, needs to ask additional questions to continue building your sandwhich.

each person in the assembly line interacts with the person before them, the customer, and the person after them.

anyway, not really an interesting story on paper (or in a blog), but something i observe on my two days per week at subway.

if you’re lucky, i’ll disect the salad station at the deli…

Back in June I wrote about the sweet spam I’m privy to on a daily basis.

I have various strategies to help me cope with it, many revolve around my delete key. One that’s helpful is getting my mail on my Treo and rapidly deleting it from there which, in turn, then removes it from my mail server.

It’s one of those collective bonding things though. I get spam, you get spam, can’t we all be friends?

I occasionally read the Dreamhost blog. They’re funny people. Snarky people. And wise asses too.

And since they’re one of the largest hosting providers around they deal with spam too.

To wit: A guy calls them and threatens to go medieval on them because he believes they’re sending him tons of spam.

This is all left on voicemail. Which they’ve kindly put online.

When I first played the message to coworkers, some of them peed their pants in fear. One guy pooped and had to go home early. They were softies and needed to toughen up anyway. The Internet is serious business.

And then he called back and left another.

This is all well and fun. But because we’re collectively kind of snarky, an audio file ain’t just an audio file until someone downloads it, mashes it up and releases it to the world.

Which is exactly what this guy did.

And you can listen to his mix here

Bless these internets.