Thanks to everyone who has left a kind message about wanting to help here at Deep Jive Interests.  I’ve been kind of bit busy as of late, but now that I have a temporary breather, I will be replying back to everyone who has expressed an interest.  In particular, I’d like to thank J. Angelo at BlogHerald and Lorelle Van Fossen for helping spread the word that I am looking for some interested folks.

One other specific bit of help that I also want to throw out is that I’m also looking to redesign DJI.  I wrote this current theme myself, but I don’t really have the time to put together a new one.  If you know (or happen to be) an up and coming Wordpress Theme Ninja, and would like a a crack at this particular blog, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Just so that there’s no confusion — there’s absolutely no money in it for you.

But, on the other hand, you get the notoriety of saying that you created a blog, the chance to work with me (if such a thing is worth something to anyone), and the chance at spreading your own reputation around the blogosphere through my constant braying (for I will bray loudly if it is good).  And if the design is at all popular, maybe we’ll release it for public consumption as well.

If you’re interested leave a comment and we’ll try an hash something out.

Cheers!

So today I had a mock / real exam of sorts which was painful, because its always difficult to hear how you need to improve, but excellent at the same time because we don’t get a lot of chances to *do* mock exams. The Royal College exam in Internal Medicine has both an oral and written component; however, the oral component is the one which requires a lot of practice because of what’s required in such a short amount of time.

They give you a stem (essentially the clinical scenario), and you’re either required to walk through exactly how you would manage the patient, examine the patient, or communicate with the patient (with standardized patients, i.e. “mock patients”). The time frame is 10 minutes.

In many ways, its as much a test of how you can preform under a time-limited stressful situation, and as a means of how you can perform what you need to do while looking graceful, organized and co-ordinated as well. For that reason, its important for us that we not only know our Stuff, but be able to show that we know our Stuff …

… which is why doing mock exams are actually quite good.

The best scenario of the day, today?

“Examine this patient for an overactive thyroid. But don’t examine the thyroid itself. And … go.”

Hi guys and gals,

In the upcoming weeks (and perhaps months) there is going to be a slow change at Deep Jive Interests in terms of its content (I think) and its author(s) (I hope).

For those of you who didn’t already know, although I blog about new media issues (a catch-all term for “whatever I think is interesting on the internets”) , my day job is being one of the Fellows (a very senior resident) in General Internal Medicine here in Toronto. I see sick patients in the ward and in clinic through all kinds of illnesses (depending on the month) and that’s pretty much my day.

I kind of stumbled into blogging almost two years ago while wanting to get back into technology, as medical school (4 years) and residency (another 2 years at the time) had taken me away from that. As I used to tell people, before the turn of millenium Tables (in web design) were de rigeur and “web standards” were still a bit of a pie in the sky.

Anyway, its been a happy kind of adventure over the past many months, and DJI has grown in a few ways as well, allowing me the indulgence of writing about things I want to write about with a few people actually noticing, and rarer still, people actually commenting back from time to time (thank you, all of you who have done so).

When I started blogging, I knew that there would be a time in the future when I’d probably have to stop for at least a few weeks straight … or perhaps even a few months.

That time is now.

… or, rather, it kind of was a few weeks ago.

The reason is that my Royal College Exams in Internal Medicine are here (or will be, in April and May), and seeing as they are the Final Exams one writes at the end of one’s medical training they are rather important.

Although my training won’t quite end, because I’ve decided to do an extra year’s training in Palliative Care, this Exam is the Big One. Its the kind where people sweat and stress, and really, start studying in earnest about a year before the exam date.

Its about t-minus several weeks until the first part of that exam, and to do it justice, Deep Jive Interests is going to have to change while I get down to brass tacks.

Rather than shut the whole blog down, I’m going to take this opportunity to do some experimenting.

This means that posting will get increasingly more irregular, but I’m hoping that it will change in a bit of a good way. Rather than focus on the daily tech issues of the day, I’m hoping that the content will change to reflect larger issues, perhaps more thoughtful issues around new media, and perhaps things that aren’t covered by Techmeme, TechCrunch, and any one of the larger new media blogs.

This might mean a change in content format, in favour of things like reviews or interviews, or giant lists. Or it might mean rambling essays in the rant-y kind of style that I enjoy.

So where do you come in?

Well, what I also want to do is put a spotlight on bloggers who need more exposure — bloggers who have a unique perspective and unique experiences in new media.

Yes, I am looking for guest bloggers.

If you happen to know of any — or, happen to *be* one — and you have a story to tell or a post to write, leave a quick message below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

To everyone who has been following my blog for a while?
A big “Thank You” for reading.

Through this period of “transition”, I’m hoping that the content will still be as fresh, engaging and as interesting as it ever was (if you found that it was), while hoping to introduce you all to some newer voices, some newer ideas and stories.

Cheers
Tony Hung.
p.s. so yes, if you want to be one of those voices leave a comment and we’ll try and work something out. :)

So an interesting fact, trailing the hubaloo over how Jason Calacanis does (or does not) treat his startup squad at Mahalo (working them like slaves or merely encouraging the best out of them) — turns out that the Mahalo worker bees are looking for just about any content/fodder to create indexable pages, and that includes stuff which suggested by *you*.

What do I mean?  Well, put it more plainly, Mahalo will create a page on a topic that you suggest, populated with links that they find (and self-edit).  How?  Utilizing Twitter, actually.

If you send a suggestion to @MahaloToDo, they’ll create a page in a couple days. 

Out of fun, I decided to suggested a fairly obscure topic: Capgras Syndrome, to see how they’d do with it.  Here’s the actual page, as they got it done yesterday, which is pretty sparse, but to be fair, its a pretty sparse topic.

For those interested (and if you’re not, read on, because its kind of wierd-type interesting), Capgras Syndrome is a condition where people believe that people they know are actually replaced by imposters.

Here is one description, via Wikipedia:

Mrs. D, a 74-year old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalize her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognized other family members and would misidentify her husband only.

Although a lot of pages on the web refer to it as a psychiatric condition (i.e. they are “crazy”) associated with schizophrenia (which it may be), it is also associated with damage to the brain in some fairly specific areas; in particular lesions (or changes) in the non-dominant hemisphere of one’s brain, for example because of a stroke or trauma, can cause all kinds of peculiar conditions, some examples might be …

• an increased tendency to experience deja vu and “mystical” experiences (right temporal lesions)
• an inability to understand the emotional content of language (they don’t “get” sarcasm), also known as receptive prosody,
• Reduplicative Paramnesia, in which folks believe that a person, place or object exists as two identical copies.

The worker bees at Mahalo haven’t done a bad job (but not a great job either) of a difficult topic.  If you want to try this “function” of Mahalo’s ‘mechanical turk’, try and messaging @mahalotodo, and see what comes up.  Its surprisingly fast, and maybe you’ll get some free usable research out of it too.

Update: March 14, 2008
Sorry guys, it looks like the backdoor has closed. :P I am closing the comments, but if you want to be on the list in case it ever opens again, or in case I get any other invites or goodies to other Web2.0 Applications, just leave your email (I promise not to sell your email or to spam you etc etc).

Thanks for stopping by! :)

____________________________

So there’s a bit of a “backdoor” way to get a DropBox invite, and for the moment, it still seems to work. If you’re interested in having an invite, just leave a comment and when you do, make sure you that you leave your email address (where it says to leave an email address — not in the content area) so that I can add you.

What I’ll do is create a single shared folder on my account and “share” this folder with whoever wants an invite. What happens is that everyone who I share this folder with automatically gets an account (please do NOT upload anything to this shared folder!)

I don’t know how long this will work for, as the DropBox team is clearly being deluged with new accounts, and new accounts are being restricted to 5 gig “beta” accounts (when I signed on, it was 10 gigs).

Good luck!

So, this is a quick review, mostly because DropBox is getting Digged, TechCrunched and Redditted all at the same time — and I’m finally allowed to blog about it, as they’ve dropped their request they bloggers not do so. I’ve been in the private beta for almost two months now, and DropBox is pretty much as hyped: it is an awesome remote online “drive” solution.

While its features are not tremendously unique — you get gigabytes of storage, you can install a little program on your computer which auto-syncs so that a special folder “auto-syncs” with getdropbox, you can “share” different folders and files in a fairly granular fashion, and so on.

Rather, what really works for me is how simple and elegant it is.

{actually there is two other features that are also pretty nifty: how it keeps different versions of files every time they are changed, and its auto-gallery feature}

There are, in fact, many online solutions, but what sticks out about DropBox is that its interface is very clean, very fresh, very simple, and very fast. Unlike its competitors, the online interface isn’t trying to mimic your desktop, and as such, isn’t full of fancy AJAX (or Flash) tricks. It has a very simple interface, and its a joy to use.

This latter fact is important to me, because — and perhaps you’re like me — you bring data between computers of varying ages and processing speeds. AJAX and Flash are fine when you’ve got a relatively “new “machine, but in the places that I work (hospital), I’m often faced with old machines, or machines that have miniscule amounts of RAM, or computers that are just plain slow. Using other online storage solutions make no sense in this environment because they’re slow and cumbersome to use.

But this is where DropBox sails, as it requires very little of the host machine to work … which is just as it should be.

On the other hand, its not a perfect product by far. One thing about DropBox that needs work, for example, is the downloading interface. There is no easy way to download more than one file (if you’re at a remote machine and don’t want to install the remote “drive” on it), and obviously this is an important feature if DropBox is meant to be more than an archiving tool (which presupposes that you won’t be downloading much).

This feature can’t be all that difficult to implement, so I anticipate that its one of those things these guys are working on.

Bottom line: DropBox is pretty awesome and given its simple interface, very usable even in fairly primitive computing environments. I’ve been using it almost daily in the past two months, and its one of those services that goes above and beyond any superlatives that I’m going to use — and that you really just going to have to try for yourself.

Well, it looks like the anime/otaku/fansubbing crowd doesn’t read Techmeme or Techcrunch, for that matter (this blog too, obviously, but that’s something I’m willing to overlook :), but someone had, and it looks like the word is spreading about Crunchyroll’s success, and it looks like they are not pleased.

So here’s the recap: Crunchyroll (a You-Tube “clone” which is a video-streaming site for folks who love and/or who are obsessed with Japanese animation and /or Japanese/Asian movies / television series) got VC funding from Venrock about two weeks ago to the tune of 4 million dollars, which was a contentious position, I asserted, because the vast majority of its content was, and continues to be, copyrighted — hosting the videos was, and continues to be, a legal landmine for Crunchyroll.

It tries to get around this by saying that it will happily take down videos if the appropriate DMCA paperwork is filed, but will not actively police videos at the point of upload.  Because the copyright owners are unaware or do not care (or have other reasons that I’m not aware of), there continues to be a whole *LOT* of copyrighted material still on Crunchyroll, and this includes both animated shows and television series..

What’s become apparent to me since writing the original is that there’s a human side of this story that I didn’t appreciate.

And that is of the fansubbers, whose contribution, it can be argued, Crunchyroll’s success is based upon, and whose existence it owes itself to.

Fansubbers are folks who, often as a group, subtitle television shows and movies from their native language into other languages.  Fansubbers exist for all kinds of niches, and for all kinds of video media.  To me, fansubbers, are a little bit like the creators of open source software, in that they spend a whole lot of their own personal time and energy making something that can be enjoyed by a whole lot of other people.

However, *unlike* folks who create open-source software, very few can use this hobby as a launchpad to professional activities, and very few of them make any money for their efforts (almost all make none).  Many of them are literally doing it for the love of “the game”, and a desire to want to share it with others.

Furthermore, unlike folks who create open-source software, many of them are *also* the potential targets of legal action, as subtitling itself and the redistribution of the original video is in a legally shady area to begin with.  In fact, many fansubbing groups have asked its fans *NOT* to upload their videos to sites like YouTube so that they won’t be the obvious target of legal action.

So, it adds a greater dimension of irony that not only is Crunchyroll getting funding for streaming videos that are already copyright protected, but the folks who have made those videos possible for watching (subtitling) have gone through hoops to avoid copyright prosecution themselves — with no practical monetary gain in the first place.  In fact, many go out of their way (and add a message directly to the videos that they sub) that their work isn’t meant to be sold or resold at any price.

And right now, it looks like they’re realizing what’s going on, and they’re not happy.

With the fansubbing community coming to grips with how Crunchyroll is making out (like bandits, as it were) off their hard work (and at their own personal risk), it remains to be seen what kind of ramifications this will have on Crunchyroll — if the amount of media taken down changes (i.e. increases), or if fansubbers are going to be adding interesting “messages” to Crunchyroll at the end of their work, in the event that it gets uploaded to Crunchyroll.