Wow, it’s been nearly two weeks since I last wrote about Justin.tv (or indeed anything!). In that time I’ve not been broadcasting at all, partially because of a week-long illness, and also because of “stage fright”. I don’t particularly feel that there’s much of interest to broadcast at present.

I do have a few ideas, including musical ones, of how to make my broadcasts a little more interesting, but I won’t be implementing them until at least Tuesday next week.

Also, sadly, one of the people who I had built up quite a friendship with on Justin.tv, on their channel, has stopped broadcasting, effectively deleted everything from their home page, and left. That’s quite sad, as I now don’t have an easy way of contacting her.

That’s one of the perils of online friendships, I guess. They’re quite fragile. It’s all too easy for people to leave one service or another, and effectively disappear. When they’re several thousand miles away, that makes it very difficult to maintain contact.

Oh well, I suppose I ought to get used to it. Sad, though.

Here’s my roundup of feelings and impressions after my first full working week with broadcasting on Justin.tv.

I’ll be including my impressions of the service, how I’m feeling, as well as any technical issues which arise, and workarounds I discover. Feel free to chip in and leave your comments, whether you’re a broadcaster, a viewer, or can’t understand why anyone would want to broadcast their life to the Internet, or watch others.

Talk to the Camera

When engaging with anyone via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) who is watching you, it can be difficult to remember to look at the camera.

At present I’m using the built-in iSight camera on my iMac, so I should remember to look at the little green light that tells me the camera is on. It doesn’t always work, but I’m getting better.

It’s weird

There’s something a little strange, at least to me, about watching someone else’s life, and it’s even odder broadcasting even a portion of your own to a watching world — even if it’s only one or two people at a time.

It is something I’m starting to get used to, though, even after one week. After all, I have a free choice as to whether the camera is on. I don’t pretend to be exciting, or entertaining. This is all an experiment.

Idiots

Any platform where people have free speech with relative anonymity is guaranteed to breed idiots.

Many of the female broadcasters are showered with suggestive, lewd comments, some of which are quite obnoxious. I’m spared a lot of that, but I’m still not immune.

I’ve discovered that there are a number of Internet forums which pick on one channel or another (not just on Justin.tv) to send their members to, for the express and deliberate purpose of disrupting the conversation, and seeing how much they can upset/rile the broadcaster.

They obviously get some kick out of it. It’s always to be expected. Justin.tv has limited tools to ban and ignore such behaviour, though it wastes everyone’s time and energy having to do it.

It’s not much different to dealing with forum and blog spam and personal attacks - it’s just live.

Good relationships

I’m already forming some good relationships with a few broadcasters and viewers, in much the same way as I have done in other ways online (Facebook, email, instant messaging).

Looking forward to week two

I’m going to stick with the experience. Despite some of the negatives, it’s really nice to be able to talk to, and see, other people during the working day, particularly as I work alone at home and don’t often see people.

Following my problems with EyeTV refusing to quit, I’ve now discovered a similar problem with both CamTwist and Safari.

A few times, CamTwist (a freeware piece of software which manipulates live video from a connected camera, including the built-in iSight) has crashed, and then refused to quit.

Today, Safari quit while streaming video from the iSight into a Flash-based video encoder.

The link does appear to be either misbehaving hardware, or misbehaving software which is reliant on a piece of hardware.

EyeTV uses the USB interface for digital TV tuner stick. The other applications use the iSight, which is a USB device (albeit internal)

When each application crashes, I wonder if it doesn’t properly “give up” control of the relevant USB interface. It gets stuck in the endless “Process Ending” sequence, which can’t be killed by any method I know of.

What I’d love to be able to do is execute whatever kernel-level command is run whenever a user logs out, because then every application quits. It’s really annoying.

The call for ideas continues.

I really hope this issue is fixed in Leopard.

I’m aware that post title sounds a little riskier than the reality.

As of Tuesday, I have officially been webcasting on Justin.tv, the live video publishing service which has just gone public.

I got my beta code about five days before the whole thing opened up, so it’s not particularly exclusive any more.

I’ll be streaming live video mainly during the weekdays (6am-6pt GMT) and at other unscheduled times, primarily of my home office. Feel free to stop by and say “Hi”, and ask me questions, though bear in mind that I am supposed to be working!

I’m generally quite camera shy, but I felt that it was a useful service to research and try out, and will get me used to the camera for a few possible upcoming projects.

I’ll be trying to keep a diary of some of my experiences with this new medium - a format which I think is going to become increasingly important on the Web and one which bloggers could and should investigate and take advantage of.

Here’s the live feed, though there have been some problems with embedding video in other sites recently, so if that doesn’t work, visit LondonBlueLive.

Watch londonblue live video and chat on Justin.tv

As I wrote at the Blog Herald, Darren Rowse is offering a whole stack of prizes from very generous sponsors, to celebrate the third birthday of ProBlogger.

Prizes include cash, computer equipment, subscriptions, professional services, CDs, posters, plus a host of non-blog related prizes including truffle trees, cigar starter sets, a tea package, even “50 pesos, 2 Jamaican dollars, 5 Canadian dollars, 50 American dollars, and an unused NFL Pro Bowl Ballot from 1994″.

There will be a series of competitions over the coming few days (several have already ended or are in progress). Hence one reason for writing this post: to enter the 2×20 inch LG monitor competition. I’d love those!

So head on over (my winning a prize isn’t dependent on you visiting, by the way) and take part yourself.

Happy Birthday ProBlogger!