The first time I read about the underlying concept of web 2.0 was a little over a decade ago in the ending chapters of “Weaving the Web” by Tim Bernes Lee. This is a fascinating book on the history of the web and is highly recommended for anyone interested in the original vision of the web.

The final chapters of the book are about bringing semantics to otherwise disparate content. Over the years, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has made progress with formalizing interoperable standards, but we still have a long way to go before we realize the vision of the Semantic Web.

However, it’s interesting how we are now starting to adapt these principles in are our daily lives. An example might be our use of YouTube to broadcast our skate videos through RSS. Now our SK8NE1 subscribers can be notified and review our latest materials in their RSS readers without even coming to our web site. Here’s an example of a video you would see in an RSS reader:

Another interesting trend has been an increasing number of blogs. It seems like it was only a few years ago that Google bought Blogger and applications like MovableType and WordPress were just starting to get momentum. Today, blogging is part of the mainstream and an intregal part of the way we get our information.

In many ways, blogging and RSS are synonymous since most people syndicate their blog’s content using RSS. Embedding the display of your YouTube videos in your feeds is a powerful way to add rich media to an otherwise text only post. We now live in an on-demand world. Social networking and personalized web spaces allow people to receive information based on their preferences and most people subscribing to our blog seem to be primarily interested in our videos.

To that end, we plan to add more and more videos to our blog posts and are now embedding the entire posts in our feeds. This means that if you subscribe to our blog we’ll automatically send our latest posts directly to your designated location and you don’t even have to come to our site.

I wanted to see if I could place a YouTube video in a WordPress blog posting so I could reduce any additional bandwidth costs of serving up large video files. I started by creating a YouTube channel called, you guessed it, SK8NE1. Then, I exported an old (i was about eight) short (15 seconds) video clip to DV format (60MB) and uploaded it using the Google Gears upload application. Here’s the result:

Note: We changed our WordPress settings to full text to see if the YouTube video above would show up in Google Reader after the ping indices were updated.

I think it looks pretty good so I may start using YouTube to do the “heavy lifting” of my skate videos. Over the next year or so I’d like to put up some short training videos on skate tricks I’ve learned over the years. Digital video files can be enormous and if I get a lot of people looking at my videos it could cost me (my dad) some bucks! Enjoy the short clip, I’ll plan to put more up soon. Please let me know what you think!

When I was six my dad purchased a beginner skateboard ramp at Target for my birthday. He said it cost $19.95 and was the best present he ever bought me. It’s funny how 6 years later I still have it and enjoy doing tricks with it on our driveway. My brother and I spray painted it last year and it now looks like it is on it’s last leg, but this ramp goes way back with me and I may never be able to let it go.

Last Christmas, I got more skateboard ramps and a grind rail. I believe that this time the cost was $89.00 and he (Santa Claus) purchased it at Sam’s Club. The new ramps have helped a lot since I can set them up in different configurations. My street tricks have never been that good because most of the time my dad takes us to the concrete skate parks around town and I just like skating vert, but these low cost ramps have gone a long way in helping me develop some street skills when he is traveling or playing tennis.