Moblogging

Mobile phone, or as Nokia says nowadays “Mobile Multimedia Computer, is emerging as the key device in which user-generated / -originated media content is captured. To growing extent, the portable gadget is also becoming hooked to online services without PC connection. In this, there are still many hurdles to be crossed. I decided to have a full-scale go on this one and try the apps and ideas available online for moblogging. Equipment used: Nokia N70 and Dell D620 + Nokia 6280 for T-Mobile NL.

Option 1: Sending MMS-messages to e-mail addresses of online services

MMS is telco-originated innovation to post multimedia from one device to another and also to online services. I tried posting MMS’s to YouTube, Flickr and TypePad. YouTube MMS-connection works only in the US, thus no success. Flickr allows me me to post messages to an secret e-mail address. This worked fine. But the stupid MMS attaches a lot of unnecessary marketing stuff from the operator, which needs to be deleted in the blog. Wow-factor: 4/10

Is modern web analytics part of web 2.0?

The more I work with web analytics tools, the more it becomes clear that modern internet is not all about the hyped social networking, user generated content, ratings, rankings, peer-to-peer networks etc. On the contrast to this anarchy-looking front, internet services behind the “hood” are actually emerging to be a highly analytical discipline – even from an invividual bloggers. I bet most of the blogger keep on doing the following to a growing extent: 1) checking the stats-part in their blogs; 2) checking whos is referring and reading their posts and 3) becoming either motivated of dismotivated of the lack of readership or comments or at best becoming very motivated because of broad and specialised interest towards their contributions. I do know about you, but at least I tend to doing this more and more often with my blogs.

One of the key shortages that I have found so far in the blogging platforms it the whay how limited the stats-section actually are. With this I mean in their basic features. Yes, I know that one can install e.g. Google Analytics (GA) -tag to the CSS-template and start getting much richer data. But seriously – tell me an average blogger who would do this? Not even in Google’s Blogger the Analytics-part is well integrated into the system. Why could not Google make an limited, but blog customised version of their product available to all Bloggers? I think they should. Moreover, Google acquired last year Measure Map – the simple blog analytics suite. How about integrating this to Blogger & GA?

Experiment on online videos

One of the biggest phenomen during 1996 (ups, sorry meant 2006), was the breaktrough of YouTube and online video in general. For sure there are only few times in economic history that a company which only after selling its company for 1,5 billion dollars can start thinking: “Hmm, what is our business model”. YouTube is an incredible “incarnation” of the whole web 2.0 topic. We create to us – organised anarchy becomes mainstream.

To experiment this, I registered to YouTube and created an sister -blog for this one. I will try to nearly daily look at YouTube and similar services and post my collection to the blog. You can see this also as an additional widget in the right column of this blog. Feel free to comment either to the Blogger-based video blog or directly to this main blog for our trial.

In my first postings I discuss e.g. “the 15-min of fame phenomena” through the weird media phenomen of Finland, Olli Hokkanen. Check it out!

Search of the perfect personal portal

Ever since Netscape launched its “My Netscape“-portal in the 1990s, I’ve been testing with various intervals the status of the so-called “personal portals”. Must say that during the last few years, the trend has been very positive – we can really talk about personalisation, when I can really choose my own information sources from the sites that follow and create usable and readable user interface to consume the content.

In my current screening I am testing the following services:

• Netvibes: Real web 2.0 start-up, strong personalisation features and well networked in the online domain
• MS Live: Microsoft’s Live portal, with a lot of localised content feeds, pretty windows/MS like UI and feeling to use
• My Google: Google’s personalised search with lot of content, yet somewhat messy, pretty neat gadgets and networking to the online community, I like also the integration to my Google usage
• My Yahoo: Yahoo’s my section, crowded with content, layout very Yahooish = busy, currently in my opinion one of the weakest Yahoo offerings
• Newsgator: Happened to acquire in 2004 the FeedDemon-client for my RSS-feeds, now this is integrated to the Newsgator portal. Simple and straightforward for feed handling
• Bloglines: web 2.0 -pioneer in feeds and personal blogging, UI very techy, but efficient, somewhat still stuck to style of 2005, should renew its usablity

Are you Google or Yahoo?

Being veeerrrry much into web 2.0 I started uploading my pictures to web-albums some time ago. Google now has Picasa Web Albums to which I signed up. Really nice service if you ask me. It is a tad less ’social’ since there is no public listing of photo-albums of people and you cannot search it but it is really nice if you want to have your online album and share it with people. One of the cool features is that not all photo’s are public. You can make private albums and invite people to look at them. A colleague of mine wanted to share his wedding pictures but he didn’t want the whole world to see them. Using Flickr this is not possible (or at least not that I know of) so Picasa Web Albums would be a good option. With Flickr you can only limit the sharing of photo’s to other Flickr user who are your contacts. But this forces people to have a Flickr account (e.g. a Yahoo account) in order to see my photo’s. Guys, wake up! Do you really think my mom has a Flickr account? I am glad to see that Google understands me better…;-) It seems that in the world of web2.0 you are forced to be either me2.0_yahoo or me2.0_google…..or even me2.0_microsoft…

Starting a blog for my family

A while ago I bought a domain name my wife’s family. I bought it at speednames.com. The nice thing is that I can create email aliases for all family members which is kind of cool. It also allows me to configure a web site. At the time I had no specific idea what to with it….to be decided later I guess.

However, when I went to visit my family during new year’s eve, I thought it could be an idea to configure a blog for it. That way we can write some stuff on the family gathering and perhaps it can also be a way to keep in touch later on. The idea sounds nice but I still have to see if my family members will use it…after all they are not all so web 2 as I am!!!!

And so I did. I created a blog using blogger. Why? Don’t know, it was the first thing that came to my mind and considering it is now owned by Google I thought it would probably be ok. So in a stroke of impulsiveness I created the blog and wrote the first posting. The creation process was excellent, no difficult questions and you are up and running in less than five minutes. Good job.

Flickr-connection

I was just playing around the Flickr-widget available here at WordPress. It is really a nice feature to embed images to the blog. What I needed to do was to set up an Flickr-account and then link it to this blog. Trick requires some internet knowledge, but should not be a showstopper for any online user.

Practicalities:
Photos were taken with Nokia N70 mobile phone and uploaded to a PC via Bluetooth connection. Then I uploaded them from the PC to the just-created Flick -account (satamadesign).The widget was activated by taking the RSS-feed address from the Flick-account data and inputting it to the field in the widget management menu.

Comment:
Probably one of the most relevant web 2.0 linkages one can make. Gives boost to the sharing of own pictures. Typical use situation would be to share e.g. family events with relatives.

Web 2.0-kick-factor:
Using this trick, your family and friends see that you; 1) have a digital camera, 2) are capable of uploading the imagery taken with it; 3) are nicely connected to digital lifestyle – you have your photos on-line and share them.

Risks and challenges:

• As always with images – having low quality pictures that no-one has interest to view. (wedding/birthday slide show or video dilemma)
• Messing up with the log-in -process and linking process of the blogs.
• Linking PC and mobile phone can sometimes be a pain – Bluetooth does not always work as it should.
• Setting this up is somewhat nerdy – requires knowledge of e.g. RSS-feeds