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

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!

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.

WordPress as the blogging platform choice

Ok, this is the initial post of for this site. To run the experiment, we needed a location in which our thoughts could be published. We wanted this not to be hosted by our IT colleagues at Satama. Instead, we wanted the situation to be as similar as possible to the one consumers are faced with: obtaining a quality service for minimal investment and with the maximum amount of features.

Choices that we found out and also our initial comments on them:

• WordPress: Empowering this blog and many others – we decided to aggregate our experiences here to previous experiences. WP has easy and solid statistics in it and nice customisation tools for the widgets.
• Live Spaces: Microsoft’s blogging platform – links nicely to LiveID. Yet, current stats give little information about the users and their behaviour.
• Blogger: The pioneer in blogging, new version in beta. Still decided just to try this, not to publish on it due to limited extension capabilities.
• Typepad: Probably the most robust and feature-rich blogging platform. Yet, business model is subscription-based and thus did not suit our usage.
• Yahoo Blog: Very basic blogging tool, connected to Yahoo ID.
• Blog.co.uk (or its country sites): German challenger for the blog scene

Yes, there are more in the markets- but tell us – what are your favourite blogging platforms and why?