Notepad on steroids or Office 2007 replacement?

Google just introduced ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘. Since I am a ‘googler’ I had to try it out. This will probably be the next big thing, right? Although I had just installed Office 2007 on my computer I coudn’t wait to see what would replace it! So, after rushing to Google and signing-in I started to write my first document, this posting actually. At first you see a lean and mean interface, good I thought. Then I got the creeps, hang on, maybe this is all there is! To give you an idea, this is what it looks like…

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?

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

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?