Mark Maher interviewed me on this experiment. Sorry for not posting for a while – all too much of project work. Maybe this actually is the key challenge for internet industry professionals in their upgrade process to new things: so limited time and so many new things to learn.

Anyway, more to to be written soon. My trial on using Shozu and moblogging tool has been very nice. I like the tool a lot!

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…

This application used to be called ‘writely’ before Google acquired it. There are other similar alternatives such as Ajaxwrite , Zoho writer and no doubt that Yahoo is also working on one, as is Microsoft with their Live program. I checked out both alternatives as well and they are actually very similar. All allow you to write simple documents and apply very limited formatting. The nice thing is that it stores all the documents online, as part of your Gmail account or similar. So you always can access your documents…but so can Google which will scare-off all the privacy freaks. Having my documents as part of my account is rather cool but then I’ll see it as a ‘web drive’.

The disappointing aspect is that Google Docs is very basic. It is more like Notepad on steroids than anything else. Exporting to other formats works but it is very limited and even styles do not get carried over correctly. One good feature is the spelling checker which actually works. I would say there is no immediate threat to Office 2007…..it will take a while

Besides the fact that I am impressed technically speaking that it is possible to create word processor in HTML, I wonder if there is really a market for such web applications now that the whole world is using MS Word. Before Google Docs or any other wordprocessor reaches the level where Word documents can be edited and save with all features such as inserting images, drawings, styles, and so on, we’ll be living a couple of years ahead. When Word becomes available in XAML, one of the other technological promises of Microsoft, the need for HTML based applications is largely gone.

For the time being it is a good alternative for people who write simple documents and want to have access to them everywhere. But it is not more than that I am afraid…perhaps you’d better continue with installing Office 2007 now! All in all, wow-factor: 5/10

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

Option 2: Sending e-mail to service e-mail addresses

Nearly all blogging platforms allow to send posts to them via e-mail. And nearly all modern mobile phones support e-mailing. Thus – logical option would be to send an e-mail to the blog. Tried it with TypePad and worked initially very fine. Then the to some weird reason the images did no longer go through. No idea why. Repeated the same trial with Live Spaces. This worked fine. One stupidity of Nokia’s design popped up with this trial. With otherwise great basic phone 6280 one cannot send bigger attachments than 100k. An 2mpx camera photo averages to 350k with this device. Right. PLEASE NOTE: E-mail apps on mobiles can use quite a lot of mobile data = costs euros. Wow-factor: 6/10, practical and easy to understand.

Option 3: Using mobile versions of online media services

E.g. Flickr offers a quite slick version of its service for online image consumption and uploading. Yet, using it is a painful mobile browser experience (as all usage of mobile browsing). Worked fine, works with any phone with a wap-browser, thus ok solution, not recommended to daily usage. Wow-factor: 4/10

Option 4: Using downloadable mobile client to connect to services

The more I use services on my mobile, the more I believe in the power of client-ware on the mobile. It is totally different to leverage the power of the mobile phones processor instead of being dependant on the browser or the Java2ME-limitations in the phone. Thus, I wanted to scan for small apps I could use to connect to online services and start posting my images and videos. Below are some options:

• Nokia LifeBlog: Lifeblog is probably the most underleveraged mobile application that I have had in my phone. It looks great, has a great use case, is especially in PC a great application. It’s usage and UI was somewhat iPhoneish already in 2004, with bubbles etc. Yet, time has passed and Lifeblog has never reached the popularity it could had. Lifeblog connects to TypePad, but did not bother to try this – too complex for long term usage, must say. Wow-factor: 6/10 (mobile), 7/10 for PC application
• Yahoo to Go: Yahoo to Go is a collection of application that allow me have Yahoo’s selected service on my mobile. The application extends very nicely my N70’s capabilities and hooks e.g. to Yahoo mail on the background. Moreover, it adds “Send to Yahoo”-kind of options to phone’s menus. On the media front, the app supports currently only Yahoo Photos. As this service is “to be redesigned and launched” at the moment, user experience not that good. Yet, the mobile search was very well done. Wow-factor: 8/10 (mobile solution), 6/10 (mobile media integration to online)
• ShoZu: Via Flickr I found the great piece of software called Shozu. In my opinion, this application nearly has it now what it takes to be “Mobile web 2.0-empowered“. It has 1) both Java and Symbian-versions of it (=available to most phones); 2) a great idea for managing “connections” to own services – services are managed online and connections then synchronised to the mobile; 3) usable and intuitive interface on the mobile; 4) a nice pre-set of web 2.0 services available to connect into and customise; 5) support for nearly all main blogging platforms and finally 6) capability to add tags and title to images and videos. Thus, with this application I was finally able to post my initial mobile video to YouTube and also use the same application to post images to blogs, Flickr etc. Wow-factor: 9,5/10, UI could always be better
• ZoneTag: Yahoo Research is distilling a proto of their Geotagging service for Flickr. In comparison to ShoZu, this application has an unique feature. It adds automatically the geo-data from connected GPS device or also via the Cell-ID from the mobile telco’s network. Very similar idea to CellSpotting, but much more relevant than just spotting. Moreover, the application proposes immediately after photo-shooting to post the image to Flickr. Really handy feature. Wow-factor: 8,5/10 (UI could be much better, yet, this is a yet proto.

I bet there are multiple more choices for this kind of mobile connections and more applications to evaluate from. Yet, for me the one that I will start using from now on is ShoZu. It really gives me the feeling of being ready to “broadcast” from my mobile. Yet, am I ready in my head to convert my behaviour to be “immediate blogger” – well that’s another issue. At the moment, I feel that there are still some steps to be taken towards this. Yet, will reach there… hopefully

Comments, experiences etc. very much welcome on this!

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?

Anyway, the question that I posed in the title was about web analytics being part the web 2.0 phenomena. I try to discuss it here a bit more in detail:

“Yes – web analytics is part of web 2.0″

• WA broke mainstream in 2005 – so did web 2.0 – thus it is part of web 2.0.
• Modern internet is all about understanding internet lifestyle – essential part of this is using statistics
• Every business and brand are starting to use WA as part of their next generation web sites – thus WA is web 2.0
• No-one can no longer be in control of the massive flow of internet users. Web analytics gives better control over this and thus is important for any web 2.0 – enthusiastic to master
• Web 2.0 is about empoworing consumers – what could be a better way to do this than empowering the citizen journalists with tools that in the past were barely available to incumbent media giants

Argument for: “No – it is different phenomena”

• Web 2.0 is all about networking users – what does stats got to do with this?
• Web 2.0 is about allowing consumers to connect to interesting and new sources and people- it is much more important to look at how this can be done instead spending time on crunching data.
• There is already too much of “big brothering” going on – why should we get more of this? Are we loosing all the spontanity in connecting to others?

As you can read between the lines, I am in favour of that web analytics is an essential part of web 2.0. We are more are more into knowing transparently how much readers each “publication” attracts. Many heavy-bloggers even let their readers to log-in straight to their analytics tools. Calvinistic approach, “I have nothing to hide, look from here”, prevails in this genre. Think if we were able to look publicly at e.g. New York Times’s usage data. Media transparency or what?

Anyway, please let us know about your experiences in using web stats/analytics in your web 2.0 cases? What makes you tick on them? Or are they in your opinion totally useless systems, targeted only for corporations? Comments welcome!

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!

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

Practicalities:
Setting up an personal portal is nowadays very easy. Just select from pre-defined “components” and “widgets” the once you prefer and there you are … fed content updates automatically and very nicely content feeds can categorised by using Excel-like tabs/pages. Portal can be constantly refined and more and more websites and blogs include buttons that help to included the site into the personal portal – handy! Moreover, some portals can nicely accept my feed-lists as OPML-files and include them into the my sources.

Comments:
Personally I used to be in favour of the client server-model for news reading. I wanted to download the content into my laptop and then browse through it when the timing was appropriate. Also I used to like to store interesting data snippets to my pc and my networks drives. With the the modern information overload, this approach does not work any more. Only way for me to stay up-to-date on news is to have personal “dashboards” to content that I prefer to read and the modify this dashboard accordingly.
Web 2.0-kick-factor:
World of web 2.0 would not be possible without RSS-feeds. They are for the area as essential than SMSing is for the mobile telecoms and mobile messaging. To really benefit of the power of these, personal portals can be of major use. Using these will replace immediately having an opening page to e.g. to BBC, Helsingin Sanomat, YLE, Zibb, DeTelegraaf etc. Bookmarking and having media company as gatekeeper was and is sooooo web 1.0. Thus – if one want to be web 2.0, in my opinion, an excellent starting point is to start leveraging feeds integrated into the preferred personal portal.

Risks and challenges:

• Finding the most relevant news sources to follow
• Having the courage and stamina to develop own portal – not always a nice job to do
• Integrating bookmarks into the personal portal – not even in 2007, all the main sites have RSS-feeds to leverage – thus it is not easy to integrate all bookmarks into the portal. Moreover, synchronising the browser to the portal is still an emerging field. I will get back to this challenge later in this blog.
• Managing multiple logins to the multiple universes. As Martijn has written earlier in this blog – world of logins is exploding over control. It is really difficult to remember what login belongs to what service and what content was added to what portal… good ideas in helping to cope with this challenge are welcome!

Outcome:
For the time-being, my favourite personal portal is Netvibes. I prefer it because of 1) its space-efficient UI, 2) very nice catalogue of pre-defined feeds and gadgets, 3) independence of main providers (G, M & Y); 4) its solid spread over the blogsphere, Netvibes-buttons are all over the place and, finally, 5) because of the quick-read-feature for feed, no need to jump to the site our of the portal. Yet, the key question is – what it the real business model of Netvibes – who will buy it? Google or Yahoo? Or a media company? Meanwhile, I will keep on testing and enjoying Moreover, if you have similar experiences with the mentioned or additional personal portal, feel free to comment here below, thanks!

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…

Since now we are talking about photo’s let me share one with you guys. After all, in the web 2.0 world it should be a piece of cake to add my Google Picasa photo in this blog. Let’s give it a try. WordPress presents a box with an image upload service and image browser. I am not going to use that because that wouldn’t be very me2.0. So I’ll link to the image in my public album. But how do you do that? WordPress also gives me a bottom “insert image”. Let’s try that. Hmm, I need to set a URL. What could it be? I open up Picasa Web Albums and go to the image I want to insert. At the right of the photo I see a link called “add to blog” so I click on that. It then shows me HTML code to insert!!!!! Aaargh, this is back to the stone-ages! Ok, so I switch the the “code” view in WordPress and try to insert the HTML. Here we go:

Yep, I see the picture now. It is the iMax theatre in Valencia by the way. Really cool building. The only bummer is that the image is too small now. I want it to be as wide as the text column is. So I select the image and hit the “edit image” button. But in that settings window I have to set the number of pixels. Hmm, is there an other way? I notice the image has scaling “handles” now that I have selected it. Let’s try that. Whaooh, that works nice! The only thing is that the editor window in WordPress is wider that the actual width in the posting. So I need to try it a couple of time until it is about right. Guys, how about adding an option “text width” as a size option? In the end, I notice that the image looks badly scaled. Apparently Picasa only give a fixed size thumbnail so if I re-size it goes crappy….pfff.

Since I also use Blogger I thought that would be nicely integrated with Picasa since they are both Google product. But alas, not a tad better, expect for the image size options I mentioned in my previous posting….I guess it shouldn’t be that hard to add a Flickr or Picasa image browser functionality in a blog platform? Next time, I’ll tell you more about my photo album experiences.

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.

In general I am still happy with my choice, but let me tell you about some first experiences based on one week of usage:

• After creating the blog it puzzled me how you actually log in!!! At the top of the page there is a bar with a link called “sign in” but that only takes you to the blogger homepage. At the top right corner you see this:
  …Huh? What do you mean with “new blogger” ??? I just created one!!! Anyway, I figured that I probably was a new blogger since I signed up using my gmail. So I clicked on it and I see this:
  
  Ok, I get it…and finally I am logged in. But why does it have to be so COMPLICATED??? Clicking on the “sign in” link could have showed my my Google account based login since blogger can know I am one of those and I could have logged in without even leaving my blog!!!! Arrrgh…I guess it is those marketing guess that want to force me to see the blogger homepage. Rather chanceless if you ask me. If my task is to log in, I will not waste any time in looking what is on the blogger homepage. I will log in and that’s it!!! The really bad thing is that WordPress which we are using here does exactly the same….:-(
• The second thing I noticed concerns uploading images. Inserting images works really well in blogger. Simply click on the insert image button and you can upload an image. WordPress is not that smart in this area. Anyway, I upload the image and I am then asked what size it should be. Seems a logical questions and the options are small, medium or large. Ok, but how large is large? Is that the full width of the article space? It doesn’t say anywhere so I simply give it a try…..aaaaaand…no it is not the full width. Why on earth would I like a large image that is about 20 pixels less than the maximum width? I also tried small and medium and I still can’t figure out how big that is….they are different sizes for sure but that is about it.
• So I am able to insert images so I plunder my collection and add five images. I insert the first image, type some text with it, hit return and then insert the next image. Guess what happens? It is placed at the top of my article and not where my cursor is? Aaaaargh. So I thought I’d move it down to where the cursor is. That doesn’t work since the editing window is supersmall and dragging didn’t work as expected. So I had to switch to HTML view and do it manually……my wife wouldn’t be able to do that…
• Now comes the worst of all……my upload pictures look like crap!!! The colors are all wrong and they look very pale…if I click on the picture I get the original which looks perfectly ok. Apparently, blogger is trying to be clever and convert my images to an optimal size….but it fucks up the colours along the way…:-( The saddest thing of all is that I had already optimized my pictures manually in Photoshop…
• But then I needed to invite my other family members! And yes, you have guessed it….none of them was using a Gmail account. So I first have to send an invite to them using the argument that they do not have to use Gmail, they only need the username & password combination for logging in. I know many dislike Microsoft for trying to solve the “I have too many usernames and passwords” problem with Microsoft Passport. But the world really needs something like that. I am getting absolutely mad with all these sites that require me to sign up. I have a file on my desktop with all my usernames and passwords for all sites. I have about 40 of them now….please let somebody figure out a solution for this!!!

Anyway, my family is happy and they enjoy the site. Now let’s see if they also start writing something….

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

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?