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?

Towards web 2.0 lifestyle

Welcome all to follow our experiment. We are two digital media industry professionals that have both worked in the industry for close to ten years. This blog will be a diary of our joint trial to upgrade ourselves to the requirements of the “web 2.0 lifestyle”.

What do we mean by this?

To be short, most the gurus and visionaries talking about the web 2.0 praise the revolutionary character of it. Most of the experts are very positive and open about their beliefs of the phenomena. Yet, very rarely we have found anyone talking and discussing about :

1. What kind of things should one carry out to “live” like web 2.0 philosophy calls for?
2. What are the challenges for consumers (esp. the mass market) to adopt to the “new user-driven internet”?
3. Practical hints and discussions on the “web 2.0 upgrade” for existing industry professionals i.e. the ones who were also there at the time of web 1.0.

We decided to make this design experiment to upgrade ourselves to the new era. Also we want to be as open as possible and boost discussions within others in the cyberspace about ideas and experiences in these issues.

Please feel welcome to read, to comment and to guide us to this new world!

Tommi & Martijn