Category: Blogging

  • Microblogging: Tiny Social Objects

    Jaiku’s Jyri Engestrom‘s recent presentation at reboot 9.0 orients successful social networks around ‘social objects’ – such as Flickr’s photos, del.icio.us’ bookmarks and MySpace’s music and five principles for building such services…

    • Define your {social} object.
    • Define your verbs.
    • Make your object sharable.
    • Turn invitations into gifts.
    • Charge the publishers not the spectators.

    All very useful (particularly for our own mee:view and Believr) though I don’t think its fair to write off non-social-object networks. However, the most interesting part of Jyri’s talk speculated on where future disruptive innovations in blogging may come from. Defining disruptions as either simpler, cheaper or more convenient, Jyri believes that blogging will trend from occasional (a post per week, a photo every day) to continuous (hourly micro-posts).

    This is clearly the continuous presence paradigm that Jaiku is pursuing and Twitter has dominated. Sadly, though Jaiku’s a much more elegant and refined service, with a ‘social object’ metaphor, it’s actually the people-oriented Twitter that is repidly evolving into a de-facto infrastructure for presence across all contexts.

  • Gelato CMS

    GelatoI’ve just spent the afternoon tinkering with Gelato CMS, a tumblogging application, kinda like an open source version of Tumblr.

    Apart from WordPress, I haven’t really played around much with installable web apps, so I’m patting myself on the back for successfully installing Gelato on MAMP!

    Gelato’s neat – as a simple tumblelog for sharing YouTube clips, URLs, quotes, pictures and MP3s, it works really well…though I had trouble importing chats from MSN Messenger.

    I’d like to see a plug-in that scraped my Flickr, del.icio.us, blog, Last.FM and YouTube posts to automagically write a tumblelog on my behalf…oh wait, that’s kinda what my Feedburner feed does!

    Though Gelato works well – I’m not sure I can find a use for it within my personal workflow…though I can see potential to integrate Gelato into a bunch of future projects.

    Incidentally, I grabbed the screenshot of my Gelato tumblelog using Paparazzi.

  • Blogger’s Guilt…

    So, it’s been almost two months since I posted for O’Reilly and Corante, so I figured I should pull my finger out…

    See you in October 😉

  • Corante: Mobile Messaging 2.0

    Mm2blogbanner_2
    I just finished up my first trio of posts for Corante and Airwide’s Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog

    I’ll also be covering the Global Messaging 2007 conference for Corante next week, in Monte Carlo 🙂

  • Crunched

    Sadly, the chain of events which led to Sam’s dismissal from TechCrunch UK continued to have repercussions that unfortunately overshadowed the conference itself…

    • Michael Arrington, proprietor of the CrunchNetwork decided to put TCUK on hold, locking out Sam, Mike Butcher and contributors like myself without any warning…though I later managed to recover my password, I figured it was impolite to continue posting!
    • Michael later posted his perspective on the events leading up to the dismissal and closure.
    • A few days later Mike butcher resigned as co-editor of TCUK.
    • Over the weekend, Loïc Le Meur posted his recollection of events and his response to criticisms of Le Web.
    • Yesterday, Natali Del Conti resigned from TechCrunch, partially due to the abusive comments surrounding these events.

    I have sympathy for Sam, Mike A and Mike B’s positions, more so for Natali…each seemed to face unfortunate choices. Le Meur however conducted himself appallingly; I’ve read reacted similarly to criticism last year too. This is a shame, he’s someone who appears to be quite likable and has great enthusiasm and energy – there was no need for his outburst; Sam was justified in his criticisms.

    In just three-and-a-half months, Sam and Mike B lifted TCUK from a standing start and located it at the centre of the UK tech scene. Those of us at the periphery, as contributors and writers, were planning to extend coverage and events around the UK, energising entrepreneurs and innovators wherever they existed. TCUK was doing good work and pretty much for free!

    TCUK was more than a brand and a blog, it was the sum total of relationships and trust developed by its contributors; that won’t dissipate…it’ll follow Sam and Mike to whatever they plan to do next. I hope TCUK will relaunch soon as well as Sam and Mike’s new venture – a competitive news landscape for the tech industry is healthy and neccessary.

    UPDATE: Sam and Mike are back on the air as Vecosys, tracking European statups…great news and I wish ’em both the best of luck. Unfortunately, the spat between Sam and Michael Arrington appears to be getting uglier and distracting from real industry news.

  • How Much Is My Blog Worth…

    Blogworth_1 …£ 5505! That’s more that I would’ve thought! So what’s the valuation on all those other blogs that I’ve written for…

    The figure for TCUK sounds pretty accurate – accounting for two co-editors as well as some overheads and expenses. You can find out more about the methodology here – calculated from Technorati data.

  • Pixel(un)box-ed

    Pixelbox2006_1Even though we stopped writing in July, I’m still a little sad that I’m closing up Pixelbox this evening, after two years, 500-odd posts and a modest 75’000 page views, averaging about 100/day. Pixelbox also ranked 611’863rd on Technorati.

    Pixelbox was France Telecom’s first public, corporate blog and a collaboration between Wanadoo’s Technology Research and Design departments. A team of fifteen design and innovation professionals chronicled their observations of the design industry, technological developments and the work of inspirational artists and design practitioners; kinda like a mini-Boing Boing for designers 🙂

    From Eddy’s long, serious political observations to Key’s perma-stream of microposts, it was a lotta fun seeing everyone trying to find their voice. Indeed, some contributor’s bonusses were tied to how much they posted. I’ve just spend the best part of a day, republishing my own contributions to my personal blog…I was just behind Rich and Key in volume of posts!

    Most of the team have moved on to launch po-bo, to bring together designers from what was Wanadoo and the existing mobile teams in Orange UK. Me? I’ll be leaving Orange in three days time – yay!

    Pixelbox is dead; long live po-bo!

  • Second Voice – Telephony In Virtual Worlds

    I just posted my first contribution to O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony blog; a short piece on how voice applications might be added to Second Life. I’m thinking about some more articles exploring…

    • how mobility is changing social+cultural patterns and how current products and services don’t really assist.
    • some commentary on mobile product design, framed around Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity and handset innovations such as DigitWireless & NeoKeys.
    • speculative stuff about use of mobiles as distributed sensors…

    Any more weird, left-field telephony ideas? Please lemme know 🙂

  • Battlestar Craptacular

    Battlestar Yesterday, SciFi channel debuted Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance, a series of ten ‘webisodes’ due to run twice weekly throughout September, prior to the premiere of BSG’s third season in October.

    I’m a huge fan of this show – the only SF show qualitatively on a par with the likes of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under – yet upon trying to watch the first webisode I was confronted with the message – We’re sorry but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location. Frak.

    Needless to say, YouTube, newsgroups and torrents are distributing the first two segments, despite region restrictions, but unfortunately without the consent of the producers….so much for digital rights/regions management.

    This is another short-sighted old media example of Imprisoning TV In Territories. SciFi Channel and the producers of BSG have learned nothing from the rabid piracy of this excellent show over the last two years. The Resistance should be helping to build buzz for the third season of BSG; why prevent non-US fans from seeing these webisodes when they could be marketing the show from their own blogs using services like YouTube!

    So on an anti-DRM tip, here’s webisode 2, due to debut tonight: