Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category
chilipod 1-13: Mxit August 17th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present my interview with Mxit’s Herman Heunis. There has been quite a bit of talk about how secure/insecure Mxit is for children specifically. In this interview Herman sets the record straight and points out that the challenge isn’t Mxit but rather users’ tendency to give out too much information about themselves and this is what leads to the attacks every parent fears.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
herman heunis, mxit, privacy
Posted in Devices, People, Sharing, Telecoms, Tools, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (1)
chilibean on Jaiku and Flickr July 10th, 2007
You may notice an addition to the sidebar on this blog. I have created a Jaiku channel for chilibean content.
The channel will update as new content is published to a number of sites including the chilibean blog and a new chilibean group on Flickr which I just set up for photos of anything to do with chilibean media. At the moment there are photos from the WebPR+ conference a while ago. The Flickr Group is open to any one to join so please feel free to submit photos of events which we attend or organise or anything that is relevant to chilibean and our quest to promote new media.
I’d like to add other content feeds that have to do with chilibean too so drop me a line and let me know if you have a chilibean related content feed I can add to the Jaiku channel.
In a way this is an experiment with a new communication channel. Jaiku has the benefit of being mobile as well as Web-based and its ability to aggregate a number of feeds and content streams makes it a great short form aggregator. It is a bit like a specialised feed aggregator and microblogging platform for a specific topic. As I write this I have added the chilibean blog feed (which should contain the podcasts we publish as well as the blog content), a feed from the Flickr group, a Technorati keyword search feed for the term “chilibean” as well as a feed for an Amatomu search on the term “chilibean”. In time I’d like to add del.icio.us feeds as well as other feeds which chilibean features in with a view to providing a single channel of chilibean related content which subscribers can scan at a glance and then click through to anything of interest.
If you would like to subscribe to the channels feed, click here. You can also subscribe to the channel on the Jaiku page by adding the channel to your list of contacts/channels.
Technorati Tags:
jaiku, channel, #chilibean, flickr group, content stream, feeds
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
Ready to Pownce? July 7th, 2007
Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) and some of his friends/colleagues have unveiled their previously top secret project and it is a service called Pownce. At first glance it looks a lot like certain other services I have spoken about here before:
When I first heard about Pownce I was somewhat sceptical. It seemed like an effort to piggyback off the success of Twitter and Jaiku (to a lesser extent). As with the Twitter/Jaiku debate there is no clear winner unless you are very specific about your requirements. For starters, Pownce has a different focus to Twitter or Jaiku even though it has a Twitter/Jaiku-style interface:
Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more.
Twitter is about answering the question, what are you doing? Jaiku is about status updates, presence, mobile presence and sharing via content aggregation. There is definitely some overlap but neither Twitter or Jaiku enable users to send files or event notifications quite like Pownce and for those users who want to be able to do that, it makes sense to use Pownce.
There are other similarities. Like Jaiku, Pownce allows for replies to posted items and what I like about the replies is that there are available through a link and not simply posted as and when they come in via the normal stream. There is also a star based rating system (you can see the Digg roots coming through) for each post. The reply handling is pretty nifty. Jaiku does a decent job of the comments although they are still presented in the main stream so it can be overwhelming if there are a number of comments to a number of posts. The rating thing is just a bit of extra fluff.
Another great tidbit is the availability of a feed for Pownce notes although the feed includes public friends’ notes as well. Jaiku handles feeds better because it gives you a combined feed for your posts as well as your friends’ posts and is also gives you a separate feed for your own posts exclusively.
Pownce gives users more privacy options and you can choose who gets to see what information about you and emanating from you. Here it becomes similar to Facebook’s privacy options and that really comes in handy because Twitter and Jaiku don’t really have the privacy options (Jaiku allows you to hide posts from the public or display them) Pownce provides if that stuff is important to you.
There is also a desktop client that runs on Adobe’s new AIR platform (you need to install AIR and then the desktop client). You can see what the whole system is based on and who the team members are right here.
At the moment there is no mobile or IM interface for Pownce (given the way it works, I am not sure a decent IM experience is possible although I can see a mobile client for Pownce working out). Pownce doesn’t have the aggregation features of Jaiku or the single-minded focus of Twitter which has been a big contributor to its success. As far as status messages go, I just don’t see the point moving over to Pownce. Where I do see the appeal is in the file sharing and possibly the event management posts. Those could come in handy if your friends are all on board. I haven’t mentioned that there is a link post option in Pownce too but given del.icio.us and the same function on my tumblelog, this feature doesn’t really rate a mention.
As I type this I can see how Jaiku will pretty much cover Pownce’s bases as far as content sharing goes, bearing in mind that I tend to upload my content to YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr and then share that content. On the other hand if you want to just send a file to someone without bothering with the uploads to other services and where your email client won’t handle the file size (you can upload up to 10 MB with the free Pownce service - there is a “pro” version where you can send files up to 100 MB) then Pownce is once again for you.
As with other services, one way to decide whether you want to use it is to try it out. At the moment access is by invitation only and it turns out I have a few invitations available so send me an email if you would like one. First come, first served! Then let me know what you think?
Technorati Tags:
pownce, jaiku, twitter, file sharing, events, kevin rose
Posted in Blogging, Tools | Comments (2)
Wibble: hosted blogging for business July 7th, 2007
There is a new hosted blogging service in the market called Wibble. I had an opportunity to sit with Laurian from Wibble to chat about their new hosted blogging solution for business. The idea with Wibble is to provide businesses that don’t have blogs of their own a service which they can use to publish a blog for their business on Wibble. The service is intended for people who are not necessarily veteran bloggers, who want a web presence and who don’t mind having their blog hosted on Wibble’s servers. Hosted blogs range from R3 000 and this generally includes an end to end service for their clients ranging from corporate identity to the development of a specially designed blog. Advertisers can also place banner ads on the site range from around R3 000 or so.
Wibble is a cross industry service and will cover tech, business, lifestyle, entertainment, sport, news and politics and reviews. I see it as competing with web hosting/development companies who would usually do all of this work for their clients. Obvious challenges for Wibble will come from services like WordPress.com and Blogger which enable users to quickly and easily set up a blog and customise it within minutes with a range of theming options. Of the two I see Blogger posing a bigger challenge mainly because Blogger allows users to edit the html of the pages whereas WordPress.com is more restrictive.
I do have one suggestion from a branding perspective and that is to allow users to use their own domains rather than the existing domain name structure which is something like http://wibble.co.za/hosted/COMPANYNAME. I think this is an important feature and could dissuade potential clients from using the service. At the very least a domain name like http://COMPANYNAME.blogger.com or http://COMPANYNAME.wordpress.com is somewhat less cumbersome than Wibble’s existing domain name structure. My sense is that the service provider should be as transparent as is possible and should allow the client’s brand and site to be the most, if not only, visible thing.
That being said this is a pretty interesting concept and I am looking forward to seeing how the service works out. One thing for sure is that it focuses attention on developing a social media-based platform for clients rather than the usual web site and it will distinguish Wibble from web designers/developers still rooted in Dreamweaver and the late 1990s.
I am hoping to get together with Laurian and interview her and her partner Craig fairly soon. There is a social media consulting side to Wibble as well and I think it will be beneficial to hear about this from them directly.
Technorati Tags:
wibble, hosting, blog service, blogging, hosted service, social media, domain name structure
Posted in Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
WebPR+ Conference: Rob Stokes’ first session (part 1 of 2) June 24th, 2007
In this fourth episode of the WebPR+ conference podcast, we present the first part of Rob Stokes’ first session. This is the first part of three two in which Rob talks about “Online Reputation Management”.
The WebPR+ conference was held on Friday, 2 March 2007 at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways. It was presented and hosted by Quirk eMarketing. This podcast series is sponsored by Quirk eMarketing and is produced by chilibean media.
If you would like to have your event recorded and distributed as a podcast, we will be happy to assist you. Drop us a line with your contact details and we will get right back to you. The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
rob stokes, quirk, webpr+, online reputation management, reputation management, chilivents, chilipod
Posted in People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Facebook as the platform June 7th, 2007
I have heard and read snippets that have clarified Facebook’s ambitions in my mind with the Facebook Platform. I heard a mention in some or other podcast I listened to in the last few days about how Facebook aims to be the operating system of the Web and it didn’t really make all that much sense to me until I read this post on Everything is Miscellaneous which talks about how Hot or Not (a dating/rating site) recently changed its model from being a fee-based service to being free. James Hong, the founder of Hot or Not made an interesting comment which helped me make the connection. He said:
“If I were starting from scratch today, I’d built on Facebook, not the Web.”
That is a really interesting comment to make because it implies that there could be a further layer on top of the Web as we know it in the form of Facebook or some other similar service which becomes the Windows/Mac OS/Linux of the Web and on top of which developers can develop their applications for the benefit of the community that makes use of the platform service.
Facebook, for example, is massive and the addition of these various applications to the list of available applications on Facebook has proven to be a tremendous opportunity to explosive growth for developers of popular applications on Facebook. Just as you can run 3rd party applications on your Windows/Mac OS or Linux computer, you can run a variety of applications on Facebook and if you add the social nature of Facebook to the mix, social applications like the Hot or Not Hotlists are primed for success. The Hotlists apparently reached 1 million views per day in just 4.5 days on Facebook, hence Hong’s comment above.
Put another way, here is a platform with a specific context and and a ready market for relevant applications. Wow!
Technorati Tags:
facebook platform, applications, facebook, operating system, Web, hot or not, hotornot, hotlists, james hong
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (1)
IMified acquires Feedcrier and intensifies focus on IM May 15th, 2007
I spoke a bit about IMified and the shift to IM (instant messaging) as a communications focal point in chilipod episode 6. Well, IMified has just acquired Feedcrier which translates RSS into IM. According to TechCrunch:
Imified plans on integrating the RSS alerts to its current list of IM services, calling them “Imified Alerts”. Users will also be able to get updates through IM enabled phones and Imified’s widget.
Mashable points out that IMified’s strategy is focussed on more mobile, presence-based applications which is where this whole thing becomes a lot more exciting because, aside from RSS alerts being delivered to your IM client, “they’ll be focused on presence-based alerts that can be forwarded to your mobile phone via sms”.
The IMified blog post about the acquisition speaks a little more about the direction IMified will be taking:
Through this acquisition, IMified will make use of Feedcrier’s rock solid bot platform and super-fast feed alerting technology to offer a complete IM based solution for interacting with web services and presence based alerting. While we’re still working out our integration strategy, I can tell you that we’ve got some really cool features coming down the road. Besides the obvious ability for users to subscribe to real-time feed alerts, developers will be able to use our new API to push alerts to widget subscribers. With this new alert platform, we plan on offering presence-based alerts that will have the option of being forwarded to your mobile phone via sms. Speaking of mobile phones, we’re working on HTTP enabling your IMified menu so you can interact with IMified on your mobile browser.
IM’s reach is extending from your desktop and your laptop to your mobile device and while this is already quite something, when you consider how many services are starting to focus on presence (like IMified and Jaiku, for example) the mobile space is going to become pretty dynamic. Of course the excitement builds even more when you toss in GPS functionality like the kind you find in the new Nokia N95 …
Technorati Tags:
imified, feedcrier, presence, mobile, rss, alerts, nokia n95, jaiku
Posted in Devices, Feeds, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
Microblogging: fast, simple ways to get your thoughts out there May 2nd, 2007
There are a couple tools I see as “microblogging” tools on the Web today. To me microblogs are platforms where you can post small posts or links (I would include link blogs in this category) as opposed to full blog posts with categories and a more developed thought process. There are a couple microblogging tools available at the moment and what I find really interesting is that not all of these tools work the same way and seem to collectively bridge the gap between a simple bookmark posting (a la del.icio.us) and what we have become accustomed to seeing on blogs. So a simple microblog entry would be a del.icio.us post which could look like this on my del.icio.us page:
or, if you see this post on a blog it would look something like this:
That is pretty simple stuff. The link is to a site I found interesting or worth bookmarking and I may even include a note about the link with my thoughts on the link or a description of the item linked to. There is a similar type of microblogging service that answers the question “What are you doing?”. This is a more personal form of microblogging because you are talking about things that interest you or that you are doing in a given moment. The posts are pretty simple and the focus is on keeping it short. There are two good examples of this. The first is Twitter and a typical Twitter post would look something like this:
What Twitter adds is a more immediate form of interaction with other Twitter users because the updates come in so quickly (just about as soon as they are posted if everything is working) and users can respond to each other, making Twitter a form of public chatroom in a way. There is scope for a del.icio.us-type service because you can pretty much post about whatever you want, including links. Now Jaiku takes Twitter a step further (actually Jaiku was launched before Twitter even though Twitter rose to prominence before Jaiku did) and enables users to add external feeds to their Jaiku stream and to comment on each other’s posts:
Neither Twitter or Jaiku can really be seen as true blogging services (although Jaiku is pretty close). They are almost like a del.icio.us for your personal life with each post representing a bookmark in your day. I started using Tumblr the other day (I had heard quite a bit about it and thought I’d give it a try). Tumblr is a tumblelog service which, according to Wikipedia is:
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.
The term “tumblelog” was coined by Why the lucky stiff in a blog post on April 12th, 2005, while describing Anarchaia.
Jason Kottke described tumblelogs on October 19th, 2005:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
Here is a screenshot from my tumblelog on Tumblr:
My Tumblr blog is a pretty simple one and at the moment it works in a similar way to my Jaiku feed in that I had added feeds from some of the sites and services I use to my tumblelog so what you see in this screenshot for the posts that were published on Monday are a Twitter post, two del.icio.us links (in red) and part of a post I published here on chilibean about the 27 Dinner held last Friday. Tumblr users can also post images, video and text posts to their tumblelogs (and I imagine similar services allows a similar set of postings). A tumblelog looks a lot like a conventional blog and yet it works much the same was as other microblogging services (and even aggregates them).
Each of these tools is designed to facilitate sharing in a simpler and faster way than a normal blog. Typically a conventional blog requires a bit of thought and posts tend to be anything from a paragraph or so to a few hundred words. Each of these microblogging tools enable you to publish a thought, a link or a snippet of content to the Web pretty quickly and simply without having to worry too much about dedicating time to a full post. These are the posts you do when you are catching a bus or train, sitting at a coffee shop waiting for a friend or grabbing a quick bite to eat during your lunch hour. Most of these services have a mobile element so you can publish a post from your mobile device. Not only are these microblogging platforms but they also become moblogging (mobile blogging) platforms too.
When you put all this together you start to see all these services come together to provide pretty comprehensive cover for your various publishing needs. You can now blog how you want, when you want and in the format you prefer.
Technorati Tags:
tumblelogs, tumblr, del.icio.us, twitter, jaiku, microblogging, moblogging
Posted in Blogging, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
chilipod episode 6: Web 2.0 Shifts April 25th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod, we take a look at the following topics:
- Web 2.0 Reality Bytes: Now that the honeymoon is over, is Web 2.0 a fad or here to stay?
- The shift away from email to instant messaging
References:
Email to IM
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Posted in Tools, chilipod | Comments (0)
Introducing Google’s Presently April 18th, 2007
Google is going to launch a presentation web app (which I believe is going to be called “Presently”) to complement its existing pseudo-Office offering in the form of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It announced the new addition to its Web-based productivity apps on the Google blog yesterday in a post titled “We’re expecting” (love the title!):
Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we’ve been dying to tell you about the bun we’ve got in the oven. We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.
The catalyst for this new offering was Google’s recent acquisition of Tonic Systems which is “a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools.”
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt made a point of arguing that Google was not out to challenge Microsoft’s own Office suite with its Web apps. He spoke to John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday about the new addition:
“We don’t think it’s a competitor to Microsoft Office,” Schmidt said. “It’s casual and sharing, and a better fit to how people use the Web. My guess is many companies in the audience are building products like this or other variants of this using the emerging architecture.”
Regardless of what Google may say, an offering including a word processor, spreadsheet app and now a presentation app is bound to give non-power users a pretty decent alternative to Microsoft’s well built and yet expensive Office suite. There is a preview of what you can expect from Presently on Garret Rogers’ blog on ZDNet, certainly from the perspective of support for the PowerPoint format.
For more about Presently (or whatever it will actually be called), take a look at these sources:
Technorati Tags:
google, presently, google docs & spreadsheets, google office, office, microsoft office
Posted in Applications, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)