Archive for the ‘Useful stuff’ Category
Microblog upgrades August 30th, 2007
Jaiku users will be pleased to see that there are a couple handy additions to their Jaiku service. Many of these features have been requested many times and it is great to see them incorporated. For starters, the Jaiku IM service has been released to the masses. It runs on a Jabber platform so you can send and receive Jaikus using Google Talk or your preferred Jabber compatible IM client. This is one feature which Twitter has enjoyed for some time (even though it doesn’t always work) and which Jaiku users have been virtually begging for.
Other additions to the Jaiku service are focussed on the Jaiku site and include person and channel search (I have been asking for this for a while now and I am really glad it is finally here), a more streamlined Explore page which only shows new Jaikus. I really love the Google search results when you run searches for people or channels. The search results seem to be drawn from Google searches on the Jaiku site itself. Just the same, they add some balance to the results.
The Explore page also includes a side panel with the most active conversations on Jaiku at the time. Some of these conversations have quite a following and this is a fantastic way to generate and sustain buzz about a particular topic.
Of course Jaiku isn’t the only microblogging service to have revealed some upgrades. Twitter recently announced some handy new features. Twitter users now have a search function so they can find all their friends on Twitter and add them. This is aided by the ability to search through your Gmail contacts for Twitter users based on their email addresses. I tried this out and found a number of my contacts active on Twitter and I was able to add them all by clicking on a single link.
These additions have certainly enhanced my experience of both services, particularly Jaiku. The IM option is a great help because I can now spend less time on the Jaiku site posting updates (or running 3rd party software to do that) and I can use the tools I am already using to keep up to date and to keep my updates flowing.
Technorati Tags:
jaiku, twitter, upgrade, features, jabber
Posted in Blogging, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
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)
27 Dinner - July 2007 July 28th, 2007
Well, last night was the Joburg 27 Dinner and we had a pretty good time! The venue was new (to me at least), it was the M & A in Sandton in the Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs (or whatever the firm is actually called) building, opposite Netcare. I like the venue although everyone was pretty spread out. It is a great venue for networking and perhaps a little too big for talks and presentations.
That being said, we had great seats right by the projector so I was able to shoot these two videos of two of the speakers, Scott Gray (finally) and Duncan McLeod. The Scott Gray video was shot with my Nokia N73 and I am impressed with the image and sound quality.
I wasn’t able to do the same with the video of Duncan because the lighting was a bit low for my N73 so I used my still camera which was limited to clips of 3 minutes so this isn’t the whole talk. The image quality also isn’t that hot.
I have uploaded my photos to my Flickr account as well as to Facebook where you can view them on the 27 Dinner group.
I had another interesting chat with Merle from JoziKids who is doing some really interesting stuff there. I have a two part interview with her coming up in chilipod in the next week or so which I think will interest those of you who don’t have big advertising budgets.
Technorati Tags:
jozikids, merle dieterich, 27 dinner, photos, videos, scott gray, duncan mcleod
Posted in Events, People, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
WebPR+ Conference: Rob Stokes’ first session (part 2 of 2) July 15th, 2007
In this fifth episode of the WebPR+ conference podcast, we present the second part of Rob Stokes’ first session. This is the second part of 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 Events, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
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)
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)
27-5 May 28th, 2007
We had a great time at the 27 Dinner last night at the Primi in Rosebank. Most of the usual crowd was there as well as a number of new faces. The speakers last night included Colin Daniels from The Times, Erik Hersman (the White African and proprietor of the fine Afrigadget and African Signals sites, to name a few) and Vinny Lingham who gave us a demo of a new development platform called Synthasite which he will soon leave incuBeta to run as CEO.
Colin Daniels’ talk was about The Times and lessons learned about controversy on the Web (the David Bullard controversy led to a massive increase in traffic to the Sunday Times site, more than double its usual traffic according to a graph Colin showed us from Alexa). I managed to capture a short video clip from Colin’s talk:
The Zoopy guys were running a competition where people could upload videos and photos from the evening and win a cool digital video camera. I was hoping to upload my videos to Zoopy instead of Revver but there was an issue with the upload so I resorted to Revver instead. Sorry guys!
Erik Hersman was also around to chat to us a bit about his projects. He took us through some interesting opportunities that are made possible using the Jabber platform. There is a pretty interesting mashup involving Muti and Mxit which is an “example how you can use the mobile tools that are available right now to build into your applications.”
He even mentioned a post we published a little while ago which inspired him to come up with this item:
Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove chatted a little bit about his wifi hotspot product which enables you to re-sell your bandwidth and actually make some money from it. I am curious whether there are any terms in the terms and conditions that ISPs use that would prohibit the resale of bandwidth like this? If not then this would make so much sense in so many contexts where bandwidth could be shared at a low cost to the group of users in range. It would certainly help alleviate the high costs of bandwidth in South Africa.
All in all, the event was a lot of fun.
Thanks again to Mike and his team at Cerebra for organising the event.
Technorati Tags:
27 Dinner, 27dinner, primi, rosebank, henk kleynhans, erik hersman, white african, afrigadget, african signals, the times, colin daniels, vinny lingham, synthasite, zoopy, 27-5
Posted in Events, Fun, People, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
chilipod episode 7: Podcasting to your employees May 20th, 2007
In this week’s episode we include extracts from a talk given by Shel Holz at the Podcast Academy in September 2006. The talk was released under a Creative Commons Sampling 1.0 license. As you will hear from these extracts and, even more so from the full talk, there are a number of ways podcasts can be used as effective tools to communicate information to employees.
Just as we have preferences for how and when we consume our content, so to will your employees so it makes sense to give them information in a format that works best for them. This episode is really intended to be an introduction to how you can incorporate podcasts into your company’s communication strategy.
There is just as much scope to make use of podcasts as general communications tools for other stakeholders like investors, customers and the press. Feel free to drop us a line if you would like to explore some of the possibilities that may be appropriate for your business.
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:
shel holz, podcast to your employees, employees, podcasting, corporate communications, podcast academy, creative commons sampling license
Posted in Podcasting, Podcasts, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (0)
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)