This blog is about web 2.0, traditional media and advertising, how they affect each other and how they affect us (especially me). It is also about stuff I like such as art, design, animation, music and photography. what I feel like writing. Nothing written here should be taken too seriously...
Next week is the world’s renowned World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, where over 50.000 world experts in mobile technologies will meet and what will be presented there will have a worlwide impact.
Prices range from 599 € for visitors to 4.999 € for an all areas all events pass.
After trying to register twice without success with Firefox I switch to Safari and I get a nice “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris sem. Donec tincidunt pharetra urna.” when requesting my pass.
And this people own all my personal data!
11:23 Update: One hour trying to register and still without a pass. No luck with Firefox or Safari. Calling for help!
11:30 Update: Give up. My colleague Jordi Ramos from RAC1 radio will register me via phone. He’s been through the process yesterday.
12:32 Update: After Twittering about my problems, @soniagraupera from Fira de Barcelona forwards this post to registration support resulting in a really nice and professional phone call from Josep offering help. I refuse because I assume it’s already being handled by my colleague Jordi Ramos at RAC1.
12:40 Update: I get 3 emails with the following subject “Your Mobile World Congress 2010 Registration Acknowledgement”
13:00 Update: Calling Josep to thank him for his help. My initial complain tweet when as far up as the COO of the organizing company.
The digitizing of the information changes the rules to everything. Production, storage and distribution costs tend to zero, consumers become also producers and as a result new industries appear that render well established ones obsolete in no time.
One example is the traditional publishing industry with a business model partly based on advertising and partly on subscription, a model that’s sustainable when trucks distribute tons of paper but obsolete when the net distributes terabytes of data.
On such an environment, advertisers flee to a much more interactive and responsive medium, namely the web, and subscriptions are no match for the free high quality content available online.
Who would still post an ad to a local newspaper when you have Craigslist.org or eBay.com? Or, who would pay for gadget reviews on the NYT when you have Engadget.com?
The result: many magazines and newspapers have closed their physical editions and have gone online if not closed at all.
Although Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse this trend by charging for online access, I think the point is made.
With all this in mind the efforts to bring ebook readers to the market by companies such as Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook) an Sony (Reader), just to mention a few, make perfect sense in a time of publishing crisis (crisis meaning change, not doom).
Can Apple do the same as they did in the music and the cellphone industries? Via cultofmac.com I stumble on a presentation by Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, that has put together a simple and yet enlightening presentation about the subject.
Bijl’s states that if Apple is to reinvent the publishing business they need to cover three basic needs:
Distribution of content
Business model where publishers can charge for content
Usability so people can use the reading device as a newspaper or a book
So far, Apple has turned iTunes into an excellent platform for music and application distribution, it has a solid rock business model for both and the iPod and the iPhone have the best interfaces of their kind.
I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t want to extend this model to the publishing industry with content distribution via iTunes, micro-payments as in the iPhone App Store and a reading device that matches the iPod and iPhone usability standards.
I’m sure that the whole publishing industry (and that includes Murdoch) are eager to hear Steve Jobs’ next “one more thing”. Even more than the rest of us.
Finally it’s gone live! The fourth design iteration in my blog.
Basically the highlights are:
Readability: dark text over white background. Graphics and color gone.
Helvetica, helvetica, helvetica: as much as I love Lucida Grande I found Helvetica to render pages on IE closer to the original than Lucida (blame the usual MSuspects).
Large fonts: let’s face it, we don’t read blogs. We read feeds and if by chance we land on a blog we skim over the headlines. So I decided to make them really big to make your life easier
Twitter and Facebook killed the blogging star? No problem. I integrated both of them in the blog. Twitter on the homepage and both in the lifestream section.
Tweet this: as a Twitter lover (aren’t we all) I usually tweet blog posts I like. Here it can’t get any easier with the Tweet this post link in the header of each post. Look for the birdie.
My Web 2.0 persona in my blog: Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, my shared items on Google and del.icio.us are all shared in the lifestream section.
Related posts: under each post you’ll find a list of 3 posts related to the one you’re reading. It’s impressive how the automated selection algorithm gets it right (courtesy of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
Categories and tags navigation: at the bottom of each page you’ll find the blog categories. Not 2.0 enough? Click on tags and a nice tagclould will appear to satisfy the folksonomist in you.
When I read the title “How WordPress Has Changed My Life” by Matt Mullenweg in my reader, I thought I was gonna find a marketing talk about how creating the renowned blogging platform WordPress made Matt a better and richer person. Hoping to learn something for myself I bookmarked it for later review.
But the video has little to do with Matt’s wonderful life. It features Glenda Watson Hyatt, the “left thumb blogger” (she can only type with one thumb) telling a lesson on usability and accessibility.
Business Week, with the help of Don Norman, John Maeda, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman among others, just published an excellent article with the 10 commandments of web design.
Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.
I’m writing this on a lobby before a meeting with a client. Thanks to MarsEdit, a nifty desktop blogging app, I can write this while I’m offline and worry later about publishing this post.
Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.
But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.
With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.
My experience with TextMate:
Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
I didn’t get any further
TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.
At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.
You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.
So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.
My Experience with MarsEdit:
Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
Easily republish same content to another blog
Spellcheck as you type
Applescript support
Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
Via Criterion I discover Piclens, a new plugin for Firefox (Mac & Win) and Safari that allows you to browse images on the web full screen with an advanced cinematic interface. It just blew me away when I fired it up while in my Flickr account.
In his page he has put a few do-it-yourself-with-a-wii-remote videos that will blow you away. The advanced interaction concepts he explores, the easy and cheap implementations and the clarity of the demos make the perfect combination for an instant YouTube hit.
It’s all about using the powerful 1024×768 infrared camera on your Wii remote and connecting it via bluetooth to your computer. The results?
Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wii remote
By pointing a Wii remote at a projection screen you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. No projector? Point the Wii remote to your computer monitor and turn it into a multitouch surface. Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wii remote video
Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote
(By Johnny’s personal page URL cs.cmu.edu I gather that he’s from the School of Computer Science at renowned Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and he works in Human Computer Interaction there.)
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And this people own all my personal data!
