Life must be understood backwards; but… it must be lived foward. – Søren Kierkegaard
Living Forward
Archives for October 2006
Nakama: Moblogging Photos Made Easy
Most mobile phones these days come with a basic camera built-in. It’s handy for spur-of-the-moment snapshots. I’ve used it in stores to capture price and SKU info for further research, or to document that fender-bender in the parking lot.
What’s not convenient is a way to share those photos online. Sure, a lot of the mobile companies have services, but if you’re already using something like Flickr, you don’t want or need another online gallery.
A number of companies have created add-ons that allow uploads from your mobile to Flickr, including Shozu, Nokia and Yahoo’s own Zonetag. But none of these would work with my HP iPAQ hw6515.
Enter Nakama. This free service allows you to upload photos from any mobile phone capable of sending picture messages. While Nakama does provide it’s own online gallery, the real strength is it’s ability to automatically publish uploaded photos to your Flickr, MySpace or Live Space account.
I’ve tested Nakama, and it worked perfectly. No special software was required, just the ability to send picture messages from my phone.
One caveat — the gallery of popular photos on Nakama contains a lot of suggestive photos. They do provide a “flag as inappropriate” capability, but so far, the majority of visitors apparently approve. Personally, I don’t give a rip about their own gallery; I’m only interested in using the service to make it easy to post to Flickr. And that it does quite well.
Google Gets YouTube-ular
Today, Google announced that they have agreed to purchase YouTube, the outrageously popular video sharing site, for $1.65 billion in stock. YouTube was nothing a year ago, and now this? Kudos on the nicely executed exit strategy guys. Now let’s see if Mark Cuban was right.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch as posted his notes from the conference call with the press, announcing the deal. Basically a lot is still unknown, other than that Google Video will not be going away (why not!?) and that they are looking for ways to integrate YouTube with Google Search (duh).
Cover Me
I’ve long been a fan of Peter Gabriel, ever since my cousins introduced me to his work with Genesis in the early ’70s. Recently, his RealWorld production company held a remix contest using Shock the Monkey — which appropriately begins with the admonition to “Cover me…
There are some really outstanding remixes of the song (and some plain strange ones), but if you’re a fan of Peter Gabriel, check it out.
I have to agree that Multiman’s track is the most listenable. It could’ve been Peter’s own.
I like the concept of an artist making their music available for remixing, and the website itself has a nice interface. My one peeve is the way the inline media player is configured to autoplay upon page load.
The Real Web 2.0
What is the real Web 2.0? Honestly, as your mom if she gives a crap about AJAX and she’ll say “sure, it gets those stubborn stains out of the tub.” Social networking, interaction, et. al. is expected, but it’s not what people really want from Web 2.0
So what do they want? Coffee, pizza and news. Here it is, in a short video of the real Web 2.0 (courtesy of www.thefirstpost.co.uk).
Blog Spam
Anyone who’s blogged likely knows about blog spam. It’s the scourge of the blogosphere — automated programs that search out blogs and auto-submit “ads” as comments — usually for gambling, erectile dysfunction drugs and porn. It forces responsible bloggers to moderate all comments.
Fortunately, WordPress’ Akismet plug-in does a good job of detecting spam, but for some reason, it considers comments from my email (using my @bigblueball.com address) as spam! A quick search on the WordPress forums shows that, yes, Akismet may have some false positives, but if you flag it as “not spam” enough times, Akismet supposedly learns to stop marking your comments as spam. So far, we’ve tried it with over four comments, but Akismet is still marking my comments as spam. Any suggestions?
Thomas Edison: Successful Failure
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.
– Thomas Edison