Category: webstuff

mobile blogging, part 1

“What’s the best mobile device for blogging on the way?”

I just twittered/tweeted (?) this as a question and decided to turn it into a blog post, so please feel free to comment.

Yes, mobile blogging, blogging content to an online blog as most posts/ideas come up when I am on the way to work/home/downtown. Blog content does not pop up in my head when I am at home, sitting in my dark little roof chamber, but instead when I am travelling or walking through the city and then suddendly there are these “Oh my, I neeeeeed to blog this” moments. Does that sound familiar to you?

What’s mobile?
I am already using a 15,4″ laptop as my primary computer, where I am compiling most posts using Blogdesk (for Win), pulling images from my mobile phone and getting online through a local Wi-Fi connection. Whenever I am travelling with my laptop (which doesn’t happen that often), I use a GPRS or even UMTS data connection to surf the internet via my mobile phone which is connected to my computer via Bluetooth. This is how I went online in Kenya, and this is also how I go online whenever there’s no local Wi-Fi available.

However, I often have this urge to blog directly from a more mobile device, a gadget I am always carrying around with me. What’s this? The mobile phone, of course!

So, where’s the difficulty?
Mobile devices often only offer pure text posts without any hyperlinks as editing alone is quite a pain. Entering text is usually done using a small T9 keypad, and some phones also offer dedicated QWERTY keyboards.

So I am using a Nokia N95 which enables me to take decent images (the picture quality isn’t as good as on a normal digital camera because of the CMOS sensor and its reduced size, but it’s more than sufficient for blog posts), it enables me to take decent videos @ 640×480 VGA with 30 fps but with the limitation of a mono microphone and no optical zoom and connects to the internet via HSCSD, CSD, GPRS, EGPRS, HSDPA and WiFi. The N95 even comes with an advanced video editor so that I can edit a video right on the phone! While this obviously takes some time and isn’t that easy, at least it’s possible.

The difficulty is to upload multimedia content onto the internet! This is exactly where most phones still lack a simple solution. Nokia eventually realized this and introduced the Ovi platform earlier this year, but it’s still in closed Alpha mode, so I guess we’ll have to work on a better solution. And not everyone is using Nokia phones. What about Apple iPhone users? And what about those that are documenting their life on blogs through SonyEricsson phones?

Mobile phone manufacturers apparently want their users to upload content to their own walled gardens. This blog here doesn’t run on blogger.com, ovi.com, wordpress.com, vox.com and other sites. Do they seriously want me to upload MY content to any obscure community platform? Hey, facebook is already enough in terms of walled gardens – I want to control my own content on my own website. I have a domain, webspace and am running a blog which is powered by WordPress. I want the content from my phone to directly load into the given space here.

And this is why I’ve split this post in two different parts: the a) software and b) hardware issues.

The hardware side is rather simple: considering that most phones offer sms services, blog entries may – in their shortest form at a length of 160 characters – be directly sent to a blog via sms. I can do that. I can upload an sms to my blog. Simple. And then there’s also e-mail: my blog comes with a (secret & currently inactive) e-mail address so that I could also send an e-mail to my blog which would then be posted online.

The short message, multimedia message and e-mail services are the common denominator on most phones, meaning: even Mama Wambui on the vegetable market in a rural town in Central Kenya may post blog content from her simple Motorola C139 phone via sms. But how does she read it?

See? Blogging simple and short text to an online platform isn’t that difficult. The difficulty lies in editing it and enriching it with hyperlinks, multimedia content and responding to comments.

When I started thinking about this subject, I initially thought that mobile blogging depends on the right device. Well, maybe it helps to have a computer so that surfing the net isn’t limited to a mobile device which just doesn’t offer the same comfort you’d have on a “normal” computer. But I quickly realized that instead of always blaming my not-so-perfect multimedia phone for the lack of this and that function or usability, I should instead look out for the right software, plugins, services that enable me to post from a mobile device in a way that offers more comfort than a short text which is limited to 160 characters. Mobile blogging is a software issue!

Meaning: the only difference I see between good and bad mobile phones in terms of their blogging capabilities is that some recent smartphones come with browsers that also work with Javascript and other advanced technologies which are sometimes needed online. I don’t need YouTube on my phone, but would like to comment on a K2 theme in WordPress where the comment function is based on this AJAX thing.
For pure reading of online content – and that’s what most of the current phones are capable of – I was already happy while using my old Nokia 6230i. In fact, I succesfully blogged an update on December 30th last year from a lobby in a hotel in Mombasa, using the OperaMini browser on the 6230i. It just worked.

I think that mobile blogging is a nice feature on a phone, but until it becomes as easy to post content as it already enables me to read online content from a mobile device, the only real killer application I can currently think of in the mobile sector is mobile banking/payment. Who knows – maybe in just a few years time devices will be advanced enough so that it all melts into one single application and service. This is why Google came up with the GPhone – coz it’s a software issue, not so much a hardware thing.

In part 2 I will try to compile a list of modern mobile phones that offer some comfort, and in part 3 I will try to highlight how to actually upload multimedia content from my phone to my blog (which I still have to figure out, hence this blog post :-).

Stay tuned!

videopinion

Some years ago, epinion communities used to be _the_ ultimate social platform on the net. I don’t know how this developed in the USA, but in Europe I think it has stalled.

So, instead of people writing their particular product review on dedicated opinion communities where reviews are at the centre of all attention, today’s customers go to:

a) webshops that focus on one particular product range, e.g. ebags, amazon, etc.

b) blogs

c) youtube reviews (!)

IF consumers switch from putting their opinion on a certain product they have been using from a central website to their own media platform (blogs, youtube) – how do they benefit of it? Google AdSense?

If I write about a Nokia phone, a Creative mp3 player or Eastpak/Eagle Creek luggage like I’ve done in the past, produce a short video on the phone, the mp3 player and that wheeled luggage piece – how will these companies directly pay me for praising their products?

Sustainable Sanitation Alliance & Akvo & Web2forDev

I’ll be in Stockholm over the weekend to attend the 3rd meeting of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (@ Stockholm Environment Institute, SEI). Plans actually included to attend the upcoming World Water Week in Stockholm and, more importantly, having a few interesting conversations during those evening sessions, but…[still searching for an excuse to explain why my Boss wants me to be back in the office by monday – although she’s the one staying in Stockholm for the rest of the week…argh…now let’s see how good Ryanair actually is – just rescheduled my return flight to Aug 13th.. :-)].

Nways. If you’re interested in water and sanitation issues – and I hope you are, as we’ll have the International Year of Sanitation declared by the UN for 2008 – pls have a look at akvo.org, their blog and akvopedia. The latter being an OPEN wiki for the international water community. Thomas and his team are already working hard to present AKVO to the international community on the World Water Week, they are looking for some further funding of the project and hoping to raise some awareness for such an internet platform on water and sanitation issues (the website shall, at a later stage, also include a microcredit part we’ve already seen with kiva.org). Oh, and btw: akvo is the Esperanto word for “Water”.*

If they succeed in convincing some donors, such a website *could* become the leading resource for anything related to water and sanitation online. It could, as content contribution depends on everyone, and coming up with such a great website also means convincing many other stakeholders who still do not see the internet in a way we see it (~ as a huge resource of interesting information that should be made accessible, editable and exportable to a world wide audience 24/7/365). In other words: future generations, I believe, are already used to browsing the internet and filtering it for genuine information that is of use.
Hence there’s no need for further publications in paper format if instead we can come up with an interactive communication platform such as a single website where content is pulled together from different resources. This kind of knowledge management is also the same spirit that Chris and his team are trying to implement in the development sector and are hoping to promote through the upcoming Web2forDev conference in Rome, Italy, later on in September this year.

You see, until now, many aid / dev organisations just tossed out their knowledge onto the internet and thereby indirectly asked their readers to search for the required information on their own. In our case of ecological sanitation, a lady from India recently told me that it took her 5 months to find all the necessary information online which helped her starting her own project on building ecological latrines at a local school. Obviously, we can do better than that.

Back in 2005, when Erik and I joked about the Gadgetimoja term I often use on my blog, Erik suggested that we should come up with a website dedicated to African ingenuity. And he did. Within a short time, he had the blog up and running, and our dedicated team behind Afrigadget started contributing stories. Interested readers would send in their stories on toys, resourceful hardware modifications and thereby showing to the world wide audience that Africa isn’t just a dark continent, but instead a place where people started doing their own little projects (or as Prof Ayittey would correctly argue: loooong time before the colonialists came). After the website got boingboinged a few times, ppl started realizing that interesting stories do not only emerge from high-tech laboratories in SE Asia and the US.

Of course, the sceptics will argue that the internet isn’t everything and that you won’t be able to feed a hungry child or solve real world problems by IT only. However, I think and really believe that all these approaches on spreading knowledge on available technologies may in the end contribute to the bigger picture – which isn’t just an idealistic, often too altruistic approach on changing the world, but instead coming up with an organized internet resource which would pull in different feeds on a similar topic from various physical locations. Think of David Weinberger’s tagclouds, think of the Cluetrain communication approach, think of social bookmarking ? la delicious, the wide-spread use of Wiki’s to organize knowledge and events (!), internet publishing technologies that enable 13year old kids to come up with their own, user-generated content (~blogs, youtube, etc.) and you’ll get the idea.

Who knows – maybe one day we won’t see Google? providing us with “search results” only, but instead a complete page that will have pulled-in feeds from quality (!) resources (rated by their users) and give us a quick overview on a qualified repository of knowledge that is available online. At least, I wouldn’t want to search the net for 5 months only to find a good solution to a technical issue.

And you?

(* = someone from the akvo team told me they actually tried to secure a Kiswahili domain in the first place…huuu….which goes to show that my strategy from way back 1998 when I registered uhuru.de, umoja.de & co actually wasn’t that stupid :-)

anonymous online reporting of corruption

Pls don’t nail me down if this has been mentioned before (as I haven’t been following KBW lately due to other obligations – which is sad because the feed is pretty much interesting these days), but I just stumpled across this interesting note on another network about a German company from Potsdam that apparently programmed a web-based interface which will allow internal whistleblowers (!) to report any cases of corruption anonymously.

In Kenya, that is.

The Kenya Anti Corruption Commission? recently implemented the Business Keeper Monitoring System (BKMS®) which shall assure “anonymity & information confidentiality” as well as an “anonymous diaologue”.

kacc.JPG
screenshot from the website

Says it on their website: “The BKMS®? system is used as an internet-based communication platform by whistleblowers worldwide (employees in companies and administrations as well as outsiders) to report misconduct and risks. If necessary, whistleblowers can remain absolutely anonymous in order to be protected against repressive measures.”

Obviously, such a system may not be working for those poor souls who are constantly harassed by the police, and may also come too late for Mr David Munyakei (1, 2, ex 3), but it’s a good start, I think. Also, I am wondering about the – fear – this may generate among members of the public service.

According to the website, the BKMS system is already? in use? with some companies and orgnanisations in Europe, but I wonder if anything like that has already been applied to the EU commission? Ah?

Raila “Virus”

Fortunately, I haven’t yet come across the “Raila Virus” on my systems, but my colleague in Embu told me earlier this week that it took him two days to organize someone who cleaned all machines – one by one.

Some months ago, I switched from an older Kaspersky 5.0.x release to FreeAv/Avira AntiVir by the (German) company AVIRA. A free English version (PersonalEdition Classic) for private use is available online (~16 MB). Standalone virus definitions are also available from this (more or less hidden) source, so anyone who wants to update some computers only has to download the definition files once.

Mimi sijui if this is of any help, but according to this list from July 26th 07, there’s a “Raila” definition included with the latest release. I actually installed freeAv on some GoK computers last year and managed to clean them of a nasty worm that kept on coming up. All of this within just 30 minutes! McAfee & a Norton suite often come shipped with new computers, but frankly said: they suck. Norton even more than McAfee. So in case you want to save some mbeca on the computer guy (sorry folks, I know this is killing business :-), pls feel free to try out Avira AntiVir if you haven’t yet done so.

Oh, and btw: once downloaded, pls save the setup executable on a write-protected medium (protected flash stick, CD-ROM, etc.) so it doesn’t become infected itself.

Hmm. I guess this is just another proof of how much we actually need to have free and open source, reliable, stable, compatible and secure operating systems installed on all computers that are running within government institutions. Dito in Germany (some cities actually already switched). Aahh, politics… (and there you go wondering why it was called Raila in the first place! What’s next – ThikaRoad Traffic Jam Virus? :-)

from iGoogle to GoogleReaderMobile

…so I changed my feed reader today: from iGoogle – Google’s personalized homepage – to (the mobile version of) Google Reader.

BECAUSE:

iGoogle looks like this on my laptop screen:

igoogle screenshot pc

and like this on my Nokia N95:

Screenshot0007 Screenshot0008

==> opening items takes some time and is a bit old-fashioned. While it’s good to obtain an overview on what’s new on each feed, it actually only lists items in a static order and you’d have to continue loading another page in order to see all feeds. Hence the need to switch from iGoogle (which I’ll continue using on my laptop) to Google Reader…

…which looks like this on my laptop:

googlereader screenshot pc

and like this on my N95 (==> http://www.google.com/reader/m !):

Screenshot0009 Screenshot0010

Obviously, accessing my feeds using the dedicated Google Reader – also because of it’s better navigation – makes sense. Hey guys, this thing is fast and it works!

All it requires is this awesome little export to opml utility that generates an *.xml file which may then be imported onto your GoogleReader settings page. In case you’re having different tabs installed on iGoogle, just merge all xml files into a big one. Kudos to Mihai, author of the OPML utility.

It’s fast, it’s simple, it works, it wins!

AOB: Soapstone Simpsons. Kenya believe it? :-)

how long does it take to load?

875531985_e6868ebaa2.jpg

A friend of mine in Nairobi informed me today that my blog takes ages to load. Can anyone of you confirm this?

I already? tested my website with the free? webwait service (as pictured above), but I don’t know if this actually tests the speed time? my website takes to load (~ server response time, scripts, etc.), or just how fast my site loads with my current connection (speed).

Any feedback on the download/accessibility/site-loading speed is very much appreciated. Thank You!

AOB: MSIE 6.029 sux. big times!