Positively, enlightening.
Link: Russell Beattie Notebook � Random Tech Thoughts.
Here’s a bunch of stuff that I would normally blog about individually, but don’t have the energy right now.
He’s has a good hit rate in the past few years, so at least listen to what he has to say.
David tells me that the new features I mention in my previous article are going live this week.
But, he says there are some other cool things coming really soon (next week!):
– A mobile version of the "Conversations" Tag Cloud
– The ability to send the link of the mobile chat room to your phone
from the desktop via SMS (initially US only)
– The ability to send or sync your desktop "Favorites" list to a
personalized "Favorites" list within the mobile version of the WINKsite
Chat Directory (http://winksite.com/chat from the phone)
And he’s sent me some other links that give some desktop views of what’s happening in the mobile world of WINKsite:
Some other desktop views (linking mobile and PC worlds!):
– Active Chats (Map & Conversation Module) – what’s really cool is that if you are using the desktop Conversation module, you can see who is using the mobile or the PC. And there are many who are using the mobile!
– Tags (Category, Keyword, Last 24 Hours, Last Week)
MoMo Mike was
most kind to connect me to fellow New Yorker David Harper. Mike and I had spoken a lot about
mobile and the state of mobile in Silicon Valley (took about 2 seconds) and he
tipped off David one day to give me a ping.
I am glad he did.
websites. You sign up, point and click to choose what kind of content you want
on your mobile site, and that’s it. It’s really easy and quite versatile. For
example, you can put your blog, RRS feeds, and links on your site. The blogs
will be intelligently transcoded for
easy reading on the phone browser. You can also put other stuff on your site, such as
surveys, notes, guest book, forums, or chat. The WINKsite control panel makes it really
easy and fast to set up and you don’t need to code anything.
Click here to open up my mobile site.
David has deep experience in content management systems,
having successfully run an online marketing company, among other interesting things. He thought up WINKsite one day, dreaming up a solution to make it easy for folks to create
mobile websites.
He’s been working at it a bit over 3 years with pal, Jason Sabella, WINKsite itself
going live about 2 years ago. In the last year, people really became aware of
it. With no marketing or promotion, he’s now at over 9000 sites with something
like 110 million mobile screen views over the year.
Also, he’s picked up an impressive list of users – go check
out the list of top sites that are mobilized by WINKsite. Some really smart folks, like Howard
Rheingold,
O’Reilly’s MAKE crowd,
Debi Jones,
Boing Boing, and Om Malik have
WINKsites. And Scott Rafer left his CEO position at
Feedster to be the Chairman of Wireless Ink.
Enough of the name dropping.
What I like about David is that on one level, he has created
a tool that makes it dead simple to create a mobile website. On another level,
the navigation and quality of the mobile site is really good. And on another
level, he really understands how to bring together the PC-based broadband
experience with the mobile experience.
For example, on the phone, you can add content to your site
and do some light administration. From the PC, you can obviously do a lot more,
but in both cases, changes show up right away – it’s all one site. Also, what
is really neat, is that you can view the site either from the phone or from the PC.
Click on some of the relevant links above to see what that looks like.
I haven’t seen any sort of tool like this. I will admit that
I have been playing with WINKsite for some time and have sort of been keeping
David to myself (scheming on my part, of course). But, I really can’t contain my enthusiasm any more, especially
with some new stuff David is adding.
What’s that?
David’s methodically adding new things to WINKsite that make
the PC-mobile-Web link even stronger. For example, with a few
clicks you can add a chat room to your site (how kewl is that?). But, David’s
worked up a way to display where the chats originate from, based
on the location info in the user’s profile. That makes these
mobile website chats a bit more physical.
Another little thing he’s worked up is an intuitive display (see below) of what are the most popular chat tags. This makes it easier for
someone on a PC browser to scan and choose a mobile website chat, which they
can later participate in from their phone.
Basically, the mapping and the tags
make a strong link from the PC browsing experience to a mobile browsing
experience. I really don’t know of any website that makes it easy for folks to
go between PC browsing to mobile browsing, nor any site that takes advantage of the PC browser to promote so well the
discovery of mobile sites.
I’ve been challenging David to figure out a way to do the
reverse as well, since I am keen on building that round trip between mobile and
PC. He’s been working on a text-only way of generating the tag list, but the
browsers are pretty pesky. And I know he’s been thinking of the right things and will be adding some more cool things soon.
In summary, David has this easy-to-set-up personal content
aggregator (DLA, Marc?) for mobiles, with a harmonious and integrated PC and mobile
experience, and with connections that facilitate the flow between the PC and
mobile.
I see WINKsite growing steadily and on the right path to become a great mobile interface to the Web, adding closer integration between the PC and mobile and increasing the bi-directional flow of the total experience. I, for one, am sticking close and watching David.
You should, too.
Interesting.
Link: MobHappy: Mobile Blogger Network.
If you write a blog about mobile stuff, you might be interested in joining our Blogging Network.
These guys are getting clever.
Link: MobHappy: Announcing The Carnival of the Mobilists.
The Carnival of the Capitalists is something of a blogging institution and one I’ve particiapted in both as contributor and host, from time to time. It was, in turn, inspired by the Carnival of the Vanities originally.
The Carnival of the Capitalists is still a great institution, and one I hope to keep contributing to, but Carlo and I thought that the mobile blogging world is now big and diverse enough to warrant our own Carnival – hence the Carnival of the Mobilists.
I noticed a while back that some of my feeds in iTunes had videos. Of course, they wouldn’t load into my iPod. But, they did play on my PC. So, I played around with a feed that contained videos from my Nokia N70 posted to TypePad via Lifeblog.
It worked – my phone videos played from a feed in iTunes, just like any other feed with video.
Now that’s a really simple way to make a mobile video blog podcast thingy (what to call it?), though I haven’t tried all the permutations.
But, with the new video iPods: will those same videos play on the video iPod? That would be cool.
If anyone finds out, please let me know.
Alas, the N70 does not record audio to MP3 or WAV, so there’s no simple
way to also do a traditional audio-only podcast from the phone (I’ve
been looking for an MP3 recorder app since). I know there are services that do this, but I was trying to do it all from my phone without anything other than a TypePad account. Really just a simple experiment.
Is anyone paying attention to these guys? Not only do they have a great track record, but they really get what the Mobile Lifestyle means to Media.
Shawn has written this great essay on the ‘ages’ of Media – TV-Cable-Internet-mobile. He makes a compelling case for us to understand Mobile Media as something that has evolved but is distinct from the previous ages. I think the quote below provides the best framing of the impact of what he is getting at.
The thing here is that Intercasting Corp has more on its mind than Rabble. Something tells me that Rabble is a small toe in the whole thing and that there will be bigger things coming from these guys. These guys will not be the usual ‘build something small and sell it quick’. These guys seem to be building not only the philosophy needed, but the whole she-bang.
Link: InterCasting Corp: The Mobile Media Era (With exciting InfoGraphic below!).
Imagine a reporter at the New York Times looking at a map of the world on her computer with little dots representing media being generated by ordinary people like you and me. Then all of a sudden a bunch of red dots show up, all clustered around Banda Aceh. Click and zoom to a list of pictures uploaded instantly by people on the scene of a massive tidal wave. One second later, that content is inserted into the editorial process and they are first to the story. Or that same image might be on your mobile device and you get to cut out the middle man entirely, or better yet – write your own story about it and syndicate it.
I’ve been trying to catch up with Shawn and crowd, but time and space seem to conspire against us. 😉
The key to tapping into the user-created content stream is to help
users create and share content. It’s not the content
itself that is important nor that folks want to get famous or have a
large distribution. The key is that folks want to share one-to-few, the
content as the excuse for the conversation, and we should provide the
tools for them to carry on that conversation. That is what services
like TypePad offer that products like MovableType or services like GeoCities could not provide as tools.
Link: MobHappy: Encouraging User-Created Content.
User-created content is a bug buzzterm for the mobile industry, but is the value in the content itself or giving people access to the tools to create it? For instance, the vast majority of personal blogs don’t get a very high readership, but peoples’ enthusiasm in creating them isn’t based upon that.
This is a good case for aggregators (link below), aka ‘portals’. I have been having a hard time using the word ‘portal’ because of the connotations to 1999 and the Internet Crash of 2001.* I even joked with a colleague that not only will we try to avoid the word ‘portal’, so as not to set off knee-jerk negativity, but to also avoid ‘traffic’, ‘eye-balls’, and other words linked to that most recent bubble.
But, all kidding aside, portals are back and are better. For some time, I knew that, but didn’t know how to describe it in a way that would be palatable. Then, I read a presentation from Ben Hammersly on RSS and all. And the comment that clicked with me was that now, with the structured formats and APIs that we characterize with Web 2.0 (or Web x.0), it is so much easier to create portals, and the portals are so much more dynamic and versatile.
Marc Canter has a company called Broadband Mechanics (BBM) that spends all day thinking, designing, and building portals, which he calls, no doubt to escape the negativity of portals, ‘digital lifestyle aggregators’, or DLAs. Recently, Marc wrote an article on how to make money with DLAs (see link below). While he argues the case for DLAs, and hence explains their value, he really doesn’t explicitly show how to make money. Also, I have yet to see Part Two of this article.
But, no need. It’s a great read and is important for anyone thinking of aggregating all the feeds and content out there. Also, some of the comments he makes are, in themselves, sources for longer discussions.
Great stuff, Marc.
Link: How to make money with digital lifestyle aggregators – Part I :: AO.
So personalization and customization find their destiny intermixed with Integration and Aggregation. The only way to produce compelling enough experiences is by integrating a wide range of built-in constructs, combining that with aggregated web services and content and topping it all off with unprecedented levels of control and customization. In one product or service.
Phil Windley also has some other related links to Doc Searls and Clayton Christensen.
* Incidentally, it was a portal in 1999 that was part of my switch from biomedical research to wireless
Always wanted something like ‘Keep as New’ per item. Well, here it is. And, it’s pretty nifty to be able to access the extra non-text content. I need to try out videos and audio. Should be interesting.
Link: Bloglines | News.
Mobile
For those who enjoy using Bloglines on the run, we’ve added a couple of features from Bloglines to our Mobile edition.* First, you can now access enclosure links in blog articles, allowing you to view images or listen to your favorite podcasts from your mobile device.
* Second, you can now use the “Keep as New” option for articles you have previously read, allowing you to scroll through as many articles as you want and come back to them later.