The French SPF (Secours Populaire Français), an aid group, contacted Loïc from Six Apart and Xavier from Nokia for some phones and Lifeblog to document recovery efforts in Asia. Here is their moblog.
Thanks guys.
Loïc’s report: Loic Le Meur Blog: Tsunami: the French SPF has now a moblog.
Sin to one’s (h)eaven
My boss, Christian, has a good overview of the Six Apart purchase of LiveJournal.
The blogging community is consolidating. Six Apart acquired LiveJournal! today and to me it looks like a perfect move for both. Six Apart has for a long time been thinking how to add users and yet retain high level service users demand in a paid service like TypePad. Creating a free level could upset TypePad users which wants solid quality and great service. This is where LiveJournal come in handy. Their free service will complement TypePad paid offering and build a user base at a totally different rate than what is possible with a paid service.
Link: ChristianLindholm.com: Six Apart helps consolidate blog market.
And here’s the post.
First, thinking of linking Lifeblog with a GPS device. That was easy since location info is important to enjoying Lifeblog (we put in the country information automatically on pictures and videos).
It’s not the sort of thing you’ll wear everywhere, because in some neighbourhoods, the bling value might get you mugged, but you can get away with wearing it almost anywhere because it is unobtrusive at just 6.2 x 2.7 x 1.3cm and 24g.
Some might think this Gizmo is geeky. We don’t. We think it’s a wonderful device for capturing the information flow and turning it to one’s advantage.
But, now, gizmag gets me thinking again about other devices that can make use of Lifeblog or with closer Lifeblog integration. While we still have discussions regarding the appropriateness of audio in a timeline, I am sure there are other devices and file formats that would be appropriate.
Link: gizmag Article: MP3 player AND voice recorder could develop a new market.
Dan the man alerted me to this neat article.
Now, where did I take that photo? Ask the camera.
Because the digital camera records the date and time with each picture, as does the GPS with each track point, the two can be collated to produce GPS coordinates for each photo.
.
That would be a cool hack in Lifeblog – collating GPS info with info in Lifeblog. Of course, the best thing is if Lifeblog would do it already on the phone by itself. But, that’s in the future for now.
After a fine evening with friends, we relax with soothing candles, wine, and each other. Sometimes it is easy to find that calm space, and you don’t think of anything, lest it be disturbed.
One common question I am asked is why we don’t allow Lifeblog on the phone to connect to a Lifeblog-like repository online.
I suppose the major use would be to upload stuff a few items at a time. OK, that seems doable. But, video and photos, likely the bulk of what would be transferred, are around 200k a pop. A few items then could translate into a cool megabyte of data. Flat rate pricing of data still hasn’t taken hold everywhere, so a few megabytes a week is very expensive.
OK, let’s say you have flat pricing and a few megabytes don’t bother you. Have you ever loaded 200k over GPRS? The first time, you’re saying ‘wow, I’m so cool.’ The second time, you cancel the damn thing because it takes too long. I haven’t tried 3G, but my experience is that the object sizes always are larger than the network can deal with. The 3G phones take larger images and videos, right?
OK, you say, just upload it at night when the networks are underutilized, munching up tons of operator bandwidth (which in the end they will want to monetize rather than throw into a bit bucket). Then, where is your data? Online.
But, if you think as a reference point that I have a few GIGABYTES of stuff in my Lifeblog, after only about 9 months, browsing that amount of data, even in broadband, will be a nightmarishly slow affair (I have examples).
What I am saying here is that the tech is just not there to put ALL our content online. PART of it, for sure, which is why we enable blogging to a website, which is why many of these photo sharing sites, such as Flikr and Buzznet work to a certain extent. But, the part that we partly share usually is a low-resolution version of our content. In the end we want to share the full-resolution stuff (that’s a story for another day – I’ve directly experienced this issue). Hence, only part of our content online provides a decent experience – all of the content doesn’t.
What I am NOT saying here is that online content is stupid. On the contrary, I truly believe that we will get to a point where we will store all our content online. By then I would love to have some sort of solution that allows me to have my content safe somewhere, but accessible from anywhere, by anyone I choose, with any device that can access the Internet.
But, we are still a ways from there.
Until then, the connection between a phone and a PC will always be the fastest and cheapest. The storage offline will always be cheaper and more accessible. Until then, the Lifeblog core will be the connection between the phone and PC and enabling sharing a subset of one’s content through methods, such as MMS, email, and Atom.
If I’m full of krap, let me know.
An aside: Um, because my reading comprehension lags significantly than my ability to suck things up through my ears, I am still trying to grok the microcontent stuff Marc Canter is doing. I have a slight inkling that he’s thought of this much better than I. And I hope he’s remembering the mobile devices and their narrowband connections.
In the Timeline and Mobile Favourites:
In Item view:
Here are some for images when viewing an item in detail view:
From post-to-blog editor:
Some other ones:
- Hold the pen key and press OK to mark/unmark one item
- Hold the pen key and an arrow key to mark in that direction
A lot of these shortcuts are the same in other parts of Series 60 (that’s why
we use them, right?).