Posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 2:59 am (No Responses)
Some of you who follow my blog or know me personally might know I grew up in St Paul, Minnesota. Some of you might also know that I still have family and friends in the Twin Cities. The Minneapolis bridge collapse at the beginning of the month was a tough time for both me and my family. What was most astounding to me about the event, however, was the citizen response – not only on-location, but as a wave of information throughout the world wide web.
This Minnesotan’s in-depth look covers the snowball of citizen-generated coverage that began with microblogging and rolled it’s way through the internet’s various social websites and communities. This is, to me, a prime example of one of the things that amazes and astounds me about the internet as a communication tool. Being on the other side of the globe and not owning a television was no set-back for me from recieving information during the aftermath of the collapse, and this article is a wonderful example for the social dynamics of citizen response to disasters in an interconnected world. Worth a read!
Posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 9:18 pm (No Responses)
liron.de is going to be undergoing some maintenance in the upcoming week (it is sooooo 2006). Please bear with me if some things may be slightly broken here and there.
Posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 12:00 am (One Response)
I downloaded Joost a few hours ago, and holy cow. There are a lot of things about the internet that surprise me and excite me, but Joost is something else. This is an application in a league of it’s own. The concept of Joost is painfully simple – streaming web TV. With this, they didn’t invent the wheel or discover fire. What they did do, however, is enclose this service in an interface that works so well, that you no longer have an excuse to convince yourself you need a TV. Joost’s service isn’t passive TV, but a wide selection of channels and shows (which you can watch when you want, independant of any show time). One of the more interesting aspects of Joost, that it combines between traditional TV and the aspects we know and love about “Web 2.0″. Joost does this by integrating “widgets” into it’s main interface, with which you can chat with other folks watching the same programs, and all sorts of other nifty stuff. Images speak louder than words, so let me point you in the direction of the (extremely well made) Joost promo short:
Posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:44 am (No Responses)
I’ve been using Twitter recently to see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit, there’s something interesting about the dynamics which have been created within the Twitter community. An IM-style web community with little to no topic filtering wouldn’t be something I’d admit to believing in the popularity of. But the people have spoken.
To be entirely honest, I’m having a blast with Jaiku, a webservice some would call “Twitter’s prime contender to the throne”. While at first glance, the two seem painfully similar, it took me only a few minutes with Jaiku to realize how different the two actually are and how much functionality Jaiku has. Functionality as a rich web-app is key with Jaiku. With Twitter, the bare-bones functionality is it’s charm. Depending on what you’re looking for in a micro-blogging service, either may be your cup of tea.
Jaiku supports adding feeds to your “stream”. What this means, is that besides updating your daily doings, you can set your page to aggregate your latest blog post headers, flickr images, youtube vides, delicious bookmarks and the like. This creates a “single point of presence” and allows folks to see an overview of what you’re doing around the web. I find this a simple solution with remarkable implemetation. My Jaiku page displays, alongside my written entries, my updates from Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and my personal blog.
Another feature of Jaiku is channels, which functions like an open forum on a specific topic. One of the problems of Twitter is that it doesn’t have a proper interface to allow users to “discover” other users thematically. Jaiku solves this by allowing users to engage in open discussion on a page dedicated to a specific topic. Each channel page has the same feed aggregating ability like personal pages, so if you create a channel like #hamburg, you basically have self-updating content by linking it up with flickr photos tagged “hamburg”, events from upcoming.org and local reviews from qype.com.
Another nifty and considerate feature of Jaiku is that you have the ability to unsubscribe from a certain feed which is attached to any given userpage or channel. As an example – if you’d be watching me on Jaiku, and I have my flickr photostream plugged in, you can “opt out” of getting these specific flickr updates from me, the rest of the updates you see as normal. This is particularly useful when joining a channel such as #hamburg, since it’s attached feeds seem to be bringing in quite a bit of content. I’ve chosen, for example, to stay “subscribed” to conversations on #hamburg solely, and the rest of the aggregated updates will pass under my radar.
You can watch the founders of Jaiku on Scobleshow talking about the website, upcoming features and the mobile client in betatest. It looks exciting!
Blog Day 2007 is upon us, here’s is my list of 5 blogs worth checking out:
