I'm going to be returning my iPhone to my former employer and want to continue mobile live photo blogging. Sure I have my Treo but the photo quality isn't in the same ballpark as the iPhone.
I've looked online at the Sony Ericsson K800i which is supposed to be the best mobile camera. This is great but it is missing a QWERTY keyboard which make the blogging part much easier than having to click the 7 on my phone 4 times to get to the letter S. Lots of letter 's' in the English language.
I've also looked at the Nokia N95 and the Sony Ericsson K850i but sans keyboard I am not as excited.
Do you know of any alternatives that might have a 3.2 megapixel or higher camera and a full keyboard? Maybe something that has yet to be released? How about a camera with EVDO or EDGE support?
Short short notes today. If you listen you'll know why.
It's Tell a Friend Friday!
Get out there and tell somebody
Even my son points out that I am allergic to lady bugs
I have to stop saying the word seriously
Costco salmon with dill
I can't take it anymore
Shout out for support to Marisa and Jason!!
Check out Jason at NCN Podcast
Thank you guys so much . . . you rock!
Betsy will be breeding goats and golden retrievers
Horned and it eats all your stuff
Goriever products to follow soon
Folicular drift
Audience Survey, please fill this out for us
Look for the graphic on "Audience Survey" on the main page
Well, it really is an old feed that I used for another project but thought I could spice it up a bit. It's a photo feed from flickr but I've rewritten it load the middle size image as opposed to the thumbnail and changed the enclosure from the middle size photo to the large size for a hefty payload.
Which of course means me! Most of the bugs have probably been worked out of Hulu but I am excited, nonetheless, to have received my temporary login and password tonight. Why? Gems like this baby from 1983.
They got new episodes of shows like Heroes and The Office from last week but A-Team episodes are a prize.
In the first five minutes of using Hulu I like it about 99x better than Joost. I would kick it up to 100x they had a premium service that would let me download the videos. But from what I read in the Terms of Use item #4 that hasn't been ruled out.
Without downloads comparing this to iTunes would be like comparing Apples (oh, I kill me) and oranges. At this point I'm not quite sure that Hulu attempting to be iTunes. Let me stress, at this point. Since NBC pulled Heroes from iTunes they have to be missing that revenue.
Signs that making I'll be making this comparison in the future: in the playlist section of the site an RSS feed is created for the shows I add to my playlist and the portability of the video via Flash Player embed. It wouldn't surprise me if client side software is on the way soon.
The real downers for me right now are site nav, downloading and no Mad TV episodes. I'll post back in a couple days about this but I am pretty sure that I will be sharing more videos before that.
The posts are posts
The most totally Gary email
"I'm in a village where people go to die"
"Someone couldn't wait and died on train"
Life itself is a destination
Mr. B is all happy
You've made it someplace
Yeah, void before it started and void when it ends
I knew you would turn it around and make it negative
When I was hit by a truck I learned this truth
Sure I flew 30 feet
How do you know you flew 30 feet?
There were witnesses
In the country?
No, it wasn't the country I was in town
Kris, could you keep farm animals in town?
Yes
Then it is the country!
I can see the bike-a-thon
Ride you big wheel around the block, pig bbq, oh someone is dying
If you are windshield smudge before you are 10 you're not a smart one
The banana seat bike catapulted me
I can see your dad measuring 30 ft
Right, everybody in town carried a tape measure
Is there a point to this story
All, I am saying is life is your destination
Live it while you got it
Lawn chair collectors
That's a hotel chair
Gigi starts yelling
We're all on the edge of our seats, Kris
They got into rc cars
When you are not the one being farmed?
The human condition means we are all farmed
Mr B
Betsy explains how it is done on the farm
I had gravel but there are many a boy that would want gravel over grass
You can be negative all you want
Today is the greatest day ever Mr. B
I am dressed in my sloppy best
Betsy takes us way back
Is there ever a need to dress up in your world, Betsy?
No
I say the same things to you
Once you understand this story you will understand me
The broom story from the last show didn't do it?
Betsy tells a story that I have never heard
Her dad bought his wife a car
We drive out to pick it up from a country driveway
It is parked behind a convenient store
It looked like it belonged in your father's yard
It was three different colors
No class, no style but it had balls
It was the original hyrbrid
Dekalb Ag car
She was disappointed
I was 15 and drove all the time
I didn't want to go get a license
It was a formality, detail
As long as I don't leave his subdivision I could get out of it
And I entered a 4 way intersection that turns out to be a 2 way
I hit a girl in a little pinto
My friend said, shit you're 15 you won't get your license until you are 21
My evil side takes over
I realize that she is 16 and doesn't know what to do
This is when I take over
We shouldn't call the police
We can let our dads talk and take care of it
The rest is history
This is possibly Betsy's funniest story ever
You are going to be a scary adult
Audience Survey, please fill this out for us
Look for the graphic on "Audience Survey" on the main page
Right now I am really hung up on live photo blogging. Something is changing in the way that we interact online. The dynamic it is a changing.
My previous post is a perfect example of this but I think it has legs for where we are online with real-time micro blogging and subscription media. It is less intrusive for the audience as they have decided to participate by subscribing or friending you in an application. Say, something like Twitter.
I guess what makes this so poignant for me, using Twitter as an example are the links that I create for the tweets are done with the source code for turo.us, a url shortening site that Mike Marusin developed, that allows me to count click-throughs. From what I can tell from these counts and photo views at flickr, they are disproportionally higher than the number that I would normally receive from the same links in my sites.
I'm not sure why this is but I can guess that the immediacy of the interaction in Twitter and the fact that people made the effort to subscribe to me has something to do with it. Friends and even strangers subscribe to me, just like they would as part of any social network to be updated with anything that I share. They trust me. A trust not provided by an RSS feed but a more personal connection
In this context of immediacy and real-time interaction I think that trust matters most to raising the number of click-throughs. These links are more successful because they aren't passive links buried in a blog post. They are right up front and time sensitive. Maybe these links act as a call to action?
Over the weekend, as some of you may of you noticed, I live photo blogged my Saturday afternoon date with Betsy and our trip to Goodwill. For me it was a time to watch Betsy as she navigated her adopted habitat and to see her operate in a way that is far from the norm in our everyday lives.
I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. Why not share it in as many ways as possible (distribution to: Flickr, Twitter, blog and RSS) with as many people as possible? One input with multiple outputs across the various Croncast audiences.
Making it happen is a lot easier than you think with email and RSS.
First. it is the camera phone that takes decent photos. Second, is the phones ability to send email with photo attachments. Third, is a place to email the photos that has an RSS feed or other API connectivity to other applications. Tons of sites like Flickr, Seesmic and Tumblr offer these and can even do some of the distribution for you. Get these three things in place and sharing your experiences in near real-time has never been easier.
Currently, it does take a little more skill to distribute the photos to Twitter. However, if you get creative you can breathe life into photos that wouldn't normally have existed after it was consumed/viewed in a photo sharing site or through an RSS reader. It is worth the effort to figure this out, it's the next stage of content distribution online.
How do I know? Google Reader shared feeds are the perfect example. Typically once someone reads a post in their reader it has reached the end of the line. But if someone shares it with Google Reader it then gets added to the individual users shared RSS feed and resyndicated. A new life for that content. The same goes for photos that end up in Flickr or a Flickr RSS feed.
In my case, live photo blogging and my ability to cast a wider net wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the Flickr RSS feed from my account. It is the magic API that feeds (pun intended) the river of resyndication that allows me to give that new life to our content.
Here's how it goes down:
1. Upload photo from phone to Flickr with subject line used as image title 2. In the body under the photo begin with an asterisk (*) if I want the photo, title and description to be a blog post also 3. In the body under the photo begin with a carat (^) if I want the title and a link to be a tweet 4. Add both asterisk and carat (*^) for blog and twitter 5. A PHP script grabs the Flickr RSS feed and reads it for asterisks and carats every two minutes and sends the photo, title and description where it needs to go 6. If it goes to the blog the title and description will be run through a keyword generations script 7. If it goes to Twitter only the title is sent and a shortened url is created to link to the photo
What all of this does is allow me to create multiple channels of distribution that can reach the different audiences that follow us. There is a bit of overlap with multiple audience members subscribed to the same services but quite a few are not. We have the Twitter audience, the blog audience, the flickr audience and the RSS audience. We also have our podcast audience but they are not really a part of this type of delivery
Summary: Look for ways to utilize sites like Flickr as a content management portal, if even from your mobile phone, to cast a wider net across your network. Work to find that one point of contact that has the lowest threshold for allowing you to get your media and thoughts online with the ability to resyndicate your content without having to lift a finger. Well, too many fingers. And make sure that it has an RSS feed!
subscribe
