sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

These are some of the references for the presentation I’m giving on blogging for non-bloggers.

Guy Kawasaki’s article is at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_120_day_won.html

Blogger is at http://www.blogger.com

Typepad is at http://www.typepad.com

Agency.com’s (private) blog is at http://blog.agency.com

Technorati provide blog search and promotion at http://www.technorati.com

Feedburner is at http://www.feedburner.com

Feel free to add more resources in the comments.

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Spring Widgets offer a platform for the easy creation and distribution of Widget content. I’ve included an example widget in this entry so you can see what I mean.

Widgets are very interesting and useful ways to distribute your stuff, if you’re an advertiser or even a humble blogger, but building widgets is a hassle, because there are so many standards for them. Tools like this one make widget creation a one-stop operation, and then deal with repurposing across all the widget platforms for you. Springwidgets generates code for Google, MySpace, Blogger, it has a downloadable version, and you can take the HTML and drop it into most web pages (including this one). There are lots of other widget platforms it could support: Vista and Mac OS X both have native widget capabilities, for example. I assume they’re working on these, but others will be if they aren’t.

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Yesterday I went hunting for the 31 Antony Gormley sculptures that have sprung up in Central London, which are part of his Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. The sculptures, all over-size and modelled on Gormley himself, have been placed on rooftops, on Waterloo Bridge and in other central locations, and all look towards the exhibit, as if it’s summoning them. The effect is quite surreal. As a piece of marketing, they’re genius, but is there a Google Map showing where they are? I can’t find one yet.

One thing that’s particularly clever about the work is the use of London as a 3-dimensional backdrop. Some of the sculptures are placed behind others, on slightly higher rooftops, so you can see both at the same time. A lot of planning went into this work…. They didn’t just drop them on random rooftops.

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Thanks to Vecosys for this story. The BBC Innovation Lab and Ymogen are trialling mobile, user-generated reporting, using Nokia’s latest mobile devices. You can see the results at this site.

Apparently, the phones don’t just track location, but also direction and velocity, so the information captured is quite novel. The real trick is going to be using this technology in a way that generates a more interesting experience than moblogging. The content at the moment is pretty standard, and apart from the mapping of photos that is done automatically (saving you the effort of doing it yourself in Flickr), there doesn’t seem to be much new here. I wasn’t interested in other people’s snaps from their mobiles before, and this doesn’t increase the value of the content, except I suppose when something major is happening and being photographed in real time.

I suppose using it to document a live event would be interesting in the hands of the right person, but the whole search / recommendation / tagging piece needs to be spot on or it will just be for people to communicate with their mates.

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I finally have an account with Freebase, the web-based database offering open access to data submitted by anyone who cares to. The service is pretty impressive and interesting, and we’re giving some thought to applications for it here at Agency.com.

Essentially, the service holds very structured data and definitions and has a wide range of access methods for creating and amending structures, for submitting, amending and querying data. There are stacks of documents and examples on the website and I think they’ve done a very solid job already.

I have a few referrals going spare if anyone geeky is interested in an account, so email me or request one through the comments form if you’d like to have a look for yourself.

The debate about ownership of data is certainly going to heat up with services like this one, as people contribute data that might be derived from other sources. A friend of mine operates a vertical search engine in property and if they scrape data from estate agents to submit it to Freebase, that will raise some very interesting questions.

And thanks to O’Reilly Radar for telling me about it in the first place.

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I have ads on my blog, partly to see if it might generate some beer money, but mostly to try out some of the technologies and see how good they are. There’s nothing like first-hand experience. And two cases in point have made me write the apparently self-referential posting I’m writing now…

The first is that Google’s Adsense is serving ads for Hardwood Conservatories on this blog, at least to me. I have no idea why that is. I can’t see any content relevant to conservatories. Behaviourally, I haven’t done anything with Google that has anything to do with conservatories. Are the hardwood conservatory companies targetting people who went to Internet World last week, or to Prague at the weekend? And will this posting increase the likelihood of a Google ad about hardwood conservatories?

You can draw your own (obvious) conclusions about the second case. I wrote a bit about Internet World last week, because I went to it a couple of times. Miva are now serving ads for sessions at Internet World, but bizarrely they’re serving ads for Internet World 2003. Surely these ads can’t still be attracting revenue from the advertiser? Will I get paid if you click on them?

I wouldn’t encourage you to click on anything that you shouldn’t. The last thing I want is spurious traffic from my site. I just thought it was odd, really. Do other people have similar experiences?

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I bought the big version of the Gorilla-pod recently and I’ve been using it a lot. It attaches to almost anything and can handle my big Nikon SLR with zoom lens quite comfortably. I used it over the weekend to take loads of interior shots of a church in Prague, and they’re really good.

There are 3 sizes, for different size cameras and the biggest one can take a tripod head like the ones Manfrotto make.

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Some of the categories in Jpgmag (the user-generated photography magazine) are getting a little hard for me to enter into … the current list includes viewpoints on the US and I know I can’t do anything much on that one.

Anyway, my entry for Dreamscapes is here and if you like it you can vote for it by clicking through on the photo.

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Test posting to Flickr and blog at the same time,
originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

If this worked, it means the whole MT XML RPC thing is working.

Fingers crossed.

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This is a lovely articulation of the “waterfall versus iterative” discussion. I agree with a lot of what Leisa is saying, though many clients have problems with the uncertainty of iteration. More than anything else though, I love the presentation style. Best use of post-it notes I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m definitely going to use Slideshare.

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