LOL at this Wired article!
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
I agree with the author. Blogging is so 2004. For the record: I installed WordPress on this server in September 2004. Time to pull the plug.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr instead.
(BTW I’m still the top entry at Google for Boring Flower Snapshot)
😉
Here are the snapshots of the second architecture tour that I took part in:
We cycled from Tinguely Museum in Basel and stopped at various points in Riehen and Grenzach Wyhlen.
Heard about Hans Bernoulli and his Garden City idea to provide improved housing for the working class as well as a patch of ground to grow vegetables and fruit. The wooden houses he built in the Landauer Quartier are apparently still in a good condition. The lease for the Landauer area will expire in 2012 or 2013. And already there are prototypes what this area could look like (mostly high rise buildings and blocks).
We saw how a small Riehen house from the 1930s was renovated to accommodate for an aging family member in need of medical care and special attention.
Next, we cycled up the hill and stopped at a couple of Riehen villas before rolling across the border to Germany.
One building that really stood out was a brand-new gallery/studio building in Wyhlen by Gerner Gerner Plus, an Austrian architectural office.
The last building of the day was a private house designed by Askari Architekten from Lörrach.
It was interesting to listen to the owners and architects. It seems that if you really want to build and invest, you also need to become a lobbyist and persuade local authorities and politicians.
Pêle-mêle off the top my head:
In my daily reads, I stumbled across a WordPress plugin called Tagaroo. It reminded me of Zemanta. I haven’t tried it out. But I guess the interesting part is that it is being sponsored/developed by media giant Thomson Reuters as part of the Calais project.
As usual I’ve been taking lots of snapshots. Faves of the week include:
Oh and yeah, I know what this year’s Christmas card will look like:
I tried out some night photography which was a lot of fun. Found out that I’ll need a good, lightweight tripod to pursue this more seriously.
The Swiss consumer magazine K-Tipp published the results of a chocolate degustazione.
I downloaded hours of video podcasts on CSS.
African bloggers in Amsterdam:
Picnic 08 (an annual tech. conference held in northern Europe) had a special Africa track called “Surprising Africa”. There’s a short video featuring the speakers here (via tweet).
I just surfed through lots of cool new photos in the Malawi group on Flickr.
Including these photos of Mulanje mountain by Lisa de Vreede:
This recent Twitter announcement is disappointing on a personal level, but also on a more global level as White African discusses:
Twitter represents a change in communication. By acting as a global gateway for updates via SMS (or the web), that then updates all of your followers, Twitter succeeded in breaking ground in one-to-many messaging. There have been a couple times over the past year where Twitter was used in Africa to get news out that wasn’t possible in any other format.
And in the comment thread he explains:
What’s missing for it to work in Africa is not just the sending of updates, but the receiving of your contacts updates. That really is what created the network effect for Twitter, and why it can’t succeed where it’s not available.
In Africa, not having SMS is a deal killer. Though there would undoubtedly be users who access it through the web – as is true throughout the rest of the world, true penetration in Africa can only come through services that can be fully operational using only SMS. Why I think this is particularly disappointing is that those third generation Twitter services that could really serve the needs of both ordinary Africans and humanitarians globally will not be built now.
The really interesting thing to me, so that Twitter doesn’t have to shoulder the load by itself, is the opportunity to build services that are separate and independent, but also equal. I guess the closest analogy I have would be to Jabber in this case – where anyone can run a server and that makes the whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.
A very interesting thread, which I’d like to recommend here.
My observations in Blantyre:
This t-shirt text puzzled me this morning…
ZIM
TST
ERN
I figured it out after a while but at first I kept associating ZIM with Zimbabwe.
I’ve uploaded two batches of snapshots to my Flickr stream. I’m a snapshotter at heart and I’m not spending much time correcting or editing my work (yet).
Unhindered by talent or technical skills, I hope I can at least convey the fun I’m having. I particularly enjoyed Saturday’s photo tour with Diveangel.
BTW, there’s a Basel Flickr meetup planned for 27th July 2008.
I’ve uploaded my wild snapshots of San Francisco covering smoothies, books, bikers, shopping, browsing magazines, coffee, cars, Ocean Beach, the hotel, buildings, streets, public transport, signs, Lufthansa and waiting.
BTW, I didn’t see a single Clinton 08 poster, I did see several Obama 08 posters and a guy selling Obama buttons. I guess, it doesn’t say much since the California primary already took place. Just something I noticed.
added to the Nutella alternatives group.
just got back from one week Southern Florida.
More snaps in my Flickr stream:
http://flickr.com/photos/chiperoni/.
When I read Scoble’s post on FlickrFan, I felt it sounded a lot like Slickr, a screensaver tool to view Flickr photos, that I’ve been using for a while.
And today while installing the Flickr plugin for Quicksilver I saw this post:
View Your Flickr Pics as Your Screensaver with FlickrFan
with this small addition at the end:
Windows users looking for something similar should check out previously mentioned Slickr.
According to one of the comments I read at Lifehacker you can set up Google Photos Screensaver to do something similar.
It seems FlickrFan is based on RSS feeds and offers some kind of Twitter integration.
Further links:
http://www.flickrfan.org/
Slickr download
Google Photos Screensaver
If you’re a widely-read blogger with a Mac-only view of the world, this is a revolution… 😉
This looks useful:
Upload to Flickr with Quicksilver
The QS plugin page is here.
I still need to try out the new Flickr Uploadr that was released a couple of weeks ago.
Just heard about the The Cloud Appreciation Society.
Here’s the corresponding Flickr group.
i’ve measured my life out in flickr uploads
here’s another life phase
Yay, the Nutella Alternatives group is growing (world dominion imminent…).
Recent additions include:
The question
Why spend so many hours and bytes on Nutella and derivatives?
It’s a web differentiator! And when people wander thru the shopping aisles with their phone cams they need a purpose.
The Flickr group lists all the details:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/nutellaalternative/
Childhood memories
As regular readers of Chiperoni know, the author grew up under African skies. Nutella and all subsitutes thereof were unknown. A friendly soul somewhere in Germany sent a package containing a small bucket in brown plastic of Nutella-like bread spread.
At school my Nutella sandwich was commented with a universal “Yuck“. South Africans, Brits, Zimbabweans, Indians, North Americans and Malawians didn’t even try it.
More for us and some classmates from the Netherlands.
I -in turn- never really acquired a taste for Marmite.
I just installed GIMPshop on my (no longer new) MacBook. And the interface looks a lot simpler.
And I received a Skitch invite. I don’t like the pink heart icon much. Kitsch.
But I somehow managed to get past that and watch the introductory video (!). The features look very useful. It offers a direct upload to Flickr. Looks like a good tool for quick screenshots. OS X’s Grab only offers TIFF, which isn’t recognized by the Flickr Uploadr for some reason or other. And which means opening GIMP or GraphicConverter or Preview. 20 clicks more.
BTW, I’m sitting in a train to northern Germany and there are quite a number of free seats for a Friday evening… (and a power plug right next to me: hope it works). I guess, the strike warnings caused a lot of people to reschedule.
(Insert pause to take a snapshot of setting sun near Karlsruhe, will be uploaded when I find adequate WiFi access)
Quite a few regional trains have been cancelled. The official reason given via the pa is “wegen Notfall” (Translation: cos of an emergency).
Why not say strike? Emergency sounds like accident or natural catastrophe (can’t spell, too much German on my brain).
Wondering out loud:
Would the new PR approach be more direct and advise the German railway company to use the word “strike” or would it find a roundabout way to describe the situation?
(I forgot to take “The New PR” book with me.)
(I like the size of my 13″ MacBook. Just right for travelling.)
Anyway, “the new PR” book has got me thinking a lot more about buyer personas.
Who am I writing my marketing collateral, company blog posts, and technology announcements for? What kind of things are they interested in? How does a buyer persona search for a new service provider? Keeping your target audience in mind while writing is nothing new. Buyer personas, though, are on a more detailled level, describing a character and a typical work/leisure setting.
And it also reminded me of Bogo’s talk at the STC Transalpine conf in Zurich last April. He stressed the importance of agreeing on personas to develop adequate tech. documentation and user interfaces.
I signed up for Redbubble.com a couple of days ago. It offers a service to upload, sell and print artwork via the web all-in-one. Payment is transferred by Paypal or cheque. There’s a minimum price for the printing and production costs. And you as the seller of the artwork can decide on the markup (i.e. your gain/income/profit). I stumbled across this service via Ozczecho’s Flickr profile. My first impression of Redbubble.com is very positive and IMHO this could develop into a viable Flickr and Etsy alternative.
Still on my list of fun to dos:
Buy a DSLR
Set up an Ubuntu laptop
Learn more Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts (zoom in and out with command + option and ^ or ‘)
Install WordPress 2.3
Try out Pixelmator
Write a book (LOL)
Go on vacation
Disclaimer: at times Chiperoni.ch is my personal online thinktank and my half-geek playground.
Seen in Martin Gyger’s Flickr stream:
These lego faces are fun!
Just like web icons… you can see the pixels when you zoom in.
Scrolling Ad Infinitum:
I discovered a new Flickr tool called Flickriver…
It loads all images into one long html page, i.e. you simply scroll down to view all pictures for a tag or group:
Canon ImageBrowser to FlickrUploadr:
BTW, I’ve found a shortcut how to add photos from Canon ImageBrowser to Flickr Uploadr. In the ImageBrowser, open Preferences and add Flickr Uploadr to the list of external editing applications. Once you’ve added it, you can send images to Flickr Uploadr while in preview mode using Edit > Edit with Registered Application > Flickr Uploadr.
Alternative to Satellite:
I stumbled across lumis Gallery. The concept is similar to Satellite, i.e. you can host photos on Flickr and reload them on your own server within your own layout. It seems to have more features…. It requires PHP 5 and a Flickr account.
Today’s personal faves:
Via Flickr mail I asked somebody who seems to be on the Ipernity payroll:
Thanks for leaving a comment in my photostream.
I was wondering if you could answer my question regarding Ipernity’s funding.Who are the investors?
Is it independent? Is it funded by venture capital? Or does it belong to another company?See my blog post: The most interesting pictures
Here’s the answer I received via Flickr mail:
ipernity is french company totally independent and self-funded.
Well. I still think it looks a bit like Sixapart’s Vox.
Basel-based artist and illustrator, Martin Gyger, has launched a website:
The site uses Satellite and a Flickr account to display the artwork. Simple.
Couple of my favorites are [1] [2] [3]
Browse thru the site, send a friendly welcome email, or leave a Flickr comment…
The most interesting pictures by nchenga
Cos I don’t have a Pro account at Flickr, the above link only finds the most interesting based on my last 200 snapshots.
BTW, it seems there’s a viable alternative at Ipernity. At least it loads a lot faster than Zooomr, it offers a tidy layout, and the texts have a European feel:
Attention, do not load another page while the upload is processing, it would crash it.
Greater firms didn’t await us to launch services that are now mainstays of Web 2.0.
Bundled with a bilingual French / English company blog. Nice.
It feels a bit like Vox, which I’m testing over at nchenga.vox.com. You can upload photos, videos, and audio and setup a blog. Maybe Ipernity is a subsidiary of 6A?
Yay for European english…!
(update) LOL. I just found this quote:
If Yahoo really want to annoy people, they could wait a month or three, then buy Ipernity – and immediately announce that they’re merging it with Flickr…
How many online services did you sign up for, use once or twice, and then never return again?
In my case, that would be lots of ’em. Some of them are really popular services like Digg or Mister Wong, where I just haven’t found a personal use case, or I’ve got a substitute or workaround. While some of them have disappeared, like leze.de or gada.be.
Here’s an idea for a blog post which I’ll update as I go along and find more unused websites in the backwaters of my Internet history.
Sites I tried, but which I don’t use anymore:
Sites or services that I visit regularly:
On the content side of things, I read:
My favorite RSS feed by far:
New explorations:
Introducing piece 0 plastic’s plastic waterbottle on head Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/324675@N25/
will probably be an Olympic sport by 2009…
Thanks, Sean!
