I was surfing Ning sites and came across this guy’s profile page and pic. If I’d have been drinking Coke, it would have come out my nose. (I love that he’s shooting from a little Heineken mini-keg.) He’s a member of Bobalicious in Canada, which is apparently a social network supporting an online online magazine up there.
I didn’t get too deep into social networking in HTDE/Web 2.0 Blog in part because services like Ning weren’t quite in full swing. But the truth is, as these services mature, Ning-like social networks offer a great way to mash up a blog and a forum to get a community of folks focused on getting to know one another better and having a little fun.
You need to have some momentum in terms of readership (three nerdy guys hanging out on a Ning is just about as exciting as three nerdy guys hanging out at one of their mother’s house without a Ning site) and it REALLY helps to have a reason to bring folks together, whether it’s regional or topical. (And if you can get people together IRL based on their social networking, all the better.)
But, that said, Ning is cool, and it can be “blogging” if you want — you can set up a Ning so that it’s very much like your personal blog (or a group blog) except you surround yourself with pictures, events and blog entries by others as well.
Anyway, if you’re reading the book and want to see if thing’s have gotten any further toward the “next big thing,” check out Ning and see if maybe it qualifies.
I appreciate what this reviewer is saying about my book…sometimes it’s tough to “hit” just right with the marketing, cover design and so on. The truth its, a lot of folks worked hard on the book (editors, tech editors, copyeditors, publicists) and not just me. But it’s a pleasure to receive glowing praise such as this:
Do yourself a favor: don’t judge this book by its (awful) cover. I’ve had this book by my side every step of the way while setting up my very first blog, and I have to say it has been a huge help. Stauffer’s style is direct and engaging, not cutesy. He tells you what you need to know to get started, without a lot of fluff.
I wanted to write a review here because I think this books deserves a big audience, and because the Amazon listing tells you little about what’s covered.
Bob then goes on to talk about the different topics in the book.
Actually, he brings up one problem I’ve had with Amazon on past projects — the book descriptions often come from very early entries in whatever cataloguing systems are used for book orders and sales. So, many times the descriptions of the books just aren’t as accurate by the time they’re written; this book, for instance, moved away from some programming coverage in part because the “rise of widgets” took place as I was writing. It took a long time to get the description changed to reflect the new outline.
Yes, it took me forever to finally make the leap to an iPhone but, now that I’ve been up and running with my iPhone for a few weeks, and I’ve got to say that I’m a little underwhelmed. Switching from a Blackberry has been interesting on two fronts.
First, I can totally see why Apple has announced a push strategy that goes along with the Me.com announcement — having to wait for your e-mail to download very much blows when you’re used to just looking down and seeing e-mail on your Blackberry instantly. I’m excited about the Me.com upgrade, since I already pay an arm-and-a-leg for my less-than-useful Mac.com account, but ONLY if the service will transparently allow me to send e-mail from my other accounts — I need it to work like Gmail in the respect that it seems that e-mail is coming from my jacksonfreepress.com account even if I’m using Apple Mail. If not, then it’s straight-up no dice on Me.com, because I can’t answer my work mail using an @me.com address.
Second, my main complaint about the iPhone might just be the carrier — AT&T is simply not as good as Alltel, my previous carrier, in this area. I’ve gone back to the days of hunting around in the room for a signal — something that I haven’t had to think about for years using my Alltel phones, whether regular clamshells or Blackberrys. Ms. D’s Treo is the same way — signal problems are very rare.
Since I’ve gone to the slick, swanky iPhone, I’ve had a LOT of trouble making actual phone calls. In my house, the signal only works well closer to a front window; in our office suite, I’ve found a better signal in the sales cubicles than in my own office. That just ain’t right.
Solution? I’m concerned that I’ll need to quickly make the decision to move to something else — back to Alltel, ideally, with, perhaps a Treo 755p. That’s not my greatest desire, since I like synching contacts and addresses with my iPhone — as a diehard Mac user, even in business, the iPhone excels on that front. Or, I could sit around and wait for AT&T to improve in my area, or I can hold on and hope that the 3G iPhone is better on actually being a phone.
I just stumbled on CounterNotions, where the author has a compelling piece on iPhone 2.0 and whether or not there’s another player in the market that can take it on.
I, personally, am watching this whole iPhone thing closely…although I swore months ago I wouldn’t go in for an iPhone, I ended up buying one one eBay somewhat accidentally (long story, but a I got a great price), but I haven’t yet activated it. Not sure what I was waiting for…but I’m getting closer.
Word of native iChat clients is helping me make that decision; I’m not a huge iChat user, but being able to bring up folks back in the office using iChat has proven very handy when I’ve had the capability in the past. (It was a feature that I found compelling about the T-Mobile SideKick, for instance.) I may be an iPhone user yet…
In what appears to be a direct response to my multiple blog entries on the topic, Apple announced yesterday that it will update Apple TV so that it can directly access the iTunes Store for rentals, videos and songs was music to my ears, since I’d been calling for that behavior for some time, as noted here and here.
Watch the guided tour and then sit back and realize something. You page through films, choose one to rent, then you rent it. Then you watch it. On your TV. That’s it. It works.
That, my friends, is a killer app.
Oh, plus, you can buy TV shows, play podcasts, play your music collection, buy more music…Apple TV just became the heart of your media center. (If you could rip movies to MPEG-4 from DVD that would take this thing even further. The drag-able movies from new DVDs will be the next best thing.) Apple TV can replace your music channels on digital cable or satellite — in fact, it can replace your CD player or iPod dock device altogether. Internet radio. It’s all there.
Once I’m allowed to buy an HDTV (ahem…Ms. D?) this will revolutionize how *I* watch TV. I imagine others will agree.
Now if only they would make it so that you can purchase football and baseball games without the damn commercials…
Very cute idea from Snoozester, a Web 2.0 product that, for as little as $3.99 per month, will give you a wake-up or reminder call on your home or cell phone. The service features a “SecureAwake” feature that will keep calling you until you answer the phone. (This assumes that, unlike me, you’re able to keep your mobile phone charged and ready to go at all times.)
Well, it took me about six months longer to write that I’d expected, but How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog is finally available. I got my author copies the other day, and I just noticed that Amazon is live and shipping. The book covers choosing a blogging application (I cover Blogger, TypePad, ExpressionEngine and, of course, WordPress) and then goes into some depth with customizing the blog’s design, multimedia offerings, headlines and so on and so on.
The book focuses mostly on incorporating existing Web 2.0 content into your blog and extending it onto the Web using social bookmarking and other services, and it even has a chapter that goes into how you can make money from your Web 2.0 blog. (Step One: write a book about Web 2.0 blogging. No, I’m kidding. Don’t do that. Less money for me.)
The one thing to watch out for in the Amazon description — I don’t know where they get that stuff…probably from the proposal. The book doesn’t really cover much PHP or AJAX scripting, as I figured out early on that I couldn’t fit that in a 400-page primer. Still, it lives on in the Amazon description, mocking me forever.
Anyway, if you’re interested in getting started with a blog and would feel more comfortable with a book by your side, check it out!
I just got a copy of iWork 08 in the office today and decided to install it during some downtime this afternoon. I had to write a short piece for the paper and thought it’d be fun to do it in Pages.
So, I did. Worked fine, although I was a bit dismayed to find the Word Count (a vital feature for newspaper writing) in the Inspector window instead of in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
Otherwise, no complaints.
Then I played with Numbers. I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy, although I do use them when I can’t avoid them. (That seems to be more often than not with the Film Society, not with the JFP where most of the financials are done in MYOB AccountEdge. But, I digress.)
What impressed me immediately was the graphical nature of Numbers, which made working with the spreadsheets I needed to create (a very small budget and then a list of our film society’s board members — I was filling out a grant application) fun to do. I got through those two sheets and decided to play with the templates.
While they’re cute and fun, I tired of the built-in Numbers templates quickly. So, I decided that I yearned (yearned!) for others. I found my way to Numbers Templates, a fun little site where people are posting a variety of different templates for Numbers. The programming for these things can get pretty sophisticated and, even more to the point, the sheets created tend to be attractive and fun to work with.
Like FileMaker, Final Cut, and Keynote before it, Numbers may be the “killer implementation” of an app for creative Mac users because it focused on both the mundane and the aesthetic. Suffice to say that I’m going to continue surfing for spreadsheet templates to play with — and that’s not the sort of thing I would have said, er, yesterday.
I missed this last week when it came out, so I’m sorry for being late to the party, but I just realized that Palm has killed the Foleo before it made it to market. I think that’s too bad — it seems to me that the media panned the Foleo unfairly just because it didn’t understand what value this sort of tweener device could bring to the market — if done right. Maybe I’m wrong in thinking this could be a nice product, but then again, I’m a little weird — I tend to focus on tethering abilities in phones, broadband over mobile and so on, as I think that’s the way to go.
A guy named Ryan, who describes himself as a fan of the KnowledgeTV show Disk Doctors (of which I was co-host) wrote today to let me know that he’d uploaded some old episodes to YouTube. This is awesome! I haven’t seen the show in years. (Yes, I’ve got a few tapes on my shelves, but it’s not like I bust them out often.) It’s funny to (a.) see how little gray hair I had (b.) listen to the computing topics of 1997-2000. Wow. Ancient stuff. And the running gag about me being a Mac guy even when the Mac was “dead.” Har de har.
Thanks, Ryan. Now that I no longer get recognized in airports (actually, I don’t know that I was ever recognized in an airport if I wasn’t standing next to Steven Sashen, who was recognized all the time) it’s nice to know those episodes will have a second life toiling in obscurity on YouTube.
I missed this 
