Qik, Snowfall
Here, some qik snowfall, on the last day of the year
Tweetgrid – a tool to make sense of it.
Yesterday someone twittered about tweetgrid, a simple to use web interface that allows you to see, in real time what people are tweeting about. It filters as many key words to chose and dedicates one portion of the screen per word. If you select four words then you can watch as four topics are discussed. if you select just two then you see only two.
The reason this is a useful tool is that it makes trend watching easier. Imagine the new year’s celebration. You could watch as a few people speak about what they’re doing, as they wish you a happy new year.
The point of tweetgrid is that it’s a quick, easy to use interface that you can use from any computer.
The idiocy of the Mobile flickr website (or why I hate Iphone optimised mobile websites)
Flickr had a mobile website that worked well because it was developed for all mobile devices. As a result I was getting into the habit of taking pictures, amending the title and adding comments whilst on the move.
Recently though, the mobile developers at Flickr decided to do what every narrow minded developer of mobile websites likes to do. Develop something for the iphone and ipod touch. This is theoreticaly a great idea but in practice it’s a nightmare for anyone using a normal phone. it’s a nightmare because all of the mobile functionality of websites disappears. As a result of this the website is all but unusable. And no I’m not going to get an iphone.
It’s a shame that the mobile web developing community are doing this more and more. I hope that flickr will do their best to rectify this most annoying of situations.
Der baader Meinhof-Komplex
There are some films we may not intentionaly go to see. Der Baader Meinhof-Komplex is one of them. The English title is The Baader Meinhof Complex
leweb | seesmic | social media
Le meur, Seesmic and some images
Whilst everyone that was present at the Paris Seesmeetup has gone home to their day to day lives the images taken are still doing the rounds. I noticed that two of my images were included in Loic Le meur’s blog. Normally all the Francofous should be able to name every shown. Can you?
Looking forward to many more seesmeetups to come.
Blogobar Neuchatel
One of the most amusing things about the blogobar meetup in Neuchatel was how many iphones were there. It was particularly amusing to see the time spent look at apps, trying to see which was the most fun. Of course we didn’t travel from various parts of Switzerland for that sole purpose. It would have been silly and we would have renamed the event, Iphone party Switzerland or the likes.
Those present were Xavier Bertschy of multimediacertified.ch, John Maim of Minsh, Alexander Matti of blackberry-fr, Stephan Blanchard of apus3 and Samuel Kohler of Marketing Alternatif.
The venue was the Sultan in Neuchatel. The next Blogobar will take place in March in Vevey so if you’re interested in coming to the event then just sign up.
The N95 8gb, google maps and navigation
If it’s something geeky you’ll see me learn how to use it. The most recent thing I’ve played with is the n95 8gb and google maps. This time though it was from a car rather than on foot and as a result it was far quicker to correct a mistake. I took care to locate the satellites before leaving home so that when I arrived to Lausanne I could stop by the side of the road, load google maps, press 0 and the gps in the phone would automatically locate me within 30 kilometers.
I then had to type the address of where I wanted to go and confirm it was correct. Within seconds I had a track. I looked at it. Saw where I was and where I needed to go and that was that, very easy. Once or twice I overshot but within just a few seconds I knew and finding the place was a piece of cake.
Of course I didn’t use the device whilst the car was moving. I made sure to keep both eyes attentive to the road conditions and only when I was stopped did I check. It worked really well.
Eclau in Lausanne
The Co working space in Lausanne (ECLAU/FB) is an interesting idea for freelancers and those who have some work to do but do not want to work from home or a cafe. There are desks and couches, a meeting space and more from which individual work and team work can be done. I was there for an Apero last night and got to meet a few of the people.
At the moment there are four people there using the space full time and another who go there occasionally. For those like me who go there very occasionaly we can drop by and work there if we so desire. It’s easy to get to from the motorway and apparently not too hard from the center of Lausanne.
One of the members is a cat, apparently he loves to come in through one window, sleep on the couches and distract certain people before walking out through a window at the other side of the space. What’s interesting is that the participants of L’Eclau think of him as a sort of alarm clock. He’s there to remind them that they should take a little break from the work they were doing.
I know quite a few people in Lausanne now so it might be an interesting place to meet some people when there are some collaborative efforts to be done.
TweetCamp
This morning whilst tweeting with Fahran Rehman we decided that we would like to organise a twitter event in London with a difference. Twestival and twinterval are great ideas but we’re thinking of doing something over a period of two days that would be like a podcamp but over two days and we need your ideas to make it worthwhile.
Already we have 27 people on facebook interested in the project and another 6 so far on tweetcamp. It would take place in London in the not too distant future normally. The reason for it taking place in London is that there are over 10,000 twitter users theoretically based in London already so we might expect at least two to three hundred to come along to participate.
If you’re interested in participating then put your name down and let’s get the project underway and see how much interest we can gather.
The Social Media Lifestyle
I believe I’m living the social media lifestyle, that is that wherever I go I have both my mobile phone and my ipod touch. As a result I am never more than a hotspot away from the world wide web and it’s content. In Switzerland I’m online as I hike through the mountains taking pictures which I can then upload to flickr for you to enjoy.
That’s also the reason I decided to start a new blog called The Social Media Lifestyle. The purpose of the new blog will be to explore the thoughts and conversations I have with non social media nuts and why they are not interested in being as active as we are. I have based my first serious post around a conversation in the TGV from Paris to Geneva and some overheard comments at a cinema in Switzerland.
What I hope to achieve through this blog is to shift the conversation away from how advertisers can promote brands and products and instead promote the adoption of new social tools such as Facebook, twitter, seesmic, flickr and plurk to name but a few. We’ve got to find the best way to explain to our audience why and how the social media will improve, rather than degrade their lifestyle.