That’s fun 🙂
Thanks to the Geneva Lake Parade I saw a nice jump in traffic to the twelve videos or so I streamed and uploaded yesterday. I suppose when you cover the right event there is an audience. This is just one small example of why I should continue streaming video content.
That’s also why I should get the content on a number of platforms.
When you’re creating web content that’s fed please think about those that are reading your feed from a device that is disconnected. here I am on a train and I’m captive to the content that you make available on your feed. Some feeds have the full article but others don’t.
The result of this has a simple consequence. There is no use for your feed on my mobile device since there is no content. I would thus urge anyone with a feed to make sure to make all content available so that people may access it on the move, especially since Wifi is not yet ubiquitous.
A few months ago I filmed the Silent Disco in Paddington station, one of London’s main train stations. As a result of the coverage of the event many people were happy to see it. With the footage I have recently filmed of the events that took place on the 6th of October I am once again getting a lot of that appreciation through facebook comments.
It feels good and I need to find more events to cover that will get this type of response.
update:–
I’m also really looking forward to watching the trends on tubemogul as I see whether it will increase over a period of hours or a period of days. It’s always fun to watch how many views you get over a period of weeks and months.
Content creation and Social Networks both fulfil our need to communicate with others. In one case we are working on the long form and creating content in blog form, photographs, well produced videos and more and through certain social networks we do the opposite. On twitter and facebook we spend most of our time writing two or three sentences at a time. These posts are quickly out of date.
Content creation in the form of article writing, blogging, well produced video, photo essays and more take time. You need to think of an idea and you need to think of a narrative. You need to find 300 words of content. You need to find at least two or three minutes of content if not more. If you challenge yourself to create this content then you see why facebook, twitter, vine and other short or quick social sharing platforms are so popular. It also explains why Geocities and other platforms eventually implode.
According to recode Twitter is making a huge video push — and tweaking Vine’s six second limit in the process.
The move is also symbolic of Twitter’s willingness to change elements of its product that have become part of its identity. Last month Twitter tweaked its iconic 140 character limit to get people tweeting more. Now it’s tweaking Vine’s six second video restriction, too. Former Vine boss Jason Toff (who left in January for Google) told
Recode last fall that Vine’s video limit was not “overly sacred.â€
Vimeo differentiated itself from other video sharing services in that it showed that it wanted high quality edited videos rather than rushes like we used to find on Google. In the last few months the quality of videos on youtube has really increased. There are a number of gameplay, engineering, fitness videos, how-to instructional videos and more. Finally Youtube is a source for serious content. We will see when Vine, Snapchat and other video services establish the same reputation.
Letter writing and blogging are similar. Recently Documentally started letter writing again. These “letters” are newsletters written every friday and sent by e-mail to a small number of people. I too have started “letter writing” but as blog posts. The beauty of “letter writing” is that we can write when we have time rather than when people are available. As these are asynchronous people can read what we wrote ten minutes or ten years from now. Now that instant messaging style social media conversations are sent back to the history books we have a greater freedom to choose where we share content.
Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are.
if you’re logged in then you see a number of features:
Blogging:
This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible.
Camera:
There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to.
The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon.
The Gallery:
The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures.
Guestbook
I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory.
Contact me.
There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds.
Presence
The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile – Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability – Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state – Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone.
Webchat
allows those on the site to chat with the web server user.
Calendar
The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when
Messaging:
It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold.
Phone Log.
Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions
Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts.
Conclusion
With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already.
Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan.
The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious.
Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.
Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.
Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.
The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.
Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.
Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.
Recently I have spent more time on Facebook and I have joined a few photo groups. One of them is for the Canton De Vaud, where people are sharing photos they have taken of the region. These photographs are well framed, well lit, and pleasant to look at. It feels like a community of photographers.
Part of my reason for wanting to return to Facebook is this group. If there is a group of local people sharing photographs then there is a good chance that there are other local groups for sharing other images, events and more.
Over the last two days I have followed groups that share archive photos, paintings, post cards and more. These images show Geneva, Nyon, Vevey, Gland, Crassier and other places as they looked several decades ago. This is a fun and pleasant journey back in time. We get to see Perdtemps when it was a park for people to walk in, and then as a park where people would play football, before finally seeing it as we know it, an ugly parking.
These groups have value, because old photos have value. They show us the ordinary world as it was at specific moments in time. It shows us place de Neuve with a tram and an old car. it shows us the castle of Nyon after an important fire in a local mill, and more.
It shows us the train that ran from Divonne to Nyon and back. I learned about this line by playing Geocache, but learned more by trying to find photos of the trains and stations. If you go to Divonne, by the pub, you can see the old train station. The former line is now a cycling and walking path. Recent history is just as interesting as ancient history.
There is an image of the Gare Cornavin before surrounding buildings were built. In another photo you can see Geneva as it looked in the 1950s or earlier. You can see Geneva airport in the middle of the countryside, before the motorway and other buildings were built.
With old photographs, paintings and other types of images you get a feel for how places looked before they were built upon. You see places before the popularisation of cars and more. You also see how buildings used to look when each one was unique. It is worth taking time to explore these old galleries of images.
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😀 That *is* fun!