Personal blogging isn’t anything new; people have had blogs since the late 90’s — but only recently has it become so easy for anyone to create one. Fully dynamic blogs can be created within seconds using software like WordPress, Blogger or TypePad — all three of these offer free hosting services too.
Gary Vaynerchuk does a good job of explaining why everyone should have an online video show; I’m going to try and do the same for why everyone should have a blog.
Your blog is whatever you want it to be — but whatever it is, it’s original. Here are some reasons why everyone should have a blog:
Your online home
If anyone ever Googles your name, this will be the first result (in most cases). This means that people who know you can find you online; your blog could potentially be a meeting point for old friends.
Make your view heard
Blogging is all about your opinion, and it’s one of the best ways to get it out there. Sometimes, if people agree with your view, you’ll get a lot of publicity from social news websites like Digg linking to you — suddenly your blog becomes the centre of attention — all because of your opinion.
Unleash your creativity
Not all of us will have the opportunity to write a book — but we can all write a blog. Share your thoughts, photos, videos and more to the world. It doesn’t matter if everyone doesn’t like what you share, but out of the millions of people in the world, someone will.
It’s the new media
Mainstream media is slowly diminishing: Newspapers are becoming blogs; TV Shows are becoming YouTube shows; Radio shows are becoming podcasts. The future is on the internet, and blogging will be even bigger than it is today — establishing a domain and blog early may help you in the future.
There’s a recent phenomenon of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services appearing across Europe, the USA and some other parts of the world. IPTV is intended to be the next-generation of television — delivering content to a user whenever they want it, rather than traditional schedule-based TV that we’re used to today. It sounds great — but there is one major dilemma: Internet.
As I have posted before, the world needs faster broadband. Delivering short, low-quality video clips that are compressed is no problem at the moment — but when it comes into larger, even high-definition video, most users’ internet connections will struggle.
In the UK, the current leaders appear to be ISPs: BT’s BT Vision, and Virgin’s Virgin Media — both of which are terrible services. They claim to give entirely “on demand” services; as it turns out, this isn’t the case. Both services come free or discounted when you purchase the ISP’s internet service, which is appealing to the consumer. However, both services do not work at all.
BT and Virgin have tried to combine traditional over-the-air digital TV with IPTV, and it doesn’t work. For a start, the actual set-top boxes are ugly: No thought has been put into the design, and good design is key to a good product. It’s the same story with the interfaces — BT are using Microsoft (not a good choice), and Virgin appear to be using a proprietary OS for set-top boxes. The interfaces are hard to use, and rarely do what you want them to do. Also, the quality of the streams aren’t worth watching on a TV bigger than 26 inches, in my opinion. HD streams is what the next generation of TV needs, not to go back a step in quality.
TV over the internet can work, but none of the big ISPs seem to get it. I think IPTV should be left to companies who are dedicated to changing the way we watch TV, rather than ISPs who are in the game purely for the money.
I’m a Google guy — like most of us, I have been using Google as my search engine for everything: Information, images, news, and maps; until now.
Microsoft’s previous MSN search was not impressive at all, and their new Live Search is nothing compared to Google. However, their Live Maps feature is quite an improvement over what Google is currently offering. 3-dimensional bird’s eye views are available on Microsoft’s map service. I actually found that, although the interface is not as smooth being web-based, it provided better images of my area than Google Earth.
I also noticed that Google has done a terrific job of “Street Mapping” major cities in the US, but not much else than central London is in street view in the UK. If Google can learn from Microsoft’s bird’s eye view, they would have the perfect service.
Although I still prefer Google’s interface, and compatibility with other browsers like Safari, Microsoft have done a decent job with their new maps feature. I’m still going to be using Google for everything, but I may check back to Live Maps for more detailed bird’s eye views.
At the time of writing this, Twitter is down. With over 1 million users registered, Twitter is the largest micro-blogging website, and one of the most popular social networks on the internet.
Created back in July 2006, Twitter was built without the idea of so many users for the service. Its infrastructure isn’t designed for this many people sending status updates every second.
For me at least, it appears Twitter goes down a lot. It may just be the fact that I’m in a different time zone to most Twitter users (GMT/UK Time); however, Twitter have created a global community, and need to keep that in mind when performing maintenance on their site.
Whether Twitter needs more processing power added to its service, or just a complete re-code of the way it processes updates - it needs to be done. Twitter: Your service is awesome, but nothing will stop you losing your powerful user base if this frequent downtime continues - please, fix it.
More and more people are becoming regular users of the internet today; sending e-mails, making VOIP calls, chatting through video, watching YouTube, sharing photos, downloading music; the list is endless. Most of these activities require a lot of bandwidth, and most current infrastructures can only deliver between 8 and 16mbps. I’m on an “8mbps” plan from BT right now - but it’s more like 6mbps.
However, not all of the world is lagging behind in internet speeds. Japan has an average of 60mbps, Korea has an average of 45mbps and Finland has an average of 25mbps. These are average speeds, not the highest speeds. The UK has less than 4mbps average, and about the same for the USA.
There are three main options for upgrading broadband speeds:
Fiber Optic Cable
Verizon in the USA is already offering a service they call “FiOS” - but it only delivers speeds of up to 25mbps, mainly in densely populated areas. In theory, fiber optic cable can bring speeds between 50mbps and 100mbps - but it’s going to be hard to lay an entirely new infrastructure across countries.
VDSL
VDSL stands for Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line. It uses existing copper lines, with fiber optic lines to bring speeds of up to 100mbps. It’s still pretty hard to deploy, but costs a lot less than fiber.
WiMAX
WiMAX, as you may have guessed (or not), is a wide area form of Wi-Fi. You wouldn’t need a Wi-Fi router in your home, instead you would just connect to a WiMAX transmitter which is nearby. WiMAX can deliver speeds of up to 70mbps, and can travel up to 50km (31 miles).
Sources: [BBC News], [Digg]
I’m currently registered on over 25 social networks - only 5 of which I use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Last.fm. New social networking websites are being created right now, to compete with the expansive number of other social networking websites currently in the cloud.
I agree with Brad Fitz and his “social graph” theory.
“The goal is not to build a social networking site or anything that’s fun for the end-user. Rather, the goal is to build the guts that allow a thousand new social applications to bloom, like Dopplr, etc. Do one thing and do it well
. It will be most powerful to instead merge little isolated social graphs into one big social graph and spread it far and wide, for all to enjoy.”
Creating another Facebook is not the right thing to do - there is not a social network for everything, and there never will be. Facebook is extremely close to being that with its support for third-party applications - but still doesn’t include everything in one.
However, I have noticed that there are several new social networks appearing that have the same purpose as others. I don’t believe this is the way forward. If Twitter already exists, why make another one? There are enough photo and video sharing websites out there - you can’t beat Flickr or YouTube by just re-branding a clone of them; you have to think different; do something new and innovative.
I’m happy for there to be many social networks out there, all with a different single purpose: Twitter for status updates, Flickr for photos, Dopplr for travel, Vimeo for videos. But creating a clone of something that already exists and does the job well is not the way forward, and these sites will fail.
As an avid iPod and Mac user, the most obvious choice for buying music would be the iTunes Store - now the world’s most popular music destination online. However, I recently gave up with the iTunes Store; there are plenty of other alternatives out there offering more reasonable prices and higher bitrate tracks - with no DRM.
7Digital is the site I’m now trying. Its library is almost as comprehensive as iTunes’, but the quality of tracks is much better. I can get 320kbps DRM-free MP3s from 7Digital, for the same price as a 128kbps DRM AAC track from Apple’s iTunes Store.
There are really no advantages to buying from iTunes - the only minor one I can think of is that it’s all integrated into one piece of software. Apple don’t even let you download the song more than once - unless you contact them and plead for them to allow you to download it again. With 7Digital, and many other music stores, you can simply visit your downloads “locker” and download it again - as many times as you want - forever.
For me, PayPal is an extremely important feature. I don’t have a credit card, and therefore rely on PayPal for all my payments. iTunes in the UK does not support PayPal, 7Digital does.
The iTunes Store has improved since it startred. Apple now offer DRM-free AAC tracks at 256kbps - but their selection is limited, and the price is 10p extra. Obviously, iTunes is still the only place to buy music videos and TV shows that I can think of.
The message of this blog post is: You don’t have to stick with iTunes. There are plenty of other alternatives out there - some better, some worse. I highly recommend 7Digital for those in the UK and Europe.
Of course, you don’t have to buy music; if you feel like being a pirate, head over to the dozens of BitTorrent trackers or warez sites.
Flickr yesterday released video compatibility to their hugely popular photo-sharing website. Flickr has caused a lot of controversy in the blogosphere due to video - some think it’s a great idea - some think Flickr was made for photos, and always will be.
Flickr video is different to most other video-sharing websites; it limits you to 90 seconds of video on 150MBs. So obviously Flickr isn’t going after the same type of content found on YouTube - the largest video website in the world, with limits ranging from 10 minutes to unlimited (with a director account). There is also no HD video support in Flickr’s video - in fact most of the video I’ve seen looks worse quality than YouTube.
Flickr has its reasons for restricting you to 90 seconds of video. It’s not looking for music videos, or video shows - Flickr is looking for short, simple videos that will praise your photos. For example, a photoset of a vacation could include some short video clips to give the viewer more explanation.
Right now, Flickr users around the world are playing around with video. I don’t think many people have got the concept yet, and neither have I entirely. But I figure in less than a few weeks people will know exactly what to use Flickr’s new video feature for. Flickr with video is certainly not just another video-sharing site - it’s the same old Flickr community as we knew it; with the addition of short, 90-second video clips to compliment your photos.
If you’re like me, you’ll be signed up to almost every social network/web 2.0 website in existence; but it can become hard for others to keep track of your profiles across the internet, and you could forget your username too. There are so many social networks I’m signed up on, that I needed a one organised place to put all my profile links.
I use a service called ClaimID - it’s simple, fast and works great. It has support for OpenID, and ClaimID can even be your OpenID host. You can sign up at ClaimID for free and start posting links. Take a look at my profile as an example.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook is to launch an IM service of its own, possibly as soon as next week. I’ve thought up three reasons why Facebook’s IM won’t work:
Not innovative
I can’t go ahead and say it’s not innovative without seeing or using it, but given from what Facebook has done in the past, I can see this just being a plain old web-based IM, branded with the Facebook logo.
Jabber
Jabber is a great thing for users, but what about Facebook themselves? Surely advertising revenue is lost through people using other IM clients than their own.
Web-based IM hasn’t taken off
And it probably never will - not until the semantic web (a.k.a. “Web 3.0″). It’s just something about desktop applications that makes them feel more responsive, reliable and generally better than web-based ones. I like to be signed on to MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk for all the time I’m using my computer. I don’t think anyone wants to be logged on to a website all day. Saying that, you do have the option to use something like Adium through the Jabber platform.
Another point about the whole web-based thing - you won’t get rich, visual experiences on a website. Webcam conversations, audio conversations can be done through websites - but not that well - nothing like Skype.
I know a lot of people are now excited about Facebook’s IM, but I still think the big guys (MSN and AIM) are there to stay for quite some time. Just because it’s branded “Facebook” doesn’t mean it’s good.
Stephen |