Moblog

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to write my blog posts in email. One of the frustrating things about Drupal 6’s release was the lack of an updated mailhandle.module to go with it, but this has (recently?) been resolved now and will likely mean that you’ll see blog posts on Teradome again. Finally!

I have to admit it, I’m jealous of the mobile client for Vox.

As a blogger, I’ve exposed myself to a number of applications — mobile and desktop — that allow for remote posting and editing. But none of the mobile clients were as good as the one that Vox released for their service.

In my case, I got to try out the S60 3rd Edition version on my E70 and it’s beautiful. For starters, every post (so far) is iconified into a thumbnail, making it easy to find the media type of the item. Then, each item is badged based on if it has been modified or not. It’s extremely easy to scan, edit and batch-post content.

Back to media type — it makes Vox an excellent photo moblog since you can create photo posts with it as well. And like ShoZu, it hooks into the camera application of the phone, giving you a one-click post-to-blog option immediately after taking a picture. Or choose “publish automatically” and have photos uploaded without interruptions, perfect for live-blogging an event.

Why am I jealous, then? Because it only works for Vox. Most third-party blogs support the MetaWeblog API which allows for remote posting — ironically, this API was heavily supported by MovableType, the blogging software that SixApart, the company that created Vox, first produced.

As a Drupal blogger, I guess I’ll have to keep waiting for a mobile client that works as well, and looks as good as Vox’s.

It’s funny just how important posting-via-email has become to me for updating Teradome. Now that mailhandler, the Drupal module that provides this function, has been updated for 5.0 — or at least, has been patched for compatibility in HEAD and is awaiting a formal release — I can resume posting to Ol’ Bloggy here from the comfort of my Sidekick.

Since there’s no way to edit a post by email after it’s sent, I only get one shot — just like with any email (although yes, I can edit it once it’s on the site, still). It feels better than a “blog editor” since I take more care editing it the first time around, and drafting something just feels more intimate since I’m carrying it on me all the time instead of having to visit an admin page in a browser to see it.

I’ve also noticed that using Twitter has helped my writing. I refuse to over-abbreviate in order to fit a message in a “tweet” as some are calling it — as I had said, if yr usin 2 much abbv in yr post, yr usin the wrng mdium. Brevity and succinctness are key. For me, Twitter is about fragments of time, not sentences.

In any case, now that my phone has been re-enabled as a multi-faceted tweeting, blogging, photo-posting machine, my only worry from here is how good the text entry is on the iPhone. But, unlike the Sidekick, at least it’ll have a spellchecker.

I guess Danger’s target market would get slowed down by spelling checkers more than they’d be helped. Rly.

I’ve been saying digg is a bulletin board since my holiday break, when I found a top-dugg story had in fact been just a photo stored in the poster’s imageshack (or similar) account. In fact, there are many signs that your darling web 2.0 company is in fact just another web 1.0 site with a glossy new outfit:

• “News” submissions are increasingly just questions to digg users that don’t link to anything, and the users are still voting them up
• Commenters are more interested in creating new threads on the site than talking about the posted content
• Wars break out over the slightest deviation from “community etiquette”… just ask the fellow who wrote the most dugg down comment ever.
• Blog content — that is, pure op-ed that is typically not researched or unverified — is wholly welcomed

Actually, that last item is sort of a trick entry. There’s value in a site that ranks and draws attention to user-generated content of all levels (just look at Technorati as an example), but that’s not what the industry loves digg for. They see it as “social news” and whatever that moniker means to them. This may have been the original description for digg itself when they were seen as a competitor to Slashdot, but even on diggnation this description has changed into digg being a place that simply links “to what’s cool on the web.”

That being said, it is a great forum to rummage through and find what’s quirky. Hey, I’m not saying I don’t like it, but we need to get real about it soon, lest we want yet another dot-com-bust.

Well, well… we made it through 2006 didn’t we? Hurrah! Now that it’s the Chinese Year of the James Bond, I think it’s a pretty good spot to look back on 006’s efforts and think about how good or lousy an agent he was.

Uncabled was launched and started off pretty strong, but I discovered that after a certain point I had settled into watching everything online and no longer had big conflicts to document. At that point it became a venue for internet-TV news — which is fine and all — but this space is getting crowed by more people with way more time on their hands. I expect it to change significantly this year into something less chatter-like and hopefully a little more useful for all.

Wierzbowski Hunters remains where it should be, an oddity of the internet. We started it as a gag in the 90s and when I resurrected it I did so to keep it alive, ideally in some form where it could run with some life of its own. Now, I’m not nearly the Aliens freak I used to be (The Matrix has filled that fandom role in the last few years) but at least I’m still one of the more notable Aliens freaks out there. There’s still room to play up the gag factor, but let’s face it, in a post-AYBABTU, post-NumaNuma, post-Caturday world this isn’t anything new… but it’s still fun.

And of course, Teradome plugs along as usual. It’s my place to play so I don’t mind when it drags a bit. It seems like every year I make a comment about about how much more personal my posts are going to become, so I’m going to avoid making that mistake again. If it happens, it happens. As long as it remains a place where I can muse on topics ranging from the joy of Guitar Hero II to the usability of social networking sites, I’ll be happy.

So to all you other self-publishers, bloggers, forum leaders and superfans out there, have a great 2007, and here’s wishing that your passion can become the next web phenomenon!

A while ago on their podcast, the editors of Engadget wondered why Palm was still using the same form factor for the Treo that they’ve always been using, and why haven’t they created a thinner one?

They even wondered if Palm continues to do so because Palm believes that the current Treo form factor is what Treo users want. In the end, it only made me wonder what Palm still has left in its Treo line at all. I have to believe that a part of the answer is that Palm doesn’t have much choice in the matter, and has to continue the Treo form factor.

The story of Palm in these later days of the company is a sad one, considering how much lead they have lost since they dominated the PDA market in the mid-90s. But not much has changed in the appeal of devices since then — the user experience of the PDA was what made a PalmOS device win out over most Pocket PCs. Palm never won on hardware capabilities or vendor selection, but they did win on simplicity and relatively bullet-proof synchronization.

The release of a Windows Mobile version of the Treo phone was a necessary evil. PalmOS development had slowed to crawl for reasons too numerous to mention. Simple grew into incapable, and to keep business users, capabilites had be brought in from outside. With Windows Mobile, Palm gave up an aspect of their user experience legacy — how users actually access and use the features of their device — to a product that is entirely out of their control, and often works against the device itself because of its inherent peculiarities. This concession to businesses was a loss to Palm’s ability to redefine itself or create clearer market distinctions for itself in the way consumer leaders like TiVo and Apple do with their custom operating systems and software solutions.

Today, Palm no longer owns the PalmOS (a different company does now) and the Treo runs the Windows Mobile software of its former enemies. So what is the Treo about these days? Unless you buy a PalmOS model, where the core of the software itself hasn’t been updated in many, many years, you’re not getting anything severely different.

Ultimately, the Treo’s strength is the Treo brand itself and the promise of easier and friendlier — just as the company spent a ton of money to buy the Palm name back and drop their old(new?) palmOne moniker. The form factor is a magnet, not just for shoppers, but for people “in the wild.” It can be spotted on the street, or across a crowded train car. Like the name, it is a brand for Palm to leverage. In a way, they are now the AT&T of smartphones — a well-recognized, solid choice, but not the best in any particular category.

Sadly, a company that once led in hardware and software is now leading primarily in marketing only — which is why the long time fans still long for cutting-edge hardware, or a new design, or the return of a new, custom operating system. I certainly do.