There has been a lot of chatter about the Australian Government’s dismal response to the arrival of refugees to this country. But I don’t think even then SIEVX experience can match what NATO units did to more than 60 African refugees off Libya recently. Continue reading
Another event, another chance to hear the bleated refrain of the modern luddite.
Still lulzing at the #muppet who last night used me for reference when asking about people giving attention to speakers. Note. Taking.—
(@franksting) May 04, 2011
Confusing focus on the device with a lack of attention. Continue reading
Earlier today I had to write a 2 line, non-technical explanation of “in the cloud” as it applied to a consumer friendly application. Boy was that challenging. You see I think the “cloud” as a term is the same pile of dog turds as terms like “smartphone” and “utilise“.
But you have to market it somehow, don’t you? And “a modern take on client/server environments leveraging web based technology and distributed storage and services” wasn’t going to cut it for my target market.
So just as I discovered while doing the citizenship exam here in Australia recently, sometimes you have to pitch yourself at the lowest common denominator in order to prevent setting yourself up for failure. So I wrote
Facebook is a good example of an in the cloud application
Which brings me to twitter and the “ecosystem” it has created over the years. There have been plenty of “hot new startups” trying to use twitter as some spinal cord for their service. A transport route to create interest in their cloud application. While many turned into abject failures or glorious turkeys, the odd moderate success exists.
I can think of one service above others which I think has gone beyond moderate success and that is Instagram. And yet, like anything which doesn’t want to be cap in hand to a master, it doesn’t depend on it one jot.
Tweetdeck and other services which started out by providing a usable interface to a dumbed down system now struggle to diversify following twitter’s guidance to get off my lawn. Instagram, thanks to a focus on getting it right on the iPhone first, has created an ecosystem of it’s own. The nascency of Instagrid proves this.
I’ve gushed over Applications before despite being hesitant at with many of them. I’ve decided Instagram has cottoned on to two things which help it:
Instagram imagery
Instagrid now gives you the opportunity to share all of those photos in one place on the web, somewhere instagram had to date left alone. Have a look yourself.
Other things people like to do as well as take pictures is to Read and to listen to music.
I’ve been a user of last.fm to store my musical taste for many years now, but it’s sharing features suck and the kowtowing to “rights owners” appears to have killed any “official” last.fm app on my iPhone in Australia.
So step in blaster.fm. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and love what it does. Sure it’s got some rough edges, but I’m pretty sure the developer knows what he is doing to take it to places which Apple and CBS Interactive would likely workshop out of existance.
I wouldn’t call it “successful” like I would call Instagram, but fingers crossed it gets there.
Final shout out to Goodreads, which despite having an iPhone App designed by committee, is going some way to getting me interested in reading books again.
We use these in the cloud applications each day, many of which use twitter to do what twitter is intended to do, share stuff with your friends and others and help people talk. I suggest Twitter, rather than writing confronting pieces, should focus on better promoting those services which use their API’s the “right” way.
What Twitter based Applications do you use which make you go back daily?
Earlier today I was asked what I use measure my effectiveness online.
@franksting so (being careful NOT to use said hashtag…) … what monitoring/measuring tools do you use, and why? 
fee plumley
artsdigitalera
While I initially dismissed the questions as applying to me I realised that despite my Continue reading
Someone once said that Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one of them.
First then a mea culpa: I must have multiple excretionary orifices as the opinions just don’t stop coming.
My challenge has always been to figure out ways to retain the thoughts and opinions and narrow them into one conclusive argument.
The act of blogging is helping me achieve this. Continue reading
When I started in University, there were these little beige boxes with a built in screen Continue reading
Being as I’m sick and tired of geeks, nerds and “business” people dissing on the iPhone. Using terms like “toy” and “plaything”.
This is the first post where I show how uninformed and lazy those commentators are.
This is WordPress on my iPhone. Almost easier to write on than using any traditional computer. Set all the tags, categories etc. How about multiple blog management. Can your “smartphone” do that?
This is a Mobile Device. Powerful. Simple. In one device.
THIS is why people across the entire Market want to use it. Not because it is made by Apple.
However for most of those “haterz” it is ONLY because it is made by Apple they “dislike” it.
And that isn’t sad. It’s pitiful.
Meanland recently published an excellent article on the future of Long form writing online. I’m personally challenged by this, because many blogs I read are in effect thought processes in words – not articles at all.
They wrote;
Long form, suggests the New Yorker, ‘is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience’
Having read the article in full, I was surprised it made no reference to tools which make it much easier to read essays and other writing online – especially the EXCELLENT arcLabs Readability service. Continue reading
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, tablet PCs are hot right now. But this latest development in personal computing and entertainment is nothing new, no matter how “magical” or “revolutionary” it may seem.
The latest crop of tablets…springs from over two centuries of research and development, starting with Elisha Gray, whose 1888 “Telautograph” (U.S. patent No. 386,815) is believed to be the forerunner to the modern tablet.
The first tablets, as we would recognize them, didn’t come about until the late 1950s and early 1960s. These “tablets” consisted of a large computer terminal attached to a receiver pad, which accepted electrical or magnetic input from a stylus. They were extremely expensive to make and extremely heavy. Over the years, as tablets became functionally more complex, they also became more compact. The rest is history.
Yes, we’ve come a long way. See just how far by viewing our slideshow of the tablet’s evolution since the 1960s.
Wow, I’d forgotten about some of these, and never even heard of others. Interesting that the original tablets – really just input devices – are mentioned, but enhancements to those devices, e.g. Wacom tablets are ignored
