I saw this and immediately thought of Robert Scoble. In his speech at Northern Voice, Robert mentioned how he used his cell phone, laptop, and even his TV to keep up with his blog reading. Well, now he can add this LED mirror to his arsenal of blogging tools.

The mirror features an LED message board mounted behind a glass mirror - thus, you can read news feeds directly… I don’t know if you would mount this in your bathroom, hall, or maybe the livingroom, but its pretty cool. The feed can be displayed via remote control from any PC connection.

One of my colleagues has just posted on our site about MAIDS - Mobile and Internet Dependency Syndrome.

The blog version of this dependency is part of what we are - blogaholics. I love our URL.

Today, while going through my list of feed subscriptions I noticed that some of the feeds where unavailable. I thought that maybe those particular blogs were hosted in the same place and the servers had gone down. Eventually the feeds were back up again. A few hours, I wanted to check out FeedBurner stats and noticed that FeedBurner was down, so our feed was down too. I realized that the same feeds that were not working before were down again, they were also using FeedBurner.

I was able to restore our feed in less than a minute, the way I have it setup generates a temporary redirect to the FeedBurner server so I just had to comment out a couple of lines in a configuration file. People always subscribe to a feed on my server, I just redirect them. Websites that let people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed do not have this option and when the feed goes down they can only wait.
What happens if someday FeedBurner closes its doors? Lots of websites will immediately loose their subscribers, and slowly recover those who bother finding what the new URL for the feed is.

I am not bashing FeedBurner or complaining about their service. Right now FeedBurner is in beta and is a free service, they do not warranty that the service will be up 24/7. But a lot of people rely on them to support a vital part of their website, and I wonder how many other free services are used in this way.

I’m thinking of maybe writing my own software to track our feed traffic. That way I am responsible for the service and if it goes down it will be either my fault or my hosting service’s.
What do you think?

northernvoice
There was a lot to take in during the conference yesterday, but I thought I would blog on some interesting topics that are still floating around in my head.

Blogging as a business tool

I very much believe that blogs are a positive force in the business world. I am always amazed when I hear of the resistance to blogging from corporations, either in starting their own blog or in trying to shut down employees who dare to mention their name. It seems so silly to me.

If you don’t want a blog about your company or by someone in your company, you are basically saying you don’t want to talk with your customers, your potential customers, or the greater community of stakeholders to whom you are responsible. How stupid does that sound??

Ok, so I get the resistance to change. It is like someone knocking on your door and saying that all those millions of dollars you have been spending on advertising and traditional marketing has gone to crap. It doesn’t work anymore. We all know this has been happening for some time now. The effectiveness of television advertising has been on a steady decline for years. With TiVo, fast forward, or our basic brain filtering gained through years of tv viewing, ads just don’t work anymore. We don’t listen. So, the standard protocol has been to make ads louder, more flashy, and more in your face. So we turn our face and leave the room. Big deal. We get used to it. So ads go up in more places. Are we watching? Not really.

Now, marketing is not dead. If it were, I would be out of a job and a career. It’s just changing. Look at Apple. What they did was amazing. There was a whole bunch of build up and a big wait. Word of mouth was already spreading about the iPod and how cool it was. It was being used in more and more ways. We were ready when Apple dumped a whole bunch of new products on the market at the same time. It wasn’t the fancy iPod commercial that won us over, it was word of mouth. Blogging is the new word of mouth. For how many days and weeks did we all fawn over the iPod Shuffle or the Mac Mini?
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
Flickr: Photos tagged with northernvoice

There are some great photos taken at the conference yesterday. There are even two of me taken by Kris Krug!! Thanks Kris!

Click here to see all of the photos.

I’ve uploaded the pictures we took at the conference to Flickr. Go check them out.
northernvoice

northernvoice

This section of Northern Voice covers 5 minute lightning talks on various blogging tools.

Roland Tanglao
Flickr
This is a tool we both love. We have a Flickr album (see here) and you can also see all the photos from Northern Voice (here). Social photosharing service. Can search without being logged in. You can do a slideshow of the photos too - one that does not take forever to load. You can be a part of various groups organized by tags - for example, the Vancouver group.

Flickr makes file sharing easy - you can see other people’s photos easily (most recent of Everybody), those of your contacts (like your friends and family), and easily upload photos online, via email, or with a downloadable tool.

Your personal homepage on Flickr is like a blog - a lifeblog. You can set your pictures as private or public, and, a great little thing, you can add comments to PARTS of pictures. You can add names to people in photos, for example. The comments come up when you hover your mouse.

The great feature offered by Flickr is its integration with blogging. 1. you can post to your blog from within Flickr. 2. you can add a Flickr album to your website such as we have done - with a random generation of images from your public folders.

Dave Shea
mezzoblue.com
Workflow on his Mac. How he posts stuff on his blog using Mac specific tools.
He demonstrates how he finds something interesting and how he posts its. He just made me want a Mac so I can do that cool thing with the window drang and drop. Uses NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. When he finds something interesting he uses MarsEdit to post it by dragging it to the new post window. He also uses Quicksilver.

Triss Hussey
Chief Blogging Officer of Qumana (personal blog: View from the Isle)
Finds something to blog about and drops it in his Qumana drop pad. He also drops pictures or anything else he wants to post (pictures, text). Checks his spelling, floats the picture to the left.
But he says that is too much work. So with one click in Lektora he can post something automatically.

Seb
Webjay.org
You get a list of playlist and anyone can make a new one. It ojnly hosts links to files that are freely downloadable online. Click on a playlist you find interesting: Extreme Lounge Terror (International). Choose how to listen to it and click on Play. You can add songs to your own playlist. Webjay also does video.

Robert Scoble
Find things with Feedster, click on it to subscribe with NewsGator. Uses Technorati to see how many links there are to his blog.
Memeorandum matches news to what bloggers say.
GdayWorld: A podcast from Australia.
Uses NewsGator and finds something, drags it to his BlogThis folder and then he posts it to Scobleizer.
He has a SmartPhone and he can use NewsGator to read his feeds. Also on the TV.

Nancy
Blogger
Compresses the whole thing to 10 seconds :)
She blogs because she wants to save the world. Needs to use a tool that is freely available. It took her a while to figure out how to actually host it on her own website. It shouldn’t be so hard.
How do you get those cool things on the sidebar? Blogroll: go to Bloglines and figures out how to do it. Subscribes to 1000 blogs and sorts them in folders. Didn’t know Blogger now has comments.
Picasa to organize her pictures. She can put the picture in her blog without having to resize it manually.
How do we help other people and make it simpler for them to do this stuff?

northernvoice
Jeff MacIntyre
Blogging relationship with the media.
The media eventually has to cite sources that are online.
Interesting to watch blogger journalists that fit into what an amateur/grass-roots journalist is.
Media is still trying to figure out what to do with it. But bloggers in journalism are just a small part of the changes happening online.

Hossein Derakhshan
Iranian born, moved to Canada 5 years ago, got his Canadian citizenship 2 weeks ago.
About 10% of Iranian internet users have weblogs in Persian (about 70,000). No other country has this many bloggers. The impact of these weblogs is beyond journalistic aspects. Describes this with 3 metaphors:
Blogs in Iran are windows to the Iranian society for the outside world. Iranians who blog are more open than the previous generations. They are open with their comments, women are part of this. Very different to what it was 25 years ago.
Blogs are working as bridges, connecting different parts of the society. Because of change islands have been created and blogs are helping bridge these islands. Between genders, generations, politicians and population. A very important connection is between people who live in Iran and those who have left the country.
Blogs are funtioning as Cafes. Free public spaces where people can talk about important political issues: Nuclear power, US relations, etc. that are not mentioned in normal media due to government censorship.

Stowe Boyd
Get Real
Corante: about 75 contributors, 35 blogs. 300% growth in readership since October, 500,000 a month.
Contributors are dedicated to social activism in some way or another. Trying to make changes in the world like pamphleteers and earlier journalists tried to do.
A lot of people link to what they write.
“You have to be the change you want to make in the world” -Ghandi
Marquee program that pays the bloggers to mention names of products in the blog entries. This marketing scheme has created a lot of controversy. He is participating in a debate about this, sponsored by Marquee…
Interest in social networking technology and science. If you are short in flu vaccine you don’t give it to the people at high risk, you give it to the people who are supernodes and can spread the virus to the population. He didn’t have success pushing this idea. Recently epidemologists confirmed that if they had done something like this there would not have been an epidemic.
A person with a concern that might appear small can make an impact if she decides to keep talking about it and not shut up about it. It is OK to have a string emotional bias on things that are important to you. Drop the myth of objectivity. (This is in the context of activism).

Sean Holman
Editor of Public Eye Online covers politics in BC. Started about 2 years ago. Managed to prompt resignation of some people. Has effected change.
Blogging in Canada today is not about journalism, it is about opinion and commentary. This is because it is easier. It is harder to find new information for your readers, which is a findamental aspect of journalism. And canadian bloggers have not done a good job.
Only one success story during the elections. In a message board called Free Dominion. A member disected an ad and found a subliminal message in it. The story got picked up by a news aggregator and then made it to the national media. This type of success story is rare in Canada.
It is easier for American bloggers. They have a richer media environment. More networks, more magazines, more newspapers. Huge number of people talking which makes it easier for bloggers to find things to disect. Media in Canada is not very diverse. Maybe if we paid attention to politicians they will start saying intersting things.

Stowe Boyd: Bloggers are the early warning system in the US. Media people monitor RSS feeds to find news. Before it used to be the opposite, i.e. the first review of a product would come from big media. Media is going through a transformation, the dialog is changing. But this hasn’t happened so much in Canada.
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
This is a panel featuring 4 speakers who each have 5 minutes to sway us to their ways.

Chris Pirillo

The “shameless self-promoter.”

URLs:
C:\Pirillo.exe
Rent My Chest
Lockergnome.net

Yes, he is the Rent My Chest guy.

#1 traffic driver
The easiest thing to do is be involved. If you like what you read, become a part of the conversation. Once you are involved in a circle, you become known to that circle.

Jeremy Wright

URLs:
Ensight

Jeremy is known for selling blogging services on ebay, just to name one thing.

His traffic: 150,000 unique visitors/month

How to build traffic:

#1
Give good ways to stay in contact with readers with services such as comment notification.

Suw Charman

URLs:
Chocolate & Vodka
Strange Attractor

New media and journalist specialty. Blogging as a business context behind the firewall is her interest. How to use it for team building and knowledge sharing.

#1 Interact in genuine and honest manner

Derek Miller

URLs:
Penmachine.com

#1 Be useful. You need to have things that are useful to the people visiting it. How?
- Post what you’re interested in
- Solutions you’ve found to your everday problems
- Post your email exchange if it helps show a process

#2 Know why you are promoting your blog.
- for people to come?
- who should visit?
- business building?
etc.

If it’s for your family, and they all visit, that is 100% success. Be realistic.
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
So, we are in the middle of the day here now. Just before lunch and finishing up the Q&A period from Stephen Downes. I just wanted to post a little of my experience thus far.

The conference has been really great. So informative. And really a great learning experience. And I absolutely love the vibe. I am in a room filled with people all blogging live about exactly the same thing I am listening to and blogging about.

But it’s also an adrenaline rush. Trying to keep up with all the info is a bit overwhelming. All of our posts are really messed up, really on the fly. We’re really lucky if we can even put in the posts. And I am just dying to post on some of the photos being taken and posted to Flickr, or just reading what other people have written. But there is no time. I have not even finished my post on Robert Scoble - right at this moment it is a mish mash of parts of my notes in something that is probably really not understandable. I was attempting to post things in some sort of logic, since my notes really have no logic, but it’s a total mess right now. Plus, I was forced to actually use pen and paper at the time since our battery was out. But I will get to it. It is lunch time in just a few minutes.

Right now there is a huge discussion that I have unfortunately not listened to. They were bashing some of the academic speech that was going on. But it was really great and intense and I cannot wait to continue posting on it.

Off for now. Apologize for the mess. Will clean it up soon. :)

northernvoice
Not it’s Ianiv taking notes again.
How does a community become a group of bloggers?
What constitutes community?
Against the long tail.
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
More Northern Voice!! Podcasting with Tod Maffin.
CBC Radio Tech Column /Nerd

iloveradio.org
techreviews
futurefile.com - business focus

Definitely a room filler, even though most of the people in the room are not familiar with podcasting.
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
Northern Voice continued….

So, I had to actually take notes while the computer was powered off, but here is the mishmash of the speech from Robert Scoble:

Outline

Trends:
1. Efficiency
2. Tsunami
3. Halo 2
4. 9/11
5. Longhorn
6. Firefox

How to build a movement?

How to read 1000 blogs a day…
Read the rest of this entry »

northernvoice
I’m sitting in a room with about 220 other people for the first keynote of Northern Voice. Go to this entry’s page for more details.
Read the rest of this entry »

Via Dave Winer, this cartoon seems like a good follow-up to my previous post about Northern Voice.