My News Sharing Set-Up

I have been experimenting with how I use bookmarking sites and news sharing sites.  I like to use more than one but also have a place where they are brought together.

I also want to discover what my friends are learning.

So far I have settled on Delicious  as my bookmarking service and Google Reader as my news sharing service.

I also occasionally I use the option to ‘Tweet This’ so that I share with my Twitter followers but I prefer to use Delicious where possible.

Both Delicious and Google Reader allow me share my choices with my friends and to see which topics interest my friends, but it is difficult create a community of friends with these two services and so really benefit from sharing knowledge.

So I now use Social Median as my knowledge community.  Both my delicious bookmarks and my Google shares are fed into Social Median and assigned to my interest groups within Social Median. This way I get to learn from others with similar interest  whether they are using Delicious or Google Reader or not.  Social Median can take feeds from other services should I take them up in future.

I also share my Delicious Bookmarks and Google Reader Shares with the activity streams in my Social Networks.

This is what my set up  looks like

My Flickr Photos on my WiFi Photo Frame

I really enjoy devices that use my home wireless LAN and Internet gateway . 

Not so long ago I bought a WiFi Radio which receives internet radio, podcasts and music from my PC media server. All our household mobile phones have WiFi and can therefore access the internet and Skype and, depending on the software, media from home PC. My TV can also access by home LAN and the internet.

Now I have acquired a WiFi photoframe a Kodak W1020 which can take feeds from the Internet, from my home LAN or from its own internal storage.

Like my WiFi radio (see my earlier blog Internet Radio) you need to link your device, wifi radio or wifi photoframe, to an online service. This is usually done by registering your devices ID with the online service . My Revo Blik Radio Station uses Frontier Silicon Radio Portal . My Kodak W1020 wifi photoframe can take feeds from FrameChannel wireless frame portal or from Kodak’s own portal.  FrameChannel can also feed photo frames from other manufacturers.

I prefer FrameChannel because it gives me access to my own Flickr photos. FrameChannel also provides access to a number of online photo services including its own. You can choose from

 

Framechannel photos	Photobucket
My Friends Photos	Windows Live Photos
Flickr	.mac web galleries
Facebook photos	Webshots
Picasa	any RSS photo feed

My Friends Photos is an interesting one as its basically an email address to which your friends and family can send photos, or messages as pictures,  which will then appear on your photo frame.

I use Flickr for my photos and this service allows you filter your flickr photos by tags. And of course you can regularly change your tags to show an alternative set of your photos.

In addition you can select from a range of other services such as news, sports and weather. I have chosen:

• National Geographic – Shorelines & Islands
• Reuters UK Domestic News  (or choose your own RSS feeds)
• Frame Media Calendar
• Three Day Weather Forecast

All these ‘channels’ appear intermingled on your connected photoframe.  You can also set the duration by channel and the time of day by channel. 

Other Features

The Kodak frames also have a really good way of configuring the frame through touch strips down the right hand side and along the bottom.  I like this approach as the screen does get covered in greasing finger prints.

In the evening I sometimes sit down to watch the picture frame rather that the TV.  Which reminds me this Kodak frame can also show videos but at the moment only those from its internal memory or off the home LAN and you can accompany your pictures with music.

As with most frames you can plug your camera into the frame and use the frame as a large viewer for the pictures in your camera (stills or movies).

More to come

What is coming along though are TVs with internet access through widgets loaded directly into you TV. More fun gadgets to play with and blog about.

I am also investigating a Freeview box with wifi called FetchTV which, unlike BT Vision or TiscaliTV, does not require a subscription.

Redwing berry feast

Redwing berry feast,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

There we were chatting away on our daily walk around the block. This time were accompanied by my daughter. We were pointing out all the wildlife as we strolled then she spotted what she thought was a thrush. On closer inspection it was a flock of visiting redwings who had just popped over for a quick berry feast.

Fortunately my daughter had her camera with her so she was able to capture this perfect spotters pose by this obliging redwing. This is the first year we have spotted redwings in our neighbourhood. We’ll have to keep an eye out for some waxwings now.

My Location Aware Mobile Phone 2

Create once and make it available everywhere

I have been experimenting with a few applications that can capture my location on my mobile phone and share this with my social networks.  I was hoping to achieve a couple of ideals.

My first ideal is for the application to automatically pick up my location using the embedded GPS.  Then for it to create a Twitter post that includes my status and a link to a map which shows my location. The twitter post would then be fed into my social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn, ecademy, Plaxo and FriendFeed. This way I don’t have to persuade my friends to use the same location based software to know where I am.

The other lofty ideal was to be able to use any application that could update and read my location in FireEagle so that it didn’t matter which location based application I was using or my friends were using so long as it could work with FireEagle. In which case they would all update each other.

The overriding principle has been to create once and make it available everywhere or put more simply to manage content in one place and yet have it fed to all applications. I have been attempting this with all my content creation applications such as Flickr and Delicious (see my blog post Joining up my web spaces).

Neither ideal has been totally successful although I think I have achieved a workable compromise.

The applications I have been trialling are Loki, Ipoki, Rummble and BrightKite. Each has its advantages and disadvantages,  which I go through at the end of this post.

Each of the applications works with FireEagle but I have been struggling with getting each application to read a location in FireEagle that has been created by another. 

Only BrightKite will create a Twitter post with my status and a link to a map with my location. In fact I could probably survive on BrightKite alone. The only downside is that it has no means of automatically determining my location on my mobile.

So I have configured a compromise using EagleFeed and TwitterFeed. My location from FireEagle is read by EagleFeed which then creates an RSS feed that Twitterfeed picks up and posts into my Twitter.

This is how it looks

Comparing the four mobile location applications.

Each of these applications will work with FireEagle except that Loki cannot read your location from FireEagle.

With each of these applications you can determine the location of your friends and who is near you.

Loki

Location: Loki uses Wi-Fi to determine your location both on the PC and on the mobile. If you are not in the vicinity of a Wi-Fi hotspot then you have to manually enter the location. You have to download a mini app for the mobile to use the Wi-Fi.

Twitter Post: It won’t create a Twitter post. 

 Other: Loki also has a facebook add-in. You can use Loki to find nearby facilities.

BrightKite

Location: BrightKite uses Loki (on IE) or Geode (FireFox) to determine your location but only on the PC not on the mobile.

Twitter Post: It does create a Twitter post with your status and a link to a map of your location.

Other:  BrightKite has a facebook add-in. It will also find nearby businesses.

Rummble

Location: Rummble use Google Gears to determine my location I think it uses Gears to access my GPS or Wi-Fi from within the browser. There is no need to download a mobile app.

Twitter Post: It will create a Twitter post but not with a link to a map of my location.

Other: You can also use Rummble to rate various eateries and see what rates others have given and you can post an itinerary of a future journey. You can also create a blog of your journey.

Ipoki

Location: Ipoki uses the embedded GPS to produce a real time stream of your location, which is great if you want your friends to follow your cycle or walking route or car journey. You need to download a mini app to use the real time location facility.

Twitter Post: It doesn’t create a Twitter post.

Other: Ipoki has a facebook add-in

Verdict

I will probably stick with Rummble as I love the way it picks up my location and I am normally Tweeting from a local hostelry.  However most of my friends use BrightKite so if I want see which of them is near me I will have to use BrightKite.  Now if BrightKite were able to determine my location using Google Gears on my mobile then……

My mobile

My mobile  is a Vodafone v1615 aka HTC TyTn II aka HTC Kaiser which is a GPS enabled 3G phone with Wi-Fi The other networks have their own label version of the HTC TyTN II.  And no I don’t use an iPhone.

Links

see this excellent primer on location determination on TechCrunch

the first edition of My Location Aware Mobile Phone

Outlook synchronised with my fixed line phone

I have just purchased a Siemens Gigaset 685 DECT telephone system with Bluetooth and answer machine from John Lewis (best price I could find) Gigaset 685 Duo

a DECT phone with Bluetooth

I have longed to be able to synchronise my fixed line telephone with my Outlook contacts. We have long been able to do to do this with our mobiles.  Indeed our household mobiles are all windows mobile 6.0.

Now at last there is a phone out there that will do it.  It achieves this by using Bluetooth. Siemens provide some software to run on my laptop that allows me to send selected contacts to the handset.  The handsets can also receive contacts beamed from our mobiles.

I thought that the only way we were going to achieve this was to use a dual fixed line/ VOIP phone (that didn’t need a PC).  With these  you can access your online VOIP contact from your fixed line phone.  However these do not allow you to use your VOIP contacts list whilst dialling out on the PSTN. The only way to use the VOIP contacts for those not on VOIP is to use services like Skype Out and that will cost.  My current fixed line telephone service tariff from Tiscali gives me free calls to 01 and 02 numbers.

Siemens does offer an IP phone in the Gigaset range with Bluetooth so I could have had the best of the both worlds. But I settled just for Bluetooth as all our mobiles have wi-fi and use Skype.

My ideal would be for the handset to access my Outlook contacts direct over wi-fi but Bluetooth is a good comprise.

My next project is to tie all this up with my online contacts – IM, email, social network contacts.  I am currently experimenting with Digsby.com and using my Yahoo contacts to synchronise with my Outlook Contacts.  But that will be the subject of a later blog when I have sorted it out.

By way of an aside this blog entry was created using Windows Live Writer  (WLW) a very neat blog writer. WLW is part of the Live suite of applications that also includes Live Photo Gallery which allows me to upload my photos direct to Flickr

On Being Semantically Aware

How do we get from tags to meaning 

Consistent Metadata

In the Web 2.0 world tags are everywhere.  Everything can be tagged which is very useful for finding stuff especially non textual stuff like pictures, music and videos.   The disadvantage is that a tag which means something to you may be associated with something different to another person. If we could all use the same tags then would that help or would that be too constraining. Would we be venturing into the world of taxonomies and strayig away from folksonomies?  Perhaps if we could have a tool which suggested tags that others have used thenthere might be more consistency in meaning try Favikiwhich uses semantic tags using WikiPedia terms.

Use an application to provide meaning

There are applications out there that can work over a number of sites along the same theme to semantically tag them to provide a richer answer to your search.  Such a site is BooRahwhich adds semantic meaning to restaurant sites to provide you with a richer material from which to make your choice. BoohRah uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs and so is able to recognis praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly.  

Semantify your site

Instead of relying on another website to derive meaning from your website you could add the semantics using a tool such as Dapper’s SemantifySemantify converts your site to internationally recognised semantic standards (RDF and RDFa) so that other applications, which understand those standards, can derive the correct meaning directly from your site and make your site readable by semantic search engines.

Use a Semantic Search Engine

If we all semantified our sites then we could use semanticall aware search engines to find what we want in the right context and we could all benefit from the data web. See this example from Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem of how LinkedIn has marked up its profile pages using international standards (microformats)   to present users with a more compelling and useful search results for their site. 

Where does this all lead ?

Semanitfied web pages become more than just text they become data and not just data but data in an internationally defined and recognised format.  This means that web applications will be able to communicate with each other over the internet and know precisely what they are looking for and be sure that what they get is what they wanted without human intervention. Scary! 

Digiscoping at Martin Mere

Incognito-Peregrine,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

I used the opportunity whilst visiting my new granddaughter to pop into the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Site at Martin Mere just outside Southport in Lancashire.

It was bright but the light was soft and it was calm. Great day for catching reflections in the water.

There was a pair of Peregrines relaxing in the sun observing the Whooper swans and othe wildfowl, pretending not to be there. But with my new digiscoping set up I was able to get a shot.

See the Martin Mere set on my Flickr site

I was using an old 60mm Opticron telescope with the DSLR adaptor to connect to my Nikon D60 but it required the camera to be in manual model so that I was forever adjusting the setting trying to get the exposure right.

Recently I upgraded to a Nikon 82mm Fieldscope with the disgiscoping adaptor FSA-L1. This adaptor allows me to use the automatic settings on the camera leaving me to concentrate solely on the focus.

Here is a picture of my new set up

digiscoping-with-nikon

 

Joining Up My Web Spaces 3

At last Linkedin has begun to catch up with the rest of the social networking sites and has introduced applications. The most interesting to me is the ability to feed in my WordPress blog and to be able to see the blogs of my contacts. It even appears that my Twitter entries ared fed as well. 

 This now means that all my social network sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, ecademy and Plaxo can receive feeds from my Twitter and from my WordPress Blog. So I only need to author my status using Twitter or blog using Worpress once for each of my social networks to be updated.These social networks can also receive content from other services such as my photos from Flckr and my shared news stories from Google Reader and SocialMedian (only ecademy at the moment. So again I only need to author this content once and all my social network sites are updated. Below I have a diagram which services update which networks. There are also a number of other content authoring services that I have not taken up yet such as video, music, wish lists, bookmarks etc that could feed my networks.

The social network sites, of course, host my profile, my contacts and my career history. They cannot pass these details across to each other so I still have to enter the same details into each one. However it looks like the protective walls may be starting to come down. They are each looking at how they will accept each others signon through the use of OpenID or Facebook Connect. Now wouldn’t that be good to only have to update my profile, conatacts and career history once for all my networks to be updated!

This is the third update to ‘Joining Up My Web Spaces’ you might like to take a look at:

Joining Up My Web Spaces 2 and Joining Up My Web Spaces

you might also like to view a related post ‘My location aware mobile phone’

 

My Web Spaces Matrix

 

 

 

 

 

Out of Poverty with Dignity

 This blog item is in support of Blog Action Day 15th October 2008 where bloggers undertake to blog about poverty all on the same day.

There must be many ways of tackling poverty.  I am concentrating on ways of helping the poor in the underdeveloped world to rise out of their poverty with dignity.  I’m not so interested in huge government sponsored projects which I feel are so difficult to prevent from succumbing to corruption.  I’m really keen on those projects and charities that aim to support the individual, small communities and coops to get beyond subsistence and into surplus to trade.

I believe that there are three approaches that combine to make this work

• Projects that provide the appropriate tools and means.
• micro finance to fund small groups and individuals and start the investment and trading
• fair trade that doesn’t put barriers in the way of these groups from trading their goods on the world markets.

Here are some examples that I happen to know about and support: 

Provision of appropriate tools and means

Practical Actionworks with poor communities to provide them with appropriate technology solutions that they can manage, maintain and control.  such as cooking devices which use less wood and the smoke is funneled out of the hut.  See their technology blog

Send A Cowdon’t provide just animals but the training on how to care for them and how to use the manure to fertilize their crops.  This way the poor are able to produce more than they need and can therefore sell the surplus to earn enough to buy things like medicine and schooling.

Spanaprovide veterinary care and training for the owners of donkeys so that they can get the most out of their donkeys without causing them pain and discomfort.  The donkeys also live longer.

Microfinance

microfinance came to the fore after the success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and its founder  Muhammad Yunus who together won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Now there are a number of examples.  I am particularly fond of Shared Interestbecause it will fund microfinance as well as fund startup groups to begin trading

Fair Trade

I am a great supporter of Fair Trade whether it is through bananas or coffee or now even through cotton clothing. I just love the thought that what I need and then buy will actually provide a reasonable, consistent return for the producer and thereby help that person to trade out of poverty.

Joining Up My Web Spaces 2

This is a follow on to my earlier item Joining up my web spacesI have added more update mechanisms and Plaxo to my network.

LinkedIn is so out in the cold when it comes to linking to other social networking applications that I have been struggling to find anything that will update my status in LinkedIn.  At last I have discovered Ping.fmWith one entry it can update all your sites or just those set for status, microblog or blog updates. I have set Twitter and LinkedIn as status updates so that I can post a status entry in Ping.fm and it will update Twitter and LinkedIn. Then of course Twitter updates the rest.

My WordPress blog already shows my Twitter feed but I wanted new blog posts to automatically create a Twitter entry.  So I have now set up Twitterfeedto create a Twitter entry by taking the title of my new blog entry and the link to the blog entry.  It needs to use Feedburner to access my blog and it can create a short URL using TinyURLOnce set up, it does all this automatically.

Mu updated diagram now looks like this:

My Soical Net 2