Joining Up My Web Spaces

The explosion of social networking spaces on the internet has been exciting but also confusing.  The beauty of what is happening now is that many ‘space’ providers have recognised they are not going to provide everything and have everybody join them and have made it possible for developers to create the joins.  Now many of your spaces can be linked together.

Having joined a number of spaces I have now tried to work out how they link together, how they ‘feed’ one another.  I have produced a daigram which shows all my spaces and the links between them.  My Rummble can update my Twitter and include my location. My Twitter updates both ecademy and Facebook.  I can create a blog entry containing a phograph or video with Flickr and post it to my Blog in WordPress which then sends the blog to ecademy and Facebook.  The diagram does show that WordPress creates a Twitter every time I publish a blog, but I haven’t set this up. I can view my Flickr content from within Facebook and Rummble.  I can show my Google Reader Shares in my blog.  All the spaces in the big box update my FriendFeed.

The other great development is having versions of these spaces in PDA (small screen) format.  I can run all the spaces in green boxes on my windows mobile phone.  Rummble uses Google Gears on my mobile to link to my embedded GPS to capture my location.  Twibble also uses my embedded GPS to capture my location.

This is just the start, no doubt, of even more interlinking. It does show though how isolated LinkedIn has become.

 

My Social Network

 

CleanTech

I was interested to see that Thomas Powers on ecademy was drumming up support for a UK CleanTech Forum and has started an ecademy club called Cleantech Meetup.  

I have long had an interest in New Energy and started a page on my website KnowYourTechs of‘Future Energy’ companies. I like to fnd out what is distinctive about their products or services as much as their financial performace as I believe companies with a distinctive technical advantage can have an edge over others in the market financially.

I have even put my money where my mouth is and invested in the BlackRock New Energy Investement Trust (FTSE: BRWM) Now it looks like I shall have to investigate putting some money into the the Powershares CleanTech ETF (AMEX: PZD) that follows the CleanTech Index

There is always a discussion as to whether technology will saves us from climate change. The new clean technologies generate less if any CO2 and use no fossil fuels and therefore have the potential to reduce our dependence on CO2 producing fossil fuel consuming resources and thus make our world a cleaner, cooler place. And of course I hope to make some money out of it as well.

 

Internet Radio

I have recently purchased a Revo Blik Radio Station http://www.revo.co.uk.  It’s DAB, FM and Internet Radio.  Also as it is Wifi it can also retrieve my music from my media server.  I needed one with a clock and alarm so I went for Blik but it is therefore mains driven otherwise I would have gone for the portable version the Pico. I can also play my mp3 player through it.  So all in all a very flexible bit of kit.

To me the appeal of internet radio is not so much the wealth of international radio stations which I can access but the ability to use ‘Listen Again’ services and podcasts.

To do this you need to be signed up with an internet radio service that your device can register to. Revo uses http://www.wifiradio-frontier.com With this sort of service you can gather your Favourite radio stations and store them under My Favourites in your own categories.  My Favourites is then reflected in the BliK menu using your categories & thus saving you from scrolling through hundreds of radio station. You can also subsrcibe to various Listen Again services and podcasts which also then appear in the Blik menu. 

I am also trying out the TVersity media server on my PC. This media server can aslo access internet radio, as well as audio and video.  The network media receiver I am using to stream media from my PC to my TV immediately recognised the TVersity as TVersity is a UPnP media server.  I haven’t yet got to grips with all that it can do with the internet.  My ideal device would be one that could give me access to the BBC iPlayer via my TV.

My real delight though would be to get hold of a UK Version of the Chumby http://www.chumby.com/ It is more than an internet radio and wifi media receiver. It looks like a cuddly toy, has a screen, you can download widgets  to view your news, pictures, weather… I want one!

Great Spotted Woodpecker & young

Great Spotted Woodpecker & young,
originally uploaded by martinrs.

I have had a great time this spring taking photos of the many fledglings in our garden. This photo shows a female great spotted woodpecker feeding peanuts to her hungry you one.

I recently bought a Nikon D60 DSLR as my first Digital SLR. This photo was taken with 55-200mm zoom lens.

I bought the DSLR to attach to my telescope to do some digiscoping but have yet to find a suitable adaptor for my Opticron telescope

Discovering the Joys of Geotagging

 

On a recent holiday I decided to sort out geotagging on my mobile. I have a Vodafone v1615 which is a rebadged HTC TYTN II aka Kaiser. It has a 3 megapixel camera which can, with its embedded GPS, add your location to your photos. To do this I needed to tweak a registry setting. Here is the tweak:

Open any registry editor, then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\HTC\Camera\ and in the folder P9 change “enabled” from 0 to 1. Now new option GPS Photo will appear in the menu.The registry editor I use is the registry add-in to Resco file explorer http://www.resco.com.

I have Yahoo Go loaded on my mobile this enables me to upload photos directly to my Flickr photostream

Flickr will enable you to map your photos so before I uploaded I had to ensure that the setting ‘import EXIF location data’ is set to yes in my Account settings.

To make sure that all the relevant EXIF data was correctly captured by my phone camera I used a freeware bit of software EXIFReader available from this website www.snapfiles.com/get/exifreader.html to view the data after I had transferred the photos to my laptop

I had another added complication in that I was blocked from viewing Flickr on my laptop as t-mobile (my laptop 3G card is t-mobile) rates it as an 18 site. So I had to pay up £2 on my credit card to prove I was over 18! 

I also tried Picassaweb  but couldn’t get it to recognise my EXIF data (hence the use of exifreader). In its manual location adding feature, it does have the advantage of being able to link an album to a location so any photos added to that album will all automatically be assigned the same location.