Digital Inspiration has an easy to follow tutorial that will allow you to have integrated voicemail on your blog or other web page in about 5 minutes.
It uses an Odeo feature, and includes a way to embed the voice mail application directly into your page.
I added voicemail capability to our Contact page.
If there was any hope that Andrew Keen was only kidding a few weeks ago when he laid this nugget on us:
If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’,
such hope was crushed by Keen’s statements at the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.
Christopher Carfi posts a report from that gathering that makes it clear that Keen is still preaching that blogging allows idiots too much of the soapbox that should be reserved for the old media elite.
If I’d been there and managed not to hurl all over my laptop, I would have raised my hand and asked him two questions:
(a) Who decides who is elite? Is merely a press pass from a newspaper evidence of elite status or is there more to it?
(b) Are you one of the elite? If so, who anointed you such? And if not, aren’t you adding to the problem by having a blog?
The first thing I ask myself when someone tries to create a line of demarcation (elite, non-elite, etc.) is “who decides where the line goes” and “who decides who decides where the line goes.” Those two questions will help you cut through more bullshit than any other questions you could ask.
Scott Rosenberg has a report on the CyberSalon as well, which contains some past and present Keen quotes:
The purpose of our media and culture industries is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.
What is the value in sharing experiences? I grow weary of your scribblings.
Clearly this guy is either the most arrogant person to ever poke at a keyboard or he’s found an angle and is going to ride it as far as it will take him. I don’t know him, but he certainly seems to have come upon a recipe of arrogance, big fancy words and outlandish statements that gets him a lot of attention.
My grandmother used to tell me that arrogance was a distraction to mask insecurity, but she wasn’t part of the elite media, so what did she know.
Scott sums up the recent non-conversation very well:
To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”
In the interest of cooking the whole pancake, let me say that I agree with some of what Andrew says on his blog, particularly the Web 2.0 stuff. He has this need to make sure you know how smart he thinks he is, but once you filter out the extra noise, a lot of what he says is spot on. And, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, he can be very funny (as in his MySpace take).
But he’s completely off base on the whole elite media business.
Oddly enough, my hunch is that he knows it.
Doc Searls posted today a much clearer, first hand version of what I tried to say the other night about those brave souls (be they A-Listers or not) who stood up for Dave Winer in the face of his unpopular (be they justified or not) actions and the blogonslaught that followed.
I’m sure Doc will take even more abuse than I did (via Comments and particularly email), but Doc’s post is example number 1 of someone looking beyond a person’s faults (which Doc admits Dave has) and at the bigger picture.
I don’t know who’s right or who’s wrong in the OPML mess. I don’t know Rogers Cadenhead, though from reading his blog he seems like a pretty nice fellow. Few would accuse Dave of being a nice fellow. But whatever the story is, it goes way beyond one letter from some lawyer and a couple of blog posts.
The fact that I’d rather hang out with Rogers (and, for the record, I would) does not make him 100% right and Dave 100% wrong. The truth is almost always somewhere in between. That’s for someone with more interest and access than me to determine. But we can’t and shouldn’t digg Rogers to victory just because some of us like him better.
Most of us will never know all the facts. Some of us (myself included) don’t care enough about the matter to try to figure them out.
But let me point out again that there are two sides to every story and to act without considering the other side of the pancake is to act too hastily.
Once the discussion becomes politicalized (and this one was from the first minute) right and wrong too often gets lost in the rush to posture and discredit.
Mark Cuban posts today about the DRM Evolution, that may lead hardware producers to keep changing the playback devices to match the evolving DRM requirements. Down the road, content you legally own may not play back on hardware you legally own because of incompatibilities with the then current DRM protocols.
The record label cartel’s answer, of course, would be to go buy another copy of the same song you have already bought on LP, 8-track, cassette, CD and MP3.
Mark’s answer is to crack stuff you own and keep a DRM-free back up copy.
It’s hard for a guy from Houston to give too much love to a dude from Dallas, but damn I love that guy.
I’ve said many times that I have not and will not buy music that is infested with DRM. If I accidentally did, I would absolutely crack it and and make a back-up copy.
There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Save the Merc campaign launched by some of the writers of the San Jose Mercury News in the hopes of finding a buyer who will save the newspaper.
First, I think the Mercury News is a good paper and while I don’t read any newspapers in their native online or offline format, it has been a bookmark of mine for a long time.
The reality is that the Merc can’t be saved. Not in its current format. Because traditional newspapers are in the twilight of relevance and the verge of obsolescence. In one of my favorite quotes of the year so far, Steve Rubel summed up the future thusly:
Flash forward 10 years from today. We will look back and laugh how quaint it was that we received our news on dead trees. Yes, I am saying the word “newspaper” will be a misnomer. News will be delivered automatically each day, not by the paper boy, but via wirelessly enabled e-paper devices that are easy to read. All of it will be powered by RSS.
If someone wants to really save the Merc, here’s exactly how to do it:
1) The first thing we do, is kill all the pop-up ads. A hip, forward thinking organization should know better.
2) Drop the print version. Gone. No More. Nada.
3) Go completely online. Sell text-based and static ads. No flash and no pop-ups. Require a free registration to get most (but not all) content online and require free subscribers to accept one email per day with special subscriber features and, of course, targeted ads.
4) Create a premium subscription, required to get all content, including some audio-video content. Sell these subscriptions for something close to the cost of a current newspaper subscription. In addition to all content, this will include the ability to search archives at no additional cost and some sort of bookmarking, tagging feature for future reference.
5) Create a complete RSS feed of the paper, organized by section- just like the print edition (Front Page, Local, Business, Sports, etc.). This would be a better organized version of the many RSS feeds that are already available. Create an online application that will allow subscribers to customize their subscription feed to include just the parts they want. The idea would be that each user could receive a custom edition of the paper via a single RSS feed.
6) Sell that feed as a subscription (as an alternative to the online edition and with a discount for people who want both the online and RSS editions). This is the future of news distribution, and the place to spend the most time and effort.
7) No adds in these feeds. None.
8) Once you make this move and perfect the online delivery of news, create a subsidiary to sell transition services to every other newspaper in the world as they follow you online.
This is the way to save the Merc.
Whether the saving is done by the new owner or some other owner, who likely would not be a traditional newspaper company, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that one of the best newspapers in one of the most tech focused parts of the world with the highest percentage of tech readers is available to blaze the trail into the future of news distribution.
So someone should step up to the plate and do it.
Everything else is either delaying the inevitable or wishful thinking.
We had a grand time at the ranch in Bandera. Lots of trail rides, hay rides and other really fun stuff. Spring break is over and the girls are back in school. I’m on the last day of my vacation, cleaning horse poop off of trucks, shoes and clothes and storing our camping/ranching gear until we head off for Frio II in August.
Now it’s time to talk about the tech aspects of the trip.
My travel hardware consisted of:
My X41 Tablet PC
My Blackberry 7130e
My Sprint Power Vision phone
The X-41, as I said in the post above, is the best traveling computer I have ever owned. It worked great. With my Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks I was able to easily record daily summaries, and, had I wanted to bore you to tears, could have easily published them to my blog. The X-41 (with the help of a card reader) was able to view the photos on the Memory Stick I use in my digital camera. In fact, I uploaded a few photos while we were still there.
What I didn’t know before we got to the ranch was whether I would have any internet access. There is none there and there are no wireless networks in the area to “borrow.” So I had to hope Verizon’s national wireless broadband network would reach to Bandera.
Not only did it reach, but the signal strength was 3 out of 4 bars. Connecting was easy and stable. This wireless deal is definitely worth the $15 extra per month that I pay for it. I will be able to use it in airports, hotels, etc. And the best part is that the phone charges off the USB cable, so the phone is being charged while you use it to connect to the internet.
While my Blackberry is my primary mobile phone, I used my Sprint phone while on the trip and it worked perfectly.
And it has me completely sold on Sirius Satellite Radio. You can listen to a selection of the Sirius stations with the Sprint phone and, with the supplied earbuds, the sound is excellent. It does drop the signal periodically, which is mildly annoying, but this is a cool feature. It is just one of the legion of audio and video features of this very cool phone.
I’ve been an XM subscriber for years, but nothing on XM is as good as channel 14 on Sirius. It’s called 60’s and 70’s Vinyl and I have yet to hear a bad song on it. I wish Sirius made a truly portable device. If so, I’d buy it (the Sirius S50 is not truly portable in the sense that it doesn’t receive the signal while unattached to its base).
I don’t know who’s paying whom to carry the Sirius stations on these Sprint phones, but Sirius ought to be paying Sprint because this feature will sell some Sirius equipment.
The tech worked as it was supposed to and allowed me to check my email and remain connected to my home and office while deep in the Texas hill country.
As I have mentioned before, while Newsome.Org is hosted on my server, I use Blogger to publish and manage content. While not perfect, there are a lot of advantages to doing that. One, it was easy to set up when I first started using a blogging platform. Two, it allows me to easily publish from the road when I travel- even if I am using a borrowed computer.
But it is not perfect. On those infrequent, but regular, days when blogger is down, I can’t post. Plus, there are a lot of features I need (categories, built-in trackbacks, etc.) that blogger doesn’t have.
So I looked around, consulted Eric Scalf, my blog platform guru, and decided to try to move my content to WordPress. I talked some about this project before.
Eric recreated my blog template perfectly, and everything looked like a go.
Then we hit a roadblock.
It seems there is no easy way to move my prior posts to WordPress without changing the URL of the post pages, which would break my inbound links. Sure, I could leave two versions of the old post pages up, but that sort of defeats the point, at least in my mind.
There is a work-around, but that work-around requires technical chops that neither I nor 99.9% of the world’s bloggers have. The last thing I’m going to do is push a button and rely on technology I don’t understand to gently and accurately handle a year or two’s worth of content. If it doesn’t work, then I don’t know how to fix it. That would be, to quote Jim Rome, “below average.”
So, here’s the thing.
First of all, this has got to be a serious obstacle to any established blogger who wants to move his or her blog over to WordPress. I’d move today if not for this problem. Granted, it may be a problem created by Blogger’s crackhead URL handling, but Blogger is not going to fix it. In fact, Blogger probably loves it because it operates as user glue. So if established bloggers are going to move to WordPress, WordPress is going to have to fix it.
Second, and of more use to readers, Eric has published a very detailed and helpful post outlining how to move from Blogger to WordPress and describing the hurdles we experienced.
I can vouch for Eric’s expertise at template transfers, so if you are thinking of hiring him to work on your template, consider this a reference. Don’t ask him to do it for free, because it is a lot of hard work.
What even Eric can’t do, however, is fix the URL naming convention problems that stopped me in my tracks.
I’d love to move to WordPress, but at the moment that looks to be nearly impossible. I wonder how many other bloggers have considered moving only to turn back in the face of this hurdle?
If you need one more reason not to hitchhike in these dangerous times, someone might force you to eat pizza and drink wine.
Found via Obscure.
It’s time for Round 16 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.
This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.
Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
Here are the contestants for Round 16:
Vizu
Digg
Del.icio.us
Omnidrive
AlmondRocks
Tagyu
30Gigs
Writely
Simpy
Gtalkr
Vizu lets you create and share polls, both on the Vizu site, via RSS feeds or on your blog or website. I like it, but not as much as Dpoll.
Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but I’ve found that I don’t always like finding my content in an American Idol fashion.
Del.icio.us is a very popular social bookmark manager. I use it all the time.
Omnidrive is an online storage and backup service. The good, it’s based in Australia. The bad, it’s been in invitation only beta forever.
AlmondRocks says its the fastest blog reader in the world. It wasn’t as slow as some of the ones I’ve tried, but it wasn’t greased lightning either.
Tagyu is some sort of tagging serive. I put newsome.org in the text box and it came back with mycomments, feedlounge and inbound. Two of those are tags I use a Del.icio.us, but the other is pretty random.
30Gigs is a free online email application that gives you 30G of storage. They are “in the 2nd stage of our best test.”
Writely is an free online word processor which recently was bought by Google. It probably has the most mindshare in the space, but that assumes people want an online word processor.
Simpy is a social bookmarking service, that lets you save, tag, search and share bookmarks and notes.
Gtalkr let’s you access your Gtalk IM application from anywhere. I thought you could already do this. They need to put something on the main page that describes exactly what this application does.
Before Today I’d Heard of:
5 out of 10.
And the Winner of Round 16 is:
I’d pick Del.icio.us because I find it so useful, but you can’t factor in prospects for success to any degree and not pick Digg. So Digg it is.
Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0
Just when the buzz from the last exclusive blogoparty party finally faded out, we get to read about another insiders party that precious few of us are likely to be invited to.
The blogospats didn’t do it. The gatekeeper business didn’t do it. But if I have to read story after story about another exclusive party where invitations are handed out from the very in-crowd to the semi-in crowd, I just might have to follow Scoble‘s lead and take a Memeorandum hiatus.
While I think the idea of Web 2.0 awards is generally a good one, the true point of this party will be known when the voting panel and invitation criteria are known.
I hope this is more about awarding the companies than awarding the invitees.
Newsome.Org 