Category: Web Life

Posted on

So much more than phone calls

In the leadup to the release of Apple’s iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show… both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever.

All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone’s capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end “Did you edit that on your phone?” He replied “No”, and then, after a pause, said “Can I do that?” Like I said, most people don’t ever explore the full features of their phone.

Being the geek that I am, I am not one of those people. I think I probably use nearly the full range of capabilities of my phone, so I thought it warranted a blog post to just talk about what exactly I do with my phone and some of the uses I have for it as a fairly fluent digital immigrant.

I don’t have an iPhone. I’d like one, but instead I own a very simple, very basic, very cheap, Sony Ericsson K610i. It was the cheapest 3G phone I could buy, but I’m amazed at what it is capable of, especially when combined with the 3G network service. Obviously, it can make phone calls and has all the usual features that a voice phone would have… address book, call register, and so on. It has a hands free mode, and can work as a speaker phone. It comes with a headset for in-car use and can also connect to a bluetooth handsfree kit for use while driving. It has a calendar for remembering appointments, a notepad for taking notes, a sound recorder, a task list, a stopwatch, a calculator and an alarm clock. I use all of these tools regularly, in fact I use the alarm clock to wake myself up every morning. I’ll concede that the standard text entry interface is not really optimal for some of these apps, but it’s good enough to be usable in small doses, which is all I ever really need it to be.

There are a ton of useful messaging options on the phone… SMS which I use a lot, and also email, MMS and voicemail. I can send pictures and videos, as well as text, through these different formats. I send and receive a quite lot of SMS, so I like the way it manages the messaging with the usual inbox, outbox, sent mail paradigm. There is also a templates mode, so messages that are sent often can be templated so you don’t have to type them from scratch all the time. That’s a useful feature.

I’m also impressed that the phone has an RSS aggregator built in. I can subscribe to blog feeds on the phone and it will regularly check the web to see if there are updates. It works exactly as you’d expect… when the phone finds an updated feed it indicates it on the main screen. This is a super-useful feature, and one I use a fair bit.

Being a 3G service, the phone’s service provider offers an interesting range of sites within the walled garden of their network. Hit the browse button and I can access news, weather, sport, comedy, finance news and special features like mobile TV. This is all video based too, so I can watch it all with proper video. I don’t often watch the TV news, but I will sometimes reach for my phone before I get out of bed in the morning and catch the early news bulletin, check the weather or watch a bit of Family Guy before I start my day. Other things I can get from the network include music video clips, ring tones and wallpapers but I have never bought any of these… more on that later. Other useful services include the ability to check the cinema guide for my nominated local cinemas, and watch trailers for the latest films. I can check my horoscope, find out what’s on TV, look up a restaurant in the food guide, check what bands are playing, or see what’s on TV. I can look up a train or bus timetable, check my lottery numbers, get the racing results, and even browse through online services like eBay, realestate.com or RSVP. This really does start to make you realise how the information landscape has changed. Our kids carry these information appliances around in their pockets. Adults just make phone calls. We are so on different planets.

The phone is also a media center. Load it up with MP3 or M4A files and you have a reasonable music player. It’s not quite an iPod, but it’s not too bad. It takes removable memory cards so you can store as much as you have space for. Flip the phone over and there is a decent camera built in the phone. It’s not a fabulous camera, but it’s ok, and given a decent amount of light it will take a pretty acceptable image. Once you take a photo, you have the ability to send it to someone via SMS or email, and you can also Blog it directly from the phone. Yes, the phone is able to establish a direct connection to a nominated Blogger account and send photos directly from the phone to the web in three clicks. Very cool, and something I use ALL the time.

It also takes video. Not the greatest of quality, but good enough. And yes, built into the phone is software called VideoDJ which lets you edit your clips together, directly in the phone. Once you capture the footage, you can trim and edit each one, arrange them in order, add a soundtrack and text and transitions, include stills, add music… all within the phone itself. It really is quite an impressive app for something so lightweight. Once the edit is complete, you have an option to send it to another phone as an MMS message, or to export to a computer using Bluetooth. Very cool, and so easy to use. (Hmmm, I might have a film festival at school where all the films have to be made on the students’ mobile phones! Could be interesting.)

Since the phone can also run an Java based application, there are lots of possibilities there too… as well as the obvious games (which are generally pretty naff) you can also get a portable Java version of Google Maps (including the ability to find locations and to navigate from place to place), Gmail, MSN Messenger and Opera Browser. I’ve also added a thing called Salling Clicker, which lets me use the phone as a remote for my Mac and enables remote control of slideshow presentations, iTunes, iPhoto, and a bunch of other computer-based uses. Finally another app called Shozu is a digital upload centre for all your mobile media. From within Shozu you can upload any media file (photos, audio, video) to virtually any web service (blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc). So photos that get taken on my cell camera can be pushed straight to Flickr on the spot where they will quickly appear on my blog thanks to the Flickr widget. It really is quite impressive. Using the inbuilt web browser (or Opera) I can browse the web, search Google, check Twitter… all from the phone. I realise that most people don’t do all this stuff with their phone – they just make phone calls – but look at what is possible.

Finally, I just love the simple Bluetooth connectivity to my Macs. With a couple of mouse clicks I can drag media to and from the phone using the Mac. I can use the Sync tool to wirelessly synchronise my phone’s address book to the Mac Address Book app. Seamlessly. Simply. In fact, the other big plus for the Bluetooth connectivity is how easy it makes it to add media to the phone for things like ringtones and screen wallpaper. I use Photoshop to trim my favourite photos to 176×220 pixels to fit the mobile’s screen, and I use Audacity to edit MP3 files into short grabs to use as ringtones… it’s easy to do, easy to transfer, and makes the phone a lot of fun to use.

Amazingly, all this is available on just a standard, garden-variety cell phone. Nothing fancy. Unlike a lot of users, I DO actually use most of this stuff quite a lot. Apart from the fact that I really do enjoy learning about this stuff, I also enjoy the idea that I am learning about and using the same technologies that the kids use, and on that basis alone I really hate hearing adults say “I just use my phone for making phone calls.”

That’s so last century!

Posted on

Birthday Blog

Betchablog is officially a year old today. I was looking back through some old entries the other day and found the very first post written on the 17th August last year. I suddenly realised that a whole year had passed… Wow, how time flies! So much has changed in that 12 months, I can hardly believe it.

It raises the obvious question… “Why blog?” It seems that Betchablog has had 141 posts in 52 weeks, that’s almost 3 a week. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to consistently do something that often, so what’s the payoff?

I get asked about that a lot, and it’s usually with the implication that I must just have way too much time on my hands. On the contrary. I have way too little time to do all the things I want or need to do, but somehow through all of that, blogging has become a really integral part of who I am and how I express myself. There is something incredibly therapeutic about committing your vague, intangible thoughts into written words, crafted together to make some sort of sense (even if only to myself). Blogging has helped clarify my own position on many issues, raised my ability to “think out loud”, helped give me insights into things that I’d not thought about, and, I think, made me a better writer. The comments back on some of the posts I’ve written have been sometimes encouraging, sometimes devastating, sometimes insightful, but always welcome. The sense of community that has developed with other bloggers is something I really value too, and reading what others write is an equally important part of being a member of this world.

Writing your thoughts in a blog, where they become public, is so different to writing them in a private diary somewhere. For me, the public nature of blogging is where its true worth comes from. It’s the act of putting it “out there”, exposing your thoughts, ideas and opinions to a community of intelligent readers and writers, that makes it the powerful medium that it is.

Having said that, I don’t write for you. I write for me. I would do this even if there were no audience. (For all I know, there may not be!) People sometimes say to me, “who reads it?”. My answer is, “who cares?”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really nice to get feedback in the form of comments and to know that you may have said something that impacted on someone, but at the end of the day I don’t write for anyone else but me.

I encourage everyone I know to blog. Go on. You know you want to.

So why do YOU blog?

Tags: ,

Posted on

Turning Data into Knowledge

Steve Madsen emailed me a few months ago behalf of the NSW Computer Studies Teachers Association, asking if I’d like to run a workshop at the next CSTA quarterly meeting. He didn’t have any particular theme in mind at the time, and indicated that he was happy for me to pick the topic… anything that might be useful to teachers of computing… and he asked that I get back to him with my idea for a workshop. No problem I said.

I thought about what might be useful to a group of computing teachers. They would be a tech savvy group, so what could I possibly share with them? As much as it might sound like a buzzword, it seems to me that there is still an awful lot about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon that many teachers are still trying to get their heads around, so I thought something along those lines might be useful. I didn’t want it to be too predictable though, and simply talking about blogs and wikis seemed like just a little too… I don’t know… obvious? I started thinking about ways to explore the ideas behind Web 2.0 in a fundamental yet interesting way. Around the same time, I was struck by a couple of websites that do some very Web 2.0 sorts of things, and when looked at in context with each other it became clear that they were tapping into the same fundamental principles in some very interesting ways.

The three sites that grabbed my attention were www.ilike.com, www.43things.com, and del.icio.us. All of these sites shared the same underlying theme of tagging personal data which could then be viewed as a semantic snapshot of the collective consciousness. That seemed like a cool concept to me; this idea of thousands of people all voluntarily submitting many terabytes of content to the web – a massive collection of text, photos, audio and video. More importantly, they were also submitting their opinions and interpretations about that content, and doing it in a way where it could be collated and organised into a broader meaning. Thinking I was being clever, I decided to call the workshop “I Like 43 Delicious Things”.

I emailed Steve back with the idea and he responded by saying that the DET proxy filters might make it hard to do much with that, since they are locked down pretty tight. A little disappointed, I figured I’d mull it over a bit more and maybe some other idea would come to me. However, the next time I heard from Steve he sent me a copy of the agenda for the meeting and there was my original workshop suggestion, listed as a definite thing. Hmm, now I had to make my clever idea actually work.

I sent a couple of emails to clarify the filter situation and it seemed that I might be able to go ahead with the original idea after all, so I started to gather some resources for the workshop. I kinda sorta knew what I wanted to say, but it was all still a bit nebulous in my head. How could I tie it all together so that it made sense to people? (and me!)

It’s funny how things just fall into place sometimes… a few days before the workshop I was still trying to figure out how to make sense of my original idea, and I stumbled across three items that brought it all together for me… one I’d come across before but completely forgotten about, and the other two I’d never seen. When I put these three resources together with the three original websites, it formed a powerful summary of what I felt was going on behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Del.icio.us’s use of tagging to create semantic taxonomies of knowledge was pretty clear to me. The way the tag clouds formed around large collections of bookmarked resources provided a clear snapshot into their hidden meaning. The same concept seemed to apply to the lists of personal goals submitted by people on 43things.com. Lots of people sharing ideas about life goals and forming patterns of collective thought by contributing those thoughts into one place. By tagging and adding metadata to their goals, it formed a “zeitgeist” picture of what the masses were thinking about. Finally, ilike.com tapped into the large store of metadata collected within thousands of iTunes music libraries and brought it all together online to form a collective community of music lovers that were able to share their tastes and suggestions, linking musical tastes and suggestions from the crowd. Three very different sites that all used a common idea of data sharing, metadata tagging and community building.

The glue that held these ideas together was three more things… Firstly, a website which created dynamic tag clouds based on the past 200+ years of US presidential speeches. Chirag Mehta has cleverly been able to delve into the words of America’s past presidents, analyse the frequency and relative importance of their words, and create an interactive tag cloud concept which gives an amazing insight into the way the issues of their day could be seen as a summary of the culture at the time. It was a powerful example of the way existing data can be easily mined for greater meaning.

The second resource was a video called The Machine is Us/ing Us. Although this video has shown up on many education blogs in the last few months, it really explains well why the web is the way it is right now, and how the contribution of user data, tagging, XML and CSS are increasingly responsible for the new web landscape.

The final resource was a video from the TED Talks series called “The Web’s Secret Stories” by Jonathan Harris. In this video, Harris shows a piece of research work (it was more like conceptual art to me) called We Feel Fine. This incredible piece of work needs to be seen for yourself, but I felt it perfectly tied the loose threads together… it was the closest thing I’ve seen to an IT-based system that constantly analyses the random thoughts of the blogosphere’s collective consciousness in near real-time and massages it into a form that is not only informative and interesting, but utterly compelling. You simply must watch the video, then go have a play with the website. It is amazing.

I think most people got something out of the workshop, at least I hope they did. More to the point, I know that I learnt an enormous amount by preparing to share this information with my colleagues. I felt I came away from it with a much deeper insight in the nature of the new web, and in the process got to grips with tools that I had often used but never truly understood. It’s so true that if you want to really understand something, try teaching it to someone else.

Tags: , , , ,