Before I rush into my busy day:
CNN has published an article on Josh Nesbit’s project at St. George’s in Namitete, Malawi. I wrote about the project here and talked about it at BlogCampSwitzerland.
Archive for the 'General' Category
On the train to northern Germany. Three more hours to go.
It’s been a long day and my motivation to get some work done is kind of missing. So here’s a text message from the train. Longer than 140 characters. Maybe.
Two doctors across the aisle are loudly discussing other doctors, Basel hospitals, the Swiss health system, politics and other details. They are code switching between Swiss German and Arabic (or something that sounds similar). They are getting out now. They were talking non-stop for two hours.
Der Trend zu mehr als einem Betriebssystem:
BTW, I finally ordered a new 13 inch MacBook with 4GB RAM. I really like the size. I guess I am officially a Mac fan. I even tweeted about it!
Twitter vs. Skype:
How do you explain the difference between Twitter and Skype? I was talking about the Twitter Dinner I attended on Monday and a work colleague asked “What’s the difference to instant messaging?”
For the casual observer, none really. Nothing revolutionary. 140 characters organized chronological on a webpage. Like the first webpages, nothing truly spectacular.
Yet again, it is another way to publish even faster. Faster than a static HTML-based webpage or a dynamic server-side based blog. The future of Twitter will be exciting to watch. Maybe it will just dwindle and die. Maybe new business models will emerge and it will become commercial like websites. Maybe it’s just a stepping stone to something new.
Anyway here we go, my first list in a long time. Here are:
Ten differences between Skype and Twitter:
- One to many vs one to one or one to two: I have more Twitter followers than Skype contacts. I don’t follow all of my Twitter followers, while Skype is more or less reciprocal and if somebody doesn’t add me as a contact, I start wondering why.
- Public With Twitter I can view the stream, and the faves before clicking the ominous Follow button. By default Skype messages are not public.
- More options Skype is direct and immediate between me and another person or a second person. Twitter can be direct and immediate between my friends and me, but it doesn’t have to be. I can post a tweet message without any follow-up or call to action. On the other hand Skypers expect a more immediate reaction. And tend to follow general conversational patterns.
- Easier to search thru I can search thru Tweet streams much more easily, thanks to add-on services such as Twiiter Search/Summize.
- Monitor Like with Google, or Flickr, I use Summize/Twitter Search to find new content on topics of interest, c.f comments on the famous Nutella Alternatives group (funny!) or on a more serious note tweets from Malawi and Zimbabwe. In the same way, companies can find what people are saying about their products. Consumers are more likely to write a 140 character message than a full A4 review on your product. I.e. Twitter forms opinions on products. And unlike statements at a cocktail party, these mini-reviews are searchable.
- Unfiltered news from strangers With Twitter I can get raw, unfiltered messages on current news as they happen, c.f the recent bombings in Mumbai. Following “breaking news” on Twitter is more exciting than on CNN and co, as they scramble to get a correspondent online and show the same video sequence over and over again.
- Mobile Cos it’s so simple, Twitter offers better mobile phone integration from the start. Unfortunately, the best Twitter feature by far was shut down in September 08. What I call the downstream, i.e. the forwarding of Twitter messages to my cell phone.
- Ubiquituous software All I need is a browser and my login data. And browsers are everywhere. I think there’s a possibility to use a Skype widget within a browser, but so far I have never used this feature.
- Faves I can store Twitter messages I like by fav’ing them.
- Fun I use Skype for work-related stuff. Twitter is for fun. I’m not twittering for the marketing effect. Just fun. I don’t care if 1000 people follow me or not.
And finally it’s art:
I learnt at LIFT 08, that I’m part of a giganormous art project.
Where else can you follow the different time zones having their first cup of coffee in the morning?
Kevin Marks picks up the recent meme on blogging being dead/old-fashioned/out-dated. He says:
Blogging…
has become part of the fabric of the net
See these blog posts and articles:
Nick Carr: Who killed the blogosphere?
The Economist: Oh, grow up!
Some things don’t change, though. Old and dying media still feel the need to criticize blogs and the authors for not being critical or original enough. Or whatever. Articles like this show a lack of understanding. A recurring theme in old media vs. new media. I write about Google, iPhones, new MacBooks and the US election ‘cos these topics have become part of my life. I’m reflecting. Collecting. Writing. Sharing. Remembering. Learning. Trying out new technology instead of sitting on the sidelines and waiting until it gets mainstream. I’m not a news site. I don’t have a budget. I don’t earn any revenue.
Post-US-election note to myself: Hope is a powerful force.
My mind is jumping here, but…
I’m reminded of this text snippet in a widespread and recognized book of poetry:
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.
Getting up at 4 o’ clock in the morning to study for school may lead to great things.
For future reference:
Marketing is never about a hammer hitting plate glass.
It is almost always about the accrued power of a thousand drips, drips that accrue, drop by drop until they overwhelm the status quo and break through, starting a flood.
The first drip is very exciting, of course. Everyone lines up to cheer.
It’s the last drip that’s lonely. Most of the time, everyone has long left the building, lost interest and moved on to celebrate some other first drip. The penultimate drip gets criticized… are you still working on that?… that’s not so great… is that it?… but then, the drip that comes next, the last drip, proves once and for all that you were doing the right thing all along.
I could write a long blog post on this.
I could sing a reggae song that has the same message.
LOL at this Wired article!
Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.
I agree with the author. Blogging is so 2004. For the record: I installed WordPress on this server in September 2004. Time to pull the plug.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr instead.
(BTW I’m still the top entry at Google for Boring Flower Snapshot)
Last minute pointer:
Kunstschaffende aus Basel und der Region öffnen alle zwei Jahre an einem Wochenende ihre Ateliertüren, um einem interessierten Publikum Einblick in ihr Schaffen zu gewähren.
Portes Ouvertes is happening this weekend. Various Basel artists are taking part. A great way to see how artists work.
Hat tip: Martin Gyger, who is also taking part.
Here are the snapshots of the second architecture tour that I took part in:
We cycled from Tinguely Museum in Basel and stopped at various points in Riehen and Grenzach Wyhlen.
Heard about Hans Bernoulli and his Garden City idea to provide improved housing for the working class as well as a patch of ground to grow vegetables and fruit. The wooden houses he built in the Landauer Quartier are apparently still in a good condition. The lease for the Landauer area will expire in 2012 or 2013. And already there are prototypes what this area could look like (mostly high rise buildings and blocks).
We saw how a small Riehen house from the 1930s was renovated to accommodate for an aging family member in need of medical care and special attention.
Next, we cycled up the hill and stopped at a couple of Riehen villas before rolling across the border to Germany.
One building that really stood out was a brand-new gallery/studio building in Wyhlen by Gerner Gerner Plus, an Austrian architectural office.
The last building of the day was a private house designed by Askari Architekten from Lörrach.
It was interesting to listen to the owners and architects. It seems that if you really want to build and invest, you also need to become a lobbyist and persuade local authorities and politicians.
As seen previously on my Flickr stream, I stumbled across this poster:
I took part in two architecture tours this weekend organized by Architektur Dialoge as part of the Les Journées de l’Architectures.
Birsstadt
I’ve uploaded a couple of snapshots of yesterday’s tour through Basel-Land. It was “off the beaten track” and lots of fun. During the tour we got a sense of the upcoming challenges as the various municipalities continue to grow and expand from a city planning point of view.
Today’s tour will have to wait til tomorrow…
Pêle-mêle off the top my head:
In my daily reads, I stumbled across a Wordpress plugin called Tagaroo. It reminded me of Zemanta. I haven’t tried it out. But I guess the interesting part is that it is being sponsored/developed by media giant Thomson Reuters as part of the Calais project.
As usual I’ve been taking lots of snapshots. Faves of the week include:
Oh and yeah, I know what this year’s Christmas card will look like:
I tried out some night photography which was a lot of fun. Found out that I’ll need a good, lightweight tripod to pursue this more seriously.
The Swiss consumer magazine K-Tipp published the results of a chocolate degustazione.
I downloaded hours of video podcasts on CSS.
African bloggers in Amsterdam:
Picnic 08 (an annual tech. conference held in northern Europe) had a special Africa track called “Surprising Africa“. There’s a short video featuring the speakers here (via tweet).
An anthropological introduction to YouTube:
Interesting background article, for future reference:
We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
Source: Edge: BETTER THAN FREE By Kevin Kelly. Via Appfrica.
It’s been one year and one month since I moved to Mac. And in line with the underlying concept of this post, I’d like to recommend a Mac OS tool which I find very useful:
If you have a look at my Flickr stream, I tend to post a number of screenshots to collect ideas and illustrate blog posts. Skitch is great for this.
I found that Skitch is more intuitive than Apple’s Grab. By default Grab creates TIFFs, which I find more cumbersome to handle and an overkill for quick notes.
I like the Skitch annotation features (text, arrows, circles, squares). This helps to interact with external contractors much faster. And I can easily send the screenshot via Apple Mail.
I post to my Flickr account directamente without a detour to Flickr Uploader. And Skitch keeps a history of recent photos and screenshots, which I can easily drag to a desktop app like Powerpoint.
A productivity tool to consider!
One of my regular Google alerts currently points to a blog that is scraping entire sections of my content and displaying these on a Blogspot site.
I have reported the Blogspot site via this website:
And I’m well aware of the fact that anything I publish on the world wide web is up for grabs. It’s a well-known fact. The minute you offer an RSS feeds, scrapers can easily pull your content and display it anywhere they like.
And you depend on the big search engine company to sort out the original from the copycats.
That’s why I like this tagline: “Make the scrapers work for you!”.
If you’re using WordPress, download the plugin and upload it to your plugin folder. Activate it in the Plugins view and then open Settings > RSS Footer to add a text and backlink:
Click Update Settings.
Finally, ping Feedburner (if you’re using it) and you should see the changes show up in your feed.
If you’re using Blogger (and you understand German), see Mlle. A.’s excellent tutorial.
See also:
How to foil scrapers on your blog
The Lifecyle of a Blog Post
When I was a kid, my mom told me that she’ll never forget where she was when she heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. She was at a train station waiting for a train to arrive, when suddenly the news spread that JFK had been killed.
I’ll never forget where I was when I heard about 9/11. I was at work in Lugano in an open-plan office, a typical Dilbert-like office setting. A work colleague came by and said something to the effect that the USA was being attacked. Various Internet news websites such as CNN or Yahoo were down. A colleague and I headed downstairs to the pub to see if we could find a TV. But somehow the satellite receiver wasn’t set up. So we headed back into the office.
On the second floor, somebody hooked up a PC, a TV reception card and an online projector. And everybody sat there watching.
As announced on Twitter, I presented a talk on mobile technology in Malawi at today’s BlogCamp in Zurich to share what I’m learning from the African blogs and tweets that I follow on a regular basis.
I started my talk with a short intro on Chiperoni (I am a bridge blogger somewhere between Basel and Blantyre) and why I blog. How much I appreciated Alex Antener’s news stream published on a Polytechnic server during the last Malawi general election. Then pointing to White African’s blog post discussing Twitter’s decision to discontinue its SMS service to the rest of the world. I tried to point out the potential a “Twitter to SMS” service could have for Malawi, where most of the population does not have access to the internet or even a plain old fixed telephone line.
I described the current situation. And how this is changing with mobile technology. I pointed to Mike McKay’s blog post about a rural area in northern Malawi where villagers climb an ant hill to get a better signal.
In Switzerland we take a lot of things such as the excellent infrastructure we have for granted.
I shared some of my observations from my recent holiday in Blantyre, some data on the pricing models and how public wifi is being introduced in urban areas.
I was a little shaky on the stats side of things, telecommunication regulations, as well as who owns the major cell phone service companies, TNM and Zain. I’ll need to do more research here. I might have got some of my facts mixed up.
I did refer to the new airtime tax that is being introduced.
Examples referred to:
- Health: The FrontlineSMS project in Namitete, Malawi
- Agriculture: Cy Kuckenbacker’s video interview with rural farmers
- Media: Ushahidi.org and Sokwanele
This talk was inspired by White African’s and Soyapi Mumba’s tweet streams. Zikomo kwambiri. Keep on tweeting.
Flickr credits: White African, Hackerfriendly, all other photos are my own.
Big zikomo to Persillie and Mlle A. for reviewing my slides!
I enjoyed presenting very much (note to myself).
Oh and I forgot to mention my chat with a Limbe internet cafe manager during the talk…
Yes please!
i went a-photowalking and learned about a project that is collecting and growing old varieties of fruit.
This recent Twitter announcement is disappointing on a personal level, but also on a more global level as White African discusses:
Twitter represents a change in communication. By acting as a global gateway for updates via SMS (or the web), that then updates all of your followers, Twitter succeeded in breaking ground in one-to-many messaging. There have been a couple times over the past year where Twitter was used in Africa to get news out that wasn’t possible in any other format.
And in the comment thread he explains:
What’s missing for it to work in Africa is not just the sending of updates, but the receiving of your contacts updates. That really is what created the network effect for Twitter, and why it can’t succeed where it’s not available.
In Africa, not having SMS is a deal killer. Though there would undoubtedly be users who access it through the web - as is true throughout the rest of the world, true penetration in Africa can only come through services that can be fully operational using only SMS. Why I think this is particularly disappointing is that those third generation Twitter services that could really serve the needs of both ordinary Africans and humanitarians globally will not be built now.
The really interesting thing to me, so that Twitter doesn’t have to shoulder the load by itself, is the opportunity to build services that are separate and independent, but also equal. I guess the closest analogy I have would be to Jabber in this case - where anyone can run a server and that makes the whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.
A very interesting thread, which I’d like to recommend here.
My observations in Blantyre:
- Despite the relative high cost, nearly everybody has a cell phone.
- The top present to get for your girlfriend is a cell phone (!).
- Most people use prepaid cards. See the current tariff plans at Zain (previously Celtel) and tnm.
- Cell phones are helping to connect remote places, that never had a telephone connection. Villagers can hear more often and directly from family members that have moved to the cities or emigrated to SA, the USA and other countries. Farmers can compare market prices, receive weather updates. See Cy’s video.
- Internet services are relatively expensive. Out of reach for personal use. Connecting via fixed line is slow and error prone. The way forward is wifi. Despite these encouraging developments, Internet will remain out of reach for most people for many years to come.
As a gentle drizzle sets in, I’d just like to dump a couple of carefully composed poetry text snippets here at Chiperoni headquarters.
So far this summer of 08 has treated me well. I’m spending every weekend with my latest gadget: Shooting photos with my Canon 40D. There’s a lot to learn. And try out. Especially regarding lenses and post-processing. I’m still very much of a snapshotter.
I have noticed something:
The memory aspect of photos has become important to me. A couple of years ago before I started blogging and flickring, I joked that I’m taking photos with my retina and one day I’ll just download the contents of my brain (bioware, wetware). But as I proceed through life, more and more of my life pictures are moving to the back of my brain. I can still access them if I want, but they are moving further back as I take care of the daily clutter. But I don’t know if the pictures will disappear one day.
I like the way I can document one moment. With one shutter click.
Yesterday I went to see the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. I enjoyed it immensely. The show that I liked the most was the one on Theo Frey.
See this Wikipedia page for more infos on his biography.
The show reminded me of a Hernando de Soto interview I read. Not so long ago, many people lived in abject poverty here in Switzerland. The Frey photos brought this time closer.
Throughout the past weeks I’ve continued my low key fitness and jogging program. I haven’t run any races or lost any weight, but it helps to deal with stress. And the side effects of sitting hunched up in front of a laptop.
The Summer of Ohhh Eight…
Did you realize? This is the second last year of single digits. I didn’t know that 08 is a lucky number in China. But I feel that this summer is special. A time to remember. Dobbiamo profittare.
i went a-photowalking (again).
