Six Apart is participating in DEMO 2004, and this morning we made some big announcements regarding mobile features for TypePad. You can see some of these features in action at our DEMO or Bust! moblog.
New mobile features from TypePad include, mobile posting to blogs from multiple authors, audio annotations to camera phone posts, and a new Palm client for TypePad.
This is what I've been working on for the past several months. It's a combination of a custom J2ME based mapping client, weblog service and location alerting system. It's being sold to carriers, not to the general public, but you can play with the public weblog site above. This is the piece I developed. It still needs a lot of hardening and ever more features need to be added to keep up with the TypePads of the world, but in general it's your standard weblog service, but with the integration of location information and maps.
I have to admit... I'm a sucker for these type of phone applications.
DEMO 2004The DEMO2004 conference begins tomorrow in Phoenix. A weblog (DEMO 2004 Weblog) is in place for the conference.
DEMO is recognized around the world as the premier event that reveals the products and services poised to have the greatest impact on the technology landscape in the year to come.
Christian Lindholm, father of the Series 60 interface, has made an abstract of his book, "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" available for WAP download to your Series 60 handset as an interactive Maxdox app (JAR file). Rather a nice format, actually, and certainly worth a gander if you're interested either in the book itself (I've already read it) or one possible face of mobile documents to come.
Mobilewhack points to an abstract of Christian Lindholm's book "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" The abstract is available as a download for Series 60 phones. I just installed it on my Nokia 3650. It is formated for my phone. Is interesting to think of having content like this available for phones. I am more and more using my Nokia 3650 as a PDA. I already sync my address book and calendar to it. With the installation of the Opera browser, viewing web pages is now an option. I've started pulling off content from my school district web site and saving it to my phone. I can now pull up schedules and memos and such for viewing on my phone when away from my computer. The one thing holding me back was the way that AT&T Wireless charges for data. Can get pretty expensive pretty quickly... Last week I read how to connect my 3650 to my laptop (Share2Blue2th 2.0 )via Bluetooth and utilize the laptop connection to pull web content on to my Nokia 3650 via Opera. Now I can pull the content for later reference without worrying about AT&T data charges.
Business leaders sent to principal's office - 2004-02-05 - The Business Journal of Portland
On Thursday, 115 community and business leaders are learning what real job stress is like: serving as "principals for a day" in Portland's public schools.
Lewis Elementary took part in this event. Our guest was Dan Williams, Comcast area director of communications for Oregon and Southwest Washington. He got to see a typical day at Lewis... This included visiting in classrooms, talking with parents, and helping to clean up a busted water fountain pipe which was spraying water all over a classroom...
O'Reilly Network: O'Reilly Network -- 2004 Emerging Technology Conference Coverage I was able to attend this the past two years. Unfortunantly, I won't be able to go this year, but the folks at O'Reilly, and many of those attending, do a great job of sharing the information presented. So tomorrow between lunch room duty, and dealing with unruly 5th graders, I'll take a look and see what is being shared...
To paraphrase Phil Windley: school communities will usually get the websites they deserve.
Tom Hoffman responds to Will's post about his frustration with publishing approval issues that are getting in the way of having more teachers publish at Will's high school.
My district has purchased a content management system that promised this kind of work flow, but in reality doesn't deliver it. (It also doesn't work very well with anything but Internet Explorer 6, but that is another story... ) Their idea was that the principal, or the principal's designee would sit as some sort of managing editor. Not exactly the best way to get people sharing information in a timely manner
I never understood how school districts can trust a teacher with a classroom full of six year olds, but not trust them to use good judgment when posting homework, field trip notices, or hamster birth announcements on a classroom web site.
The link below is to some notes for a Weblog presentation to local college faculty.....
Background and Perspective
Weblogs: A History and Perspective... by Rebecca Blood
Understanding Weblogs, O'Reilly Net Article
Blogging Goes Corporate, Wired Article
Trent Lott Gets Bloggered, Online Journalism Review:
Weblog Software:
The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup
Other Interesting Software...
Rendezvous
Subethaedit
RSS:
Rich Site Summary, Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) Site Summary, Real
Simple Syndicaton....
News Aggregators
Sample Weblog Sites
Jon Udell: Turning consumers into producers
Pay close attention to the pivotal word "experience" -- as in, for example, "the user experience." It's the clue to understanding why Steve Jobs and John Mayer onstage at Macworld, mixing tracks in GarageBand, have more to do with IT's mission than you might think. The quality of experience that we deliver, through software and services, will depend on our ability to negotiate protocols and relationships in a fluid, rapidly-evolving environment. In short: to jam.
If only the folks in my IT department read Jon Udell...
I am constantly amazed at the lack of vision in most school district IT departments, and also in most cases in their curriculum departments. The thing that got me excited about the Internet in schools was not so much the ability to bring resources to the classroom. While that is a worthwhile enterprise, what really excited me was the ability for my students to share their work with others. In the 10 years that I have been publishing this is what has really excited me...
Speaking of user experience... this week coming up is going to be interesting. My teachers will be entering grades in our student information system for the first time. This is a Java based web application... As far as I can tell it was designed by frogs...
Tuttle SVCTom Hoffman has an interesting piece about Dave Winer's "Share Your OPML!" campaign.
In comparison, "Share Your OPML!" is simplistic, even by the standards of Dave's earlier work, requiring users to manually export an OPML list from their aggregator and submit it to a central server. Only the subset of geeks who are game to try every blog gadget that come down the pike (which includes me) will ever do this, and that subset is the best understood and most easily studied part of the blogosphere.
Tuttle SVC Tom Hoffman comes up with the best line I've heard about the Bush Mars proposal... Of course once we get there, we'll rename the Red Planet
Believe me, I'm as pissed as the next guy that the dream of Space 1999 has been deferred, but the timing on this proposal seems all wrong.
Buzznet - timlauerJust signed up for Buzznet. It is one of those "post your images from your camera phone on the web..." services. Has a nice JavaScript that lets you syndicate your images. See below...
We have been out of school for three days now because of snow, ice, and freezing rain. Today everything is covered with a coat of ice. Hopefully the temperature is going to rise later today and start to melt this stuff...
I took the bus out to my school last night to check on the building. Found a busted water pipe in one of the classrooms. One of the school district maintenance guys talked me through shutting off the water for that room, but boy what a mess... Plan to head in this afternoon and see how the clean up is going.
Speaking of buses... Portland has a great public transportation system. If not for the buses nothing much would be happening.
Everything TypePad!: New Features
Uploading a ZIP File to a Photo Album (Plus/Pro)
You can now upload a zipped folder of images to your TypePad photo album.
Somehow I missed this, but a very nice feature of Typepad. The ability to take a folder of images, apply .zip compression and then upload them directly to a Typepad photo album.
An example can be found here... Hope they put something like this into Moveable Type...
Chicago Tribune | Cops to patrol airports on high-tech scooters
The Daley administration has signed a $128,000 contract to buy 28 Segway Human Transporters, and most of the machines will be in service at Midway and O'Hare, zooming down concourses and cruising around terminals with officers at the controls.
Mark/Space: · Missing Sync for hiptop
Missing Sync for hiptop enables synchronization of iCal events and To Do's list and Mac OS X Address Book contacts with the hiptop desktop interface and hiptop handheld (including the Sidekick). Share contacts, calendar events and to do items across multiple devices using iSync.
Markspace already makes a version of Missing Sync for the Sony Clié, now they are working on a version for the Sidekick. Website says coming soon...
Tuttle SVC: January 04, 2004 ArchivesTom lays out a wishlist for 2004 related to technology and education. One that stands out for me is his wish for thin clients.
Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home
The Mars Exploration Rover Mission Home is a good starting point for information on yesterday's landing of Spirit on Mars.
Blogging and RSS Will's article published in Multimedia & Internet@Schools is available online at the link above.
Opera's Small-Screen Rendering(tm)
The Opera web browser for Smartphones and PDA's is really amazing. Just about any page I have pulled up on it looks good and is readable. Much more useful than the default browser that came with my Nokia 3650.
The Windows version of the Opera browser has a very nice feature that will preview any web page as it would show up on the Opera handheld browser. For example, the image to the right is how this site looks on my Nokia 3650.