After nearly 2 years on here, I have decided to grow up and start using my very own domain. I will continue blogging at:
This week's carnival (a week after the real one) is hosted at the aptly named Golden Swamp. Make sure to go there and check out what the mobile blogging world has to offer to you!
Another week, another carnival of the mobilists, and my post on mobile social gaming is amongst them. So go head over to Ram Krishnan's Mobile Broadband Blog and read up on what else was hot last week!
This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted over at Dennis Bournique's WAP Review. Read it here to get an inspired overview of last week's posts on all things mobile!
Happy new year, everyone! And to get you a good and informed start into 2009, here's a pointer to a nice new service from Hungry Mobile, a blog run by Jan Rezab: he asked a few of us to contribute short assessments to a question he will ask once a week. Contributors include content industry executives, publishers, mobile marketing gurus, bloggers and mobile evangelists, and this should allow for a quick take from an inside circle of multipliers (as I think you call them/us) on various bits and pieces of our industry. I am chuffed to be asked to take part but I am also horrified that he allows us a full 400 characters per answer (not words, characters!).
It's been a while, 3 1/2 months to be exact, since I last found the spare moment to post to my blog. The main reason for the busy, busy time that forced me into blogging silence can be found here. I hope you will not expect me to comment further on this: I had made it an unwritten rule not to cover things directly involving my day job, and this must remain so in particular in this specific instance, which I trust you appreciate.
However, since this deal is done now, I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts with you again. Stay put and thanks for being so patient!
One of the ventures backed by Apple legend and Garage Technology Ventures founder (and of course blogger extraordinaire) Guy Kawasaki has just launched a wonderful site syndicating feeds from loads of mobile-related news from all over the web. You'll find it here. And, yes, I am greatly humbled to be part of it (and will therefore happily boast with it here... forgive me).
Alltop, which is the new venture, not only provides information on the mobile sector though: they syndicate a host of items grouped by topic; they call it "an "online magazine rack" that displays 'all the top' stories for popular topics". Great stuff and thanks for having me!
I've been a fan of those "bloggers on speed" of the likes of Jaiku, Twitter, etc for a while but I am not entirely happy with the interfaces yet: the services live of proximity and timeliness in that is then that they unfold their true power. Otherwise, the old-fashioned web accessed from an old-fashioned computer with 10x more bandwidth and a proper keyboard might actually be superior. Mobile blogging however is relatively clunky so far. There are a few guys out there who offer mobile little J2ME apps, (mobile) browser plug-ins, widgets, you name it (see for some solutions here) but, let's face it, they're not really as slick and seamless as they could (and should?!) be. Tellingly therefore, both Twitter and (now Google-owned) Jaiku use SMS as the prevailing interface to communicate with the world through their networks via your mobile phone. Is that really it? Look at the Facebook Blackberry app: so slick in comparison!
UI, accessability and discovery are the key drivers for mass user adoption - and this what all social media lives of (apart, perhaps of the institution of marriage, which seemingly works best in micro-communities of 2), so why do they not tackle this bit more aggressively? The answer might be that, whilst they realize that mobile is a major contributor to their value-add when compared to other web apps, they are not actually mobile companies; they are web companies.
The idea of utilising the power of web 2.0 and its wealth of widgets and applets contributed by a gazillion of independent developers and fan boys might all be very well but it slows adoption: Facebook apps only became successful after Facebook itself was such a huge community, they did not drive that growth (although they now arguably contribute significantly). Therefore, it would seem to me, it would be required that the originators/owners of those networks contribute more energy and resource into optimizing the user interfaces to use the actual service before falling back on third-party add-ons. Alas, it is impossible to find a Google widget (for iGoogle or Google Desktop) even for Jaiku, which Google acquired. Tellingly, the only available widget was produced by fans... There's quite a bit to be done, I think...
Mobile bloggers who read this and have not yet registered (well, can you then really be mobile bloggers?), note that Rudy de Waele, mobile blogger extraordinaire, with the generous support from his people at MyStrands hold yet another Mobile Sunday ahead of this year's Mobile World Congress (I am still itching to write 3GSM...) in Barcelona, more specifically on Sunday, 10 February.
Mobile Sunday is, in their own words, "an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums", and, yes, I'll attend in the vain hope that something cool and funky will rub off...
You'll find the registration page here.
See you all in Barcelona!
What's mobile in the following? Well, Nokia is involved and it is a development that would surely affect the mobile screen! A survey commissioned by Nokia found that, by 2012, one quarter of all media will be created and consumed from within a circle of peers rather than from traditional media. The ongoing rise of social media then, which the survey dubs "circular entertainment".
In the course of the study consumers from 17 countries were interviewed about their digital behaviors and lifestyles signposting emerging entertainment trends. Combining views from "industry leading figures" with Nokia's own research from the 900m people that use their phones , Nokia apparently "constructed a global picture of what it believes entertainment will look like over the next five years." Bless them...
Nokia's VP multimedia Mark Selby said that "[t]he trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media." So the NY Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, was right when he suspected that the "media tsunami" that is aggregated and re-purposed content today is threatening the place of traditional media.
The chaps from the Future Laboratory, who conducted the survey, went even further: "Key to this evolution is consumers' basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of." So Bush and Putin aren't all that scary after all? Phew!
I have some doubts if the survey really captures the mainstream, or otherwise society is further than I would have thought. These are the numbers they posted (based on the 9,000 consumers they surveyed):
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