priit@imke

Yes, here in IMKE, we all blog. Topics are mainly related with studies, which shows, how well we are focusing on school :] . OK, but how well we are bloging, is another topic to point on.

Our task was to read D. Pollard’s article “What Makes A Blog Popular?” and after that analyse different blogs (including ours) to find out who is writing well (and academically?) or who as simple as students in secondary school.

I analysed 11 different blogs, where 4 of them were writen in Estonian (native language speakers) and 7 were writen in English (1 native language speaker, Ray). Formula is available in Wikipedia, but I used automated version by Juicy Studio for it.

Here are the results:

Grey color shows, which numbers were compared, dark yellow stands for blogs in Estonian. The first table shows results of Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (maximum is 0) test and bottom one shows results for Flesch-Kincaid Grade test (maximum is 12).

Still, blogs can be compared with magazines or newspapers, which are having only one editor (yes, there are multi-editor blogs). I’m not buying all the magazines I can find on the store or order all the available newspapers. Most of them are pure crap, filled with commercials and fancy persons from reality-shows. For that reason I don’t understand, why all the blogs should be readable and enjoyable (some time ago I read a blog about a man who lost his wife, she died and I can’t say it was enjoyable). Blogs are still pretty much personal and I would keep it that way for a while.

Since there has been a numerous lectures which are less or more connected with mobile technologies and using them in the field of education, It is recommended to do some background stuty by yourself too.

Although Ashish form Mumbai University didn’t invent a bycycle, his simple photo album is working smoothly and could be fun toy for those who are interested in such kind of technologies. There is always a possibility to add or delete few rows of code.

Photo Album with Maps (sounds clumsy even in Estonian, I tried that too!), doesn’t include capacious code or database. Just choose your photos, use Google Maps API & wikimapia to find accurate location and upload your page into server. I tried it with three different pictures and locations. Only repercussion came when I tried to add picture, taken in the London Bridge, and Google Maps added it to somewhere in Alaska :]. So I set this location manually. Problably it was my mistake (or ineptitude).

Small how-to and demo are available here, on the auhtor’s homepage. Screenshot.

technorati tags: googlemaps, wikimapia

Few days ago I discovered that I’ve been using Flock for almost a year now. Considering that technology preview released on June 22, 2006, it has been a really long time.

Until this summer, there was a problem with memory leaks. I wrote about it and the solution in my other blog. In version 0.7, it seems that it has been fixed. The second major issue was crashing after working with PDF files.

Although Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox, it’s extensions were not available for Flock. Now there are over 1500 extensions for download.

Here I will point out few built-in features that I’m using:

uploading images into Flickr

blogging tool

del.icio.us favorites

technorati tags:flock, socialbrowsing

In Communities and Social Computing class, Kakk gave us an assignment to familiarise with different social communities in the Internet and to write a more detailed comparison. I choosed Friendster, tribe.net, hi5.com in a very simple reason - I don’t know a thing about these communities.

Friendster

Friendster is founded in San Fransisco in 2002. With more than 31 million registered users, it is one of the largest Internet communities.

Main target groups

Users are mainly from Europe, North America, and Asia aged about 21 to 30. Younger people from Asia, and not-anymore-teenagers from Europe (Wikipedia).

Main activities

Finding old and making new friends, collegues or even dates; video sharing using Grouper, and bloging. Though owners are adding extra features, it is still more like matchmaking tool.

Special traits

Video sharing!

Controversial issues

Friendster is free to use, but blinking ads and pop-ups are really annoying. And… Friendster is a very big community and like other similar project (Orkut, for example), it has to live with forbidden content (strong sexual content, rassism etc.)

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tribe.net

Main target groups

“At tribe.net, we believe in the power of connecting to other people to get things done. Since that can be surprisingly hard in a city, we founded tribe.net to make it easier. Whether it’s for finding the right job, a killer apartment, a good restaurant, a gentle dentist, or a hiking buddy, we think those tasks are best done by connecting with other local people for advice and sharing. The people you connect to can be your friends, people who live in your neighborhood, or people who live in your city that share a common interest with you. Tribe.net makes finding those people easier.” (tribe.net)

Main activities

Main activities are sharing knowledge (and questions) through different communities. Registered users can save their favorites, create services and set up their own tribes (communities)

Special traits

Communication goes always through the communities, information sharing is very important. Every registered user can save his/her own favorites, create services, and individual tribes (communities)

Controversial issues

In a controversial move, on December 20, 2005, tribe.net decided to prohibit sexually explicit content, partially in response to the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act. Coincidentally, shortly before the rule change, tribe.net hired a new CEO, who was a regular Christian churchgoer, and somewhat socially conservative. This move disappointed many users, as tribe to that point had been notable for an exceptionally permissive content policy. (Wikipedia)

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hi5.com

Main target groups

Quite big number of bands are represented in this portal. Opportunity to upload music and picture makes it easy to use to whom HTML-code is something alien or they don’t have time and tools to build up their own web-page.

Main activities

Main activities are messaging, using bulletin boards, groups, and journals. It strongly depends on users interests too.

Special traits

- Music (Beta): Musicians can upload their songs to hi5, users can add up to 15 songs by adding the hi5 Musicplayer to their profile and can purchase the songs via iTunes or REAL. Editorial provided in 5 genres; Hip-Hop, R&B, Electronic, Rock and Reggaeton.
- Photos: Users can store up to 1 Gigabyte of photos, create up to 100 albums on his/her hi5 account. Each album can hold up to 250 photos, provided it does not exceed the total album capacity of 50 MB.
- Chat: Users can use the online chatrooms to chat with each other.
- HTML Scripting: Users can add HTML to their profiles, a feature not provied by others. JavaScript, however, is stil not allowed.
- One trait could be optional online journal for every user. (hi5.com)

Controversial issues

With so many different capabilities, it is easy to get lost and also using the portal efficently seems to be more difficult than rest of those mentioned portals.

Last two days with Jürgen Sheible (Lenin’s Godson), mobiles and Python have been even more interesting than I could expect. Teacher with an artist name is something new for me and I bet for rest of us too :]

Monday’s class was more like introduction. He showed us his mobile projects, which were all less or more interactive and fun to watch - Jürgen uses video camera to make short example movies of actions. That’s a very good idea, we all know that one picture is worth more than a thousand words.

So called “hands-on” activity started already on the second lesson when we uploaded one sample program into the mobile and tested it. Todays examples were more interesting - using Internet connection, we tried to upload the text-file, download video and pictures, played with custom-made sound-recorder and more. Most of the examples are available on Jürgen’s homepage

Our let’s-get-to-know-each-other-better evening went extremely well. Wine bar was very cozy, view to the harbor was liek from the photo and of course company was good. Until one o’clock in the morning we were sitting there, who’s enjoying wine, who preferred a beer. After this place were closed, we moved to the old town were we found Ray (he left us roughly around 9) sitting alone in the bar called Levist Väljas.

We arrived home around 4 am, after taking a small cheece burgers for early breakfast :]

technorati tags:sheible, python, nokia6670, vinoteek, imke