Inside View

Nokia N70 Camera

USING THE NOKIA N70 cameraphone (not for this JFK image but for these photos) means I am very close to having megapixel coverage in my pocket. The N70 snaps two megapixels with very nice optics. In practical use, I get sharper images than other megapixel cameraphones I have used. The Carl Zeiss optics on the N70 make that possible. After shooting, I transfer the images to my computer via the USB cable Nokia provides with the camera. It's simple and elegant because my on-board Adobe software makes the images part of an electronic library.

Cameraphones have outsold normal digital cameras for the past three years and the gap is widening. I have often wondered why first year multimedia degree candidates at Tipperary Institute aren't told to come equipped with a cameraphone. Starting next academic term, I'm assessing caption writing, annotation and tagging as part of the Media Writing course that I teach. Multimedia students need to snap, upload and mark their photos. Those skills will serve students for the rest of their lives. According to a recent survey, some 70% of cameraphone users rarely get their photos out of their phones and into a computer or send them to someone else.[1]

Clippers should be bloggers

NEARLY 15% of my spam-cleaned mail comes from people who find an interesting tidbit online somewhere so they send it to me (and normally a bunch of others) to read. Many times I just get a link and no context. Since I get most of my mail on my phone, I won't follow the link to ad-heavy news sites. If friends want me to share their eureka moments, they should blog about them. It's highly unlikely I will wander off and blindly follow a hyperlink, no matter who shares it with me.

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Running on Autopilot

YOU NEED TO walk away from your normal routine when on holidays and in my case it means letting this weblog percolate on its own. I know the spammers will deface a few pages during the next week but that's okay--they cannot bring down the blog when I'm away from it. It's on autopilot. I've embargoed stuff on this blog so pages will automatically appear once a day to offer an electronic postcard for people whose addresses I never collected. I have allowed myself some technology on the days away.

Counting lightbulbs

BECAUSE COLLEAGUES hound me for my energy awareness, I counted the 38 light fixtures in our home and asked myself whether I really wanted to convert them to compact flourescent lights (CFLs). Those CFLs use one-fifth the power of normal incandescent bulbs. But three things work against them.

EMG Drop-in Birthday

THOSE WHO trace their lives through Prometheus and EMG sometimes read this blog and because I've lost all trace of reliable email addresses, I'm using this blog post to announce a drop-in birthday party on Friday, June 23rd at Mellifont Friary, Cashel, County Tipperary, Ireland. The birthday girl won't read this blog post because she's away from internet access for the next week and this blog item will scroll through the front page before she returns to reading web pages.

iPhone

MANY SUPPLIERS have been asked to provide silicon bits for the rumoured iPhone which leads me to believe that the thing will be available in the Christmas 2006 shopping season. Taiwanese chipset manufacturers are making things for Apple that slot into phones, not iPods. This could be an interesting development in Ireland, especially since some of the music-enabled phones that Nokia have made did not get approval from Vodafone for subsidy. Even without a subsidy, an iPhone would sell briskly--if it inherits the iPod UI. But it has to work as a proper voice phone and offer fast texting speeds.

Today I Gada Be Damien Mulley

I DON'T ego surf and I don't think Damien Mulley does either. But just for grins, I electronically look up faces I know in person. Different faces on different days. Sometimes I learn more about a blogger from this aggregated information than I do by reading the blogger's page or listening to the related podcast. Today, it's Damien Mulley, as seen through the mobile-friendly Gada.be interface. Here's Damien http://gada.be/d/damien-mulley the default guy, the social guy and the  geeky guy.

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Or get the Total Damien Mulley as OPML.

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Podcasters as Curators

SHEL HOLTZ suggests a tactic worth elevating to the status of "best practise in podcasting" when considering the audible recorded dimension of conferences. He recommends edited versions of spoken material from conferences. There's no compelling interest from potential listeners for the complete recording of an entire conference. Just as curators in the visual arts do not show audiences everything an artist does, there's no need for podcasters to release every second of recording from conference sessions. There's a curatorial imperative to new media. Podcasters who don't edit their stuff risk boring their audiences and that leads to people scrubbing forward through content, even unsubscribing to podcast feeds because they're too tedious.

Women and Blogging

EVER SINCE the first Bloghercon and all through the planning for BlogHer 2006, I've wondered if it's worth making an effort to attract more women into blogging because of how the organisers define the blogging space. Some of these discussions can fork communities. In my experience, women cut a large swath through a cross-section of blogs and the top honours during the first Irish Blog Awards showed that women write some of the best blogs. If blog counters discover that more male names appear to dominate the listings, I suggest those counting ensure they are looking at text blogs and photo blogs. I kept with blogging because of the example shown by two women and three men. I didn't consider my pathway as a novice blogger to be gender-bent. I can normally discern the gender of a blogger but I don't feel obliged to go looking for a female Twenty Major just because I'm reading the stinky male version. But if I needed to fulfil the urge for gender balance, I could simply click over to BlogHer.org and search for snot (one result found).

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Irish Blogs and women in blogging.
Dick O'Brien -- "Women and blogging"
Fiona de Londras -- "More on women and blogging"
Treasa -- "Just get on with it."

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County Tipperary Kenya

TWO MULTIMEDIA students from Tipperary Institute jet south for the summer (that would be the winter where they land) to become attached to the Baraka Agricultural College in Mola, Kenya. Their work experience continues a growing relationship between Tipperary and Kenya. Portions of their work experience will be podcast and blogged.