Inside View

Revisiting @danyork's "Create Something New" Rule

Dan York writes:

I woke up this morning frustrated that I simply haven’t been writing across my various sites. In theory I am a “writer”, but I haven’t been writing! And as I wrote in My 3 Words for 2018: “because if I don't write... the stories build up inside of me until they want to explode like a pressure cooker without a relief valve. Writing is my relief valve. I need to do it.”

So I said to myself- I know, I will impose a new rule on myself... no social media usage until I publish something new! A blog post, a podcast episode (such as my The Dan York Report short audio segments), an article on some site (ex CircleID), a longer update on a social site... something.... anything.... BEFORE I get sucked into the vortex of social media updates.

And I will start with a blog post like this one...

 

Thanking the Primary School History Teacher

OUR 8YO DAUGHTER is mesmerised by the story of the Titanic because of what she hears in her primary school classroom. She is asking questions at home while sharing facts through storyboards such as the Commaful frames embedded above.

Watching #typepadstatus as Service Resumes

Screenshot from @topgold's Nokia 1520.

LIKE THOUSANDS of other Typepad bloggers, I eagerly await resumption of normal service following a DDoS attack on the popular blogging platform. I have opened a Help ticket in the hope I can start accessing all parts of the service normally.

Wondering about #Typepad Network Resilience

Screenshot from many of my Typepad log-ins during five days.

I WATCHED my blog's webstats start to fade to nothing on Good Friday but then its entire support structure appeared to collapse during the Irish Easter holiday. Its slow return to form has me concerned for Say Media's network resilience.

Planning a Primary School Revision Session

Patricia Mulcahy in Clonmel | Photo from Bernie's photostream.

WE HAVE JUST started looking at a way to revise a static web site and to make it more appealing to teachers and to parents in the Presentation Primary School in Clonmel, County Tipperary.

We're trying to make the website more current. They problems we have had in the past were that it was too cumbersome to update the site. What we are now doing is exploring ways to allow teachers to update the site on their own once they are comfortable with the user friendly editing tools.

In fact this blog post is being sent by email to the web site with nothing in between--straight from email to publish. Most teachers are very comfortable with email and require very little training in web writing if e-mail is a publishing channel.

Giving Advice on Christmas Tech

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Screenshot from Statcounter.

I WATCH MY BLOG to get an idea about what kinds of technology people get around Christmas. This year I noticed queries about Kindle, Skype, and iPad apps.

Although several of my friends think dedicated e-readers like the Kindle have peaked in the market, I don't agree. I think Kindles have carved out a sustainable niche. I get a lot of use from my Kindle mainly because of its long battery life and crisp e-ink technology. I don't get the same results from the Kindle apps I use on different touchscreen phones. Christmas visitors wanted to know about Irish newspapers on Kindle. I subscribe to The Irish Times on Kindle, the third most popular Kindle newspaper in western Europe.

I need to write a separate blog post about using Skype to call an Irish mobile phone. It's a recurring question that I see in my referrer logs. Around holiday periods, Irish emigrants ask that question before they use Skype to call friends in Ireland.

The audio clip below covers a few of the other topics that were raised by people visiting InsideView.ie on Christmas Day. At the time of this writing, 21% of visitors to my blog were using a mobile device and half of those mobile visitors used an iPad to read my blog posts.

Christmas Search Strings

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Bernie Goldbach uses his blog as a journal.

 

Related articles

Papers, Kindle and Wind

Hoping Tablet People Pay

Hyperlocal Notes from Emigrants

Kindle Fire 7-Inch Discount Expected Before Christmas Reports Those Tech Guys

iPad continues to make huge majority of tablet Web traffic

Sunday News to Serve Classroom Discussions

I AM USING a time-tested pocket media process to record my take of Irish Sunday news in HD quality because I want to show creative multimedia students how to prepare broadcast-quality clips for radio and television.

As the photo shows, I simultaneously use Audioboo with an iPod Touch and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc's exceptional low-light intelligent zoom video camera. When I run both of these devices together and give them two separate upchannel hosts, I can normally get a 5-minute clip up and announced on YouTube within 15 minutes of finishing my clip. This is a major accomplishment for me because all the work is done on the phone or by server-side processing. In my experience, the speed and reliability of the cloud services now allows me to finish creative work with students well inside the two hours of practical work scheduled on our third level timetable.

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Samples: http://audioboo.fm/topgold for audio and http://youtube.com/topgold for video.

blogging

They Know Me by My Photostreams

PHOTO-SHARING APPS command riveting attention on social networking sites, something an analysis of my Flickr photostream documents. With more than 700 people visiting my Flickr collection every day, it's an important adjunct to my online presence.

I am trying to illustrate every blog post with an image from my Flickr collection and I am trying to optimise the sidebar content on my blog with fast-loading thumbnails drawn from Flickr. I know some visitors like to come and look--just look at images--and then they leave my blog behind. Sometimes a well-illustrated blog post keeps visitors looking for more than 15 seconds.

My most popular image of 2011, with more than 14,000 views in 2011, is a screenshot describing How to Lose a Job on Facebook. The stats on my other frequently-viewed photos pale by comparison.

Reconfiguring While Nobody Visits

I USED MY NOKIA E7 to chat with Blacknight Solutions several times while trying to reconfigure DNS accounts for my blog. I talked to the techs while simultaneously making server-side edits using the same phone (at left).

I want to finish 2011 with a minor reconfiguration of my blog, something I try to do when nobody is around. But Christmas 2011 is serving up a trickle of people with tech questions about things they found under the tree. My blog posts are helping people set up an iTunes account as though they are in the States, recover memory to Sony Xperia Arc handsets, and dive into new Kindles.

I could use some technical help too because the legacy control panel I have with Blacknight Solutions won't let me configure CNAME records in the syntax required to keep my blog together. And because of that snag, if you try to click below the fold on one of my older posts, you'll probably see a dead page.

Remembering Scobleizer's First Tsunami

I EXPERIENCED MY FIRST Scobleizer tsunami while watching an actual event in parallel ravage Sri Lanka seven years ago. And if Jeremiah Owyang is right, millions of us won't share the vantage point of articulate bloggers anymore.

Owyang believes the world is witnessing the Golden Age of Tech Blogging. He may be right on one level because the plumbing of blogging has changed. We no longer need to depend on RSS feed aggregators to hear about big natural events or seismic changes in world politics. The information percolates across social networks that did not exist when I watched the Indian Ocean tsunami on a plasma screen in Berlin while simulataneously reading about it on Scoble's blog on my Nokia 9210. And I didn't read Jeremiah's thoughts on a blog. They came as a Google Plus post to my Sony Xperia Arc while I was in an Irish chip shop. Nothing goes better than a little salt, vinegar and owyang with fresh fried Irish potatoes. I learn things from Jeremiah Owyang and agree with the third point he makes about the Golden Age of Tech blogging.