Monthly Archive for June, 2006

Blogr


Knallgrau, Austrian creators of blogging software twoday, have now released Blogr, a new multimedia blogging tool.

The tool supports a whole lot of languages already, and is also available in quite a few top level domains. So, if you don’t mind a Spanish interface, why not set up an account with Blogr.com.mx? (There is a section in the settings area of an account that’s called “language”, but there’s nothing there yet…so until that’s fixed, language seems to be tied to TLD.)

The name already suggests what niche the service is supposed to fill (and I mentioned it in the intro paragraph, so…): multimedia blogging. Which I understand to be spicing up a normal blog with photos and videos (and they do too). They offer rather basic functionality, for both blogging and their multimedia features, but in Knallgrau tradition, everything is very tidy and polished.

Once signed up, your content can be accessed via a subdomain, in my case richard.

Since it’s all about multimedia, the first thing to look at is their uploading mechanism:

It’s basic browser uploading, but gives you more uploading slots if you need them. There’s also the tried and tested upload per email, which I think will come in handy for those who like uploading from their cameraphones. And there’s a desktop client available, but it’s Windows only, and I couldn’t be bothered to try it out.

Their blogging back-end is quite easy to use, and although it appears to be basic, it incorporates cool stuff like automatic tag suggestions:

blogr posting

The heart of the service is their mediastream, from which you can choose what to put where. They divide the files into videocasts and photos, which shows that they are really out looking for those videocasters. I wasn’t able to find out what their storage-limit looks like, but I guess if they want to attract serious vloggers, the limit shouldn’t be too low.

The interface to the whole thing is very web2.0, including rounded corners, giant fonts and an apparent allusion to Flickr, prototypical and insanely successful web2.0 photo service. Fortunately, that stuff will take a long time to get old.

For the front-end, i.e. the area visible to people visiting your Blogr area, there are three different designs available. There’s a very simple default Blogr layout, the second one is the famous and oft-used Kubrick template, and the third one is one of the default layouts for their twoday.net blogging service. Switching between those is as easy as checking a box:

blogr templates

Overall, Blogr is an already very polished product (although still in alpha), and looks like the perfect solution for people who want to jump right into multimedia blogging without having to worry about setting up a blog themselves.

But Blogr is not alone, as there are quite a few companies who are pushing into that market (most notably lifelogger, or blinklife), but none of them with such a dedicated videocasting angle like Blogr.

Flock - new milestone out

Flock, the social browser that’s built on the foundation of everyone’s darling browser Mozilla Firefox, has just released a new version. This milestone release 16 is already packing a heap of the improvements that will also be in the Beta release that’s soon to come (according to their website).

I’m not really sure how many of the things I noticed in this release already were in earlier versions (in one format or another), but I’m just going to point out what I noticed after some time playing with this version.

The first thing I noticed was their tight RSS integration. Just click the feed icon that appears automatically as soon as a page has a feed, and the feed can then be added to Flock’s built-in newsreader. While I’m not really a big fan of local newsreaders (which this is, unless there’s some way of syncing that to some server), but I’m sure this is by far the easiest solution out there for RSS first-timers:

flock feedreader

Another feature that’s pretty unique to Flock (albeit not to this release), is their tray…drag and drop text and pictures into it for later usage. It can be activated simply by clicking a little icon in the status-bar:

the tray

This can come in very handy when researching for a blog post or other areas where research is necessary (damn, that reminds me of that paper I should be researching right now).

Finally, there’s the photobar:

flock photos

Now, I could get all excited about this feature, and while it’s really nicely implemented, letting you upload to and view your Flickr stream from inside Flock, I can’t see any immediate use for it. I mean, uploading to Flickr is nice, but there are various solutions, not least upload tools for any kind of OS, that are a lot more versatile. And well, I don’t necessarily need to look at my Flickr photos from within the browser I’m using, if in fact I can just use that browser to go to my Flickr account (and be able to leave comments, search, and do whatever the real Flickr page lets you do). Still, a nice toy.

Finally, there’s an issue that still isn’t resolved in this version. Apparently, Linux and Mac versions of Flock can’t deal with Greasmonkey scripts anymore. Greasemonkey, that extensions that allows for an extremely versatile surfing experience, boasts an impressive number of scripts and which for some people has become almost indispensable. So, when trying to install a script in Flock (on Linux or Mac, I’m on Linux), that’s what you get:

flock error

The Flock team actually addressed this issue on the Greasemonkey extension page, but there’s still no word about when they are planning to make Greasemonkey work for Flock again.

LibraryThing mobile

Well, since everyone and their Grandma are pushing towards content on mobile phones, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise that LibraryThing, everybody’s favourite online library and cataloguing service, can now be accessed via mobile phone too.

From their blog entry:

The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone’s “internet” feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you’re in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your “Pssst!” recommendations. But I don’t know anything about cellphone security, so you can’t add items, and you can’t look at private libraries—even your own.

This is great news really. It’s not that I love working with screens as tiny as my mobile’s, but I was wishing for something like that a while ago while standing in a bookstore, and undecided whether my girlfriend actually had a certain book. Well, now it’s as easy as whipping out my mobile and punching in http://librarything.com/m/.

LT founder Tim Spalding even set up a test page, so you don’t have to get out your mobile to see what all the fuss is about:

librarything mobile testpage

Great stuff!




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