www.josschuurmans.com

Lifeblog is a blogging application!

Yes it is, Ivan! :-)

Granted, Nokia Lifeblog is foremost an attempt at a memory prosthesis, as Christian Lindholm explained in that interview before the launch of the beta version in 2004.

Gordon Bell is making a more thorough attempt, albeit one that would be unpractical for the Nokia Multimedia Business Group's target customers at this stage. But don't worry, we'll get there. (See also Wikipedia: "lifelog")

The content you consciously capture (photos, video, sound, text) is part of that extended memory, as is the context information which mobile devices will be able to capture for you in the background. Both consciously created or selected content and less consciously captured context are part of our human memory, so the metaphor still applies.

As you mention, Ivan, content and contextual information is not all that valuable unless it can be searched. True, or, to put it in somewhat broader terms: real value is derived from all that information only when you start using it.

Now, this is where the onions come in.

Huh?

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

The following text is a condensed version of an article published on Nokia's intranet (restricted access) on March 11, 2004. I've omitted part of the original text for reasons of company confidentiality and the confidentiality of interviewees.

[STARTS]

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

By Jos Schuurmans March 11, 2004, 16:00

HELSINKI, Finland. -- A dozen brains at NVO Multimedia Applications in Ruoholahti have combined their visions of mobility, their entrepreneurial spirit, technological expertise and marketing skill to work on... the "memory prosthesis".

Well, sure, there you have an exaggerated metaphor. No external device is likely to replace the human brain any time soon. But the larger idea certainly holds water and the first tangible result of their efforts will be version 1.0 of Lifeblog, a preview of which will be shown at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, Germany, next week.

NVO Multimedia Applications team's Director Christian Lindholm has been pushing the case for usability within Nokia for a long time. He invented the Navi-key and has, more recently, been standing at the crib of the Series 60 platform, which he is now actively promoting and developing.

"If you were to start blogging today..."

Once in a while I get this question:

"If you were to start blogging today, which blogging platform, software and/or hosting service would you use?"

The answer isn't necessarily straightforward. In general, it depends on:

1. Which features are most important to you as a blogger;
2. How design-savvy and how tech-savvy you are, and how much you want to tweak by yourself.

I drew up an Excel sheet to compare some of the blogging services that I've used, on some of the criteria that I personally find most relevant.

The solutions in the comparison are:

• Vox, SixApart's third-party branded, community blogging service that allows you to publish different content to different groups of people: public, friends, family, and just yourself.
• Blogger, the inventors of blogging, now part of Google.
• Blogsome, a hosted service running on WordPress, an open source blogging platform.
• WordPress, open source blogging platform which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
• Moveable Type, by SixApart, blogging solution which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
• Three service levels of Typepad, by SixApart.

The criteria for comparison which I looked at are:

• Branding
  • domain mapping
  • third-party branding
• Access control
  • distributed access
  • multiple authors
• Design
  • easy layout templates and customization
  • advanced, CSS editing
• Features
  • easy-to-use backend interface
  • moblogging
  • widgets
• Application control
  • running the blogging solution on you own or hosted server
• Pricing

In some cases, where I haven't got the latest information about specific features, I have insert a question mark ("?"). I'd love to receive feedback and will be happy to turn those question marks into plusses ("+") or minuses ("-"). Please do correct me if I'm wrong about any of the inserted values.

Sometimes it's easy to choose

By way of illustration, I think there are a few "easy" use cases (or ways to narrow down your selection):

a) If you are rather tech-savvy, i.e. if you know how to install and maintain software on your own or hosted server, you can probably narrow down your selection to WordPress and Moveable Type  (- or even Blogsome in case you don't care about domain mapping). If you're not tech-savvy, you can count WordPress and Moveable Type out.

b) If domain mapping is important to you, and you don't have the technical skill to run blogging software on your own or hosted server, you should probably consider TypePad Plus.

c) If you want advanced control over your blog's design (and you don't want to run your own server), you should probably consider Blogsome (without domain mapping) or TypePad Pro (with domain mapping).

d) If you don't mind third-party branding, you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking to share different blog content with different groups of people (i.e. public, friends, family, or just yourself) in an online community setup, have a look at Vox.

e) If you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking for a free blogging service, try Blogger or Blogsome. Both are very straightforward and user friendly. Blogsome has a slightly richer feature set, including multiple authors and different access levels.

f) One reason to use TypePad basic, which is a paid service, rather than Blogger or Blogsome, is TypePad's customer service: the help ticketing system inside the blogging platform can be very useful.

Do you agree with my assessment? Can you help me fill in the gaps? Let me know!

"(...) It seems very simple when you see that you can have a web host and your name registered simultaneously. Numerous web hosting providers offer you to register your domain name with them at the time you do business with their company. It might sound great like registering cheapest domain name idea because of the convenience of getting everything done at once. But it is better to do domain name registration by your-self because this shows clearly who owns the name. There are many companies like godaddy which give domain buy service to their clients along with web design services. These services are also provided by wireless internet service providers. But to connect the internet they need to install wireless internet booster and give free wifi hotspot through which people can access the internet. (...)"