One of the reasons that most folks don’t blog from their iPhone or mobile device, has to be the difficulty of typing a paragraph or two. With Dragon dictation, it would seem that I could simply dictate a post and paste that into the rather handy WordPress iPhone app.
Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps
Back to Google Reader Shared items
On several occasions I have gushed about Posterous, the life-streaming/blogging tool. I used it for most of the past year but put it aside a couple of days ago. At least for my personal use. Several of our company blogs are using posterous.
I had to stop for sort of a silly reason. I kept sending personal stuff to one of the company blogs. Not good. The only sure way to avoid this was to pull the plug on the personal account.
I like having a place I can quickly share something of interest and it was there all the time, in Google Reader. For me it does all that I liked about posterous (with a few bonus features). Latest links are back in the sidebar.
AP Mobile
During my “on air” days (the ‘70s and early ‘80s), the AP teletype was our station’s connection to the world. During the late 80’s and early 90’s, I spent a good bit of time trying to create a low-cost alternative (mostly for radio stations) to the AP’s wire service. This morning I downloaded AP Mobile to my iPhone.
I have a feeling it will become my default app for news. Text, photos, video… it’s all there. I can flag topics of interest and AP Mobile will “push” those to me. And if I see a story and want to “report” it to AP, the app makes it easy.
Associated Press used to be pretty protective of it’s stories. Perhaps they still are, I would have no way of knowing. The old radio guy in me can’t help thinking of this is a tiny version of the old teletype. And my next thought is, “How could the AP police all of the broadcasters and keep them from using AP stories without paying for it?”
The answer is, I’m afraid, they don’t care. Would I rather have the full-featured, on-demand experience offered by AP Mobile… or hear my local “announcer” read it to me?
Augmented reality and the annotated world
The following is from a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he talks about augmented reality and the annotated world and the ever-changing definition of journalism and local news.
“Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news…
And then think how we can annotate that with our own reviews, ratings, photos, videos, social-app check-ins and relationships, news, discussion, calendar entries, orders…. The same can be said of objects, brands — and people.”
His post includes a few videos but this is my favorite:
When I think about the implications of this technology, and what it means for news organizations, I have what I have come to think of as Wile E. Coyote moments. The realization most will never catch the Road Runner (Beep, Beep!) The future –which is here– belongs to small, flightless birds that refuse to play by our cartoon rules.
PS: If you’re satisfied seeing the world through emails and text messages, your BlackBerry will be fine. If you want to augment your reality (and you will), it will be with an iPhone or similar device.