everwas

Ian Kennedy, your mobile social media friend

Self-Referential Navel Gazing, 2008 edition

This post is for my own notes - a bunch of stats about traffic on the blog and the social networks to serve as a reference point for next year.

top post of the year - Barack Obama’s Speechwriter is 26 consistently did well because of it’s high search results ranking. Coming up second was a short story about the origins of Led Zeppelin’s name thanks to a StumbleUpon link.

biggest traffic day of the year - I usually bump along at around 100 visitors/day but back in September a post on “information overload” got my first top-level link on Techmeme which sent me 4x my normal traffic.

source of readership - Google organic search sent 51.72% of my traffic with “barack obama speech writer” being the leading referral phrase where everwas.com ranks 4th. The top referring site was StumbleUpon with MyBlogLog a close second.

comment spam - i only have data back July but Akismet on WordPress has caught a ton of spam and basically removed it as an issue for me. A graph of what has been caught automatically is below - for some reason mid-November was a heavy time for me.

browsers - 43.99% of my readers were on IE while 43.31% were on Firefox. 1.25% were on Google Chrome.

rss subscriptions - subscribers to my feedburner feed have held steady around 500 readers for 2008.

twitter - since I started tracking my follower count in June, I’ve added 357 followers and now sit at 1,142 . I follow 343 back. Graphic below from my TweetStats profile.

friendfeed - 807 folks follow me over on friendfeed.com, I think a lot of that has to do with my being featured on Alltop’s frienderati page. I follow 435 but have to admit, can’t really keep up with it all.

mybloglog - 1,148 people are following me on MyBlogLog. I follow 298. I am a member of 254 communities and 343 people are a member of everwas’ community page.

top track of the year - According to my last.fm chart, Tennessee Jed by the Grateful Dead was the most popular track which is easy to understand because I must have several versions of that song in my archive. Second place track, Boomerang by Sengalese rapper Daara J is more interesting, it was the default start track on my iPod for weeks.

top photo of the year - flickr added stats but they don’t let me filter by date. Yes you can is the all time most interesting photo from my collection and has been since I took the photo in 2005. I uploaded over 1,250 photos to flickr in 2008. The all time most popular photo is Jaws (3,256 views) which enjoys a healthy ranking in image search, as well another photo which ranks #2  for “pot lights”

del.icio.us - my top tag of all time is my employer up until October, yahoo I’ve used this tag 107 times. The others in descending order are, advertising (79), google (68), and socialnetworks (56).

google reader - my most read feeds are a search for Nokia, my current employer, TechCrunch, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, The Boy Genius Report, and Alamedans, an aggregated feed of blogs from where I live.

dopplr -my raumzeitgeist for 2008 is below. No major travels save for a trip to Helsinki and then Tokyo in November. Also spent some time in Hawaii.

Screenshot of MacBook Wheel Predictive Sentence Feature

In the absence of any real substantive announcement from today’s MacWorld, people are talking up a fictional device announced by The Onion, the MacBook Wheel. I’m assuming you’ve already seen the video but here’s a screenshot of the predictive sentence feature with some choice samples.

Everwas.com now on the Kindle

Do You Watchphone?

According to the Register, LG Electronics is gearing up to offer a wristwatch phone at CES next week.

There are two ways to look at this announcement and I’d be really interested to hear what people think.

1. This is the first announcement of a new form factor for phones. What looks clunky today will eventually be slimmed down and integrated into a beautiful piece of jewelery. Pair this with a bluetooth headset and make it a touchscreen and you now have a personal internet device that you can wear on your wrist. First generation devices will be for the geek set that wants to play Dick Tracy but in the future there will be a wide range of styles that will redefine a new type of personal technology. Think of what G-Shock and Swatch did for the wristwatch industry.

2. Remember the calculator-watch of the 80’s? It’s now been delegated to the nerd history dump, a curio admired only by niche collectors. The same will happen with the Watchphone. Just as with that calculator on your wrist, no one wants to be caught diddling around with buttons on their wrist - the physical action of picking up a phone to make a call or browsing the web with a device you hold in your hand is too strong a social signal to overcome for a serious market to develop for these devices.

What do you think about the watchphone? The an important first in a new category or future gadget roadkill?

Hello 2009!

Have a wonderful New Year’s and good luck for 2009!

Naughty or Nice? Chris Pirillo as Santa Claus

Chris Pirillo is hosting a contest where he’s gifting bundles of toys for Christmas.

Me? I’ve asked for the LEGO Wonderland bundle for my son (and the neighborhood boys that will be sure to benefit).  LEGO Wonderland, Star Wars Smiles, Family Game Night, the choice is yours if you’d like to enter.

Japan’s Super Phones

I had a chance to visit the KDDI Design Center in Harajuku right at the base of Takeshita-dori (well worth a visit if you get a chance) as well as a few electronics stores to see what’s on offer from the major operators. Here’s some of the highlights of what I saw.

The obligatory 8.1 megapixel camera phone. Some of the specs include a wide angle lens, a 3.1-inch, 480 x 800 pixel OLED display, and a video mode that films in VGA at 30 frames per second.
Reviewed on engadget.

Over 90% of the phones in Japan are flip phones so the outside cover display is important for things like date/time, signal & battery meters, and scrolling message previews. Many of the models I saw featured a display that was behind a mirror type cover (you can see my camera in this photo) that makes these displays more subtle when they are sitting out on the table during a meeting. Some of the models offered for women double as mirrors so you can check your make-up.

The graphics on the phones were truly stunning. Not only was the resolution magnificent, the graphics complimented the fit and finish of the phones beautifully. The example to the left is the settings page for the phone’s bluetooth feature. The idle page (as people in Nokia call the homescreen of the phone) was also a place where a lot of time was spent to create an experience with beautiful visualizations of simple things such as the time.

The average person spends two hours a day on the train commuting to and from work or school so many phones have built in television antennas to pick up broadcast TV using a technology called 1seg. These phones are equipped to make the transition to digital television next year and, with enough on-board storage, could even begin to act as pocket Tivos.

I’m still learning the ins-and-outs of the cell phone operator business but it’s curious why we don’t see more of these phones outside of Japan. The Japanese domestic market is cut-throat and margins on these devices are razor thin so there’s not a lot of money to be made on these devices for the manufacturers that make them (indeed, Nokia’s pulled out of marketing devices for the Japanese market for all but their high-end Vertu brand).

When I asked around, people told me the PR and marketing of having a leading device was more important than the revenues. I can see what they are driving at when you see a specialized sports phone branded by G-Shock and the 8.1 megapixel camera phone from Casio as well as the TV phone by Sharp. Each of these devices help position their company for their other products and become extensions of their other products.

The last image is obviously not a phone but I include it because it’s an example of the full featured laptops that are on sale from the cell phone vendors. They are subsidized so you can pick one up for under $100 with a two year wireless data plan (about $40/month). Most run Windows XP so if you throw Skype onto one of these things along with your bluetooth headset, it could work as a phone.

Yes, that’s a standard sized business card on the keyboard. Don’t think anyone’s going to write the next great novel on this machine but it certainly is an impressive feat of miniaturization!

MyBlogLog does Social Analytics

The MyBlogLog team are back at it again with the release of Topics. This was the last thing I worked on when I was finishing up and it’s great to see a vision realized. As their blog post says, there are almost 650,000 MBL members interacting with the social web and as each person clicks, favs, diggs, etc they are leaving bits and pieces of their intention all across the web.

When we first started to look at the data that was coming through everyone’s aggregated lifestreams, we remained true to the principle that we would not try and archive everything coming through. We wanted to be part of the messaging bus but the sheer cost of trying to archive all this information and try and organize it was something best left to the big search engines.

We did recognize the value of the data and the idea was that we would strip off the meta-data and original links and use the meta-data in interesting ways and point back to the original source. Topics is just that, a first instance, I believe, of something they are calling social analytics. A moving chart showing the “most interesting” phrases being linked to, shared, and discussed among the MyBlogLog community.

The chart above is from today, it shows today’s top topics with Bettie Page (RIP), and WordPress 2.7 topping the charts. You can scroll back into the past to see how these terms fared in the past (curious to see a little blip from Bettie Page back on 11/19 - wonder what that was about?). Then there’s a link to previous days so you can go back and see what was hot yesterday and the respecting histories of those phrases.

There’s a lot of thinking that went into what looks pretty simple. Not only is there a lot of crunching going on to process every tweet, blog post, photo, delicious link, etc that runs through the system, there’s also some text abstraction to make a jumble of words clump together (color = colour, etc).

For those that grumble that MyBlogLog never sends them any traffic, there’s something for you too. Down below each day’s chart is a list of the top headlines around each topic. Remember, these are MyBlogLog members’ so it’s nice and open where anyone really has a shot to get ahead of the news and write something authoritative.

Keep rockin’ it MyBlogLog!

Software for your Nokia E71

Following up on yesterday’s post about more unique uses for GPS, here’s some stuff I’m running on my Nokia E71 which I’m finding really useful.

Traffic Pilot - download the client to your phone and turn it into a traffic sensor. When running, your location is tracked and used to determine average speed. Crowdsourcing everyone who is running Traffic Pilot is then used to figure out if a road is congested or not. I’ve been using Traffic Pilot for the past few weeks and comparing it to traffic reports on NPR and KCBS and it’s often determined congestion before the incidents are reported on the radio.

Included is a link to “Traffic Report” which will read off conditions for the roads in your area with a helpful scroll bar so you can rewind back if you miss something. Coming soon, Traffic Pilot will use your daily commute patterns to learn which routes you take and send you an SMS if there’s any trouble reported on any of the routes.

Screenshot - useful tool I found to take screenshots of your cellphone screens. It’s not “signed” for the E71 so you need to use the Symbian Signed site to upload the .sis file and get a link to a signed versionThere’s no “camera” key on the E71 so you need to change the default. I use the Backspace key with the 2 second timer.

Google Maps with Streetview - it’s now out for Nokia’s Symbian OS. Figure out what that dive bar your friend told you about looks like from the street.

Skype Lite - for low-cost international dialing. I use it when connected via wi-fi.

5 Uses for Low Cost GPS Tracking

With low cost GPS tracking devices, it is now make it economically feasible to electronically “tag” people and things that you love. A couple of examples:

1. Lobster Pots
2. Celebrities such as Simon Cowell
3. The baby Jesus statue in the nativity
4. Your pet dog
5. Lingerie???

But no one has come up with the most obvious application suggested to me by Yahoo Researcher Marc Davis. It’s got to be out there. Has anyone added the ability to turn on your phone’s GPS from a desktop browser so you can find your phone when you’ve lost it?

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