I'm listening to one of Adam Curry's podcasts. He's a weathered radio presenter and you can tell. Entertaining and brilliant.

How to write a tagline

The first tagline for my first project was really bad. I'm developing a wiki hosting service, so my tagline (naturally!) was (ready for it?): "Powerful, easy wiki hosting". Clear. Succinct. Describes the services. Sucks.

I let it rest a bit. Later, when I was writing and rewriting copy for the website, it dawned on me that the one big advantage users were going to get out of this service was that they could get their groop, team, class or whatever writing. My service would make it easy and unresistable for people to write and share stuff.

Good taglines don't describe the service, they describe the benefit. So I went back to the tagline. Something like "Get them writing!"? Nah. The "them" is too distant. Too aggressive too, you can't force people to write.

I still haven't figured it out. I'll report back later.

Internet Phone Calls with Lingo

I'm looking for a good calling plan. I spend 70% of my time in the US, 30% in Europe. My calls have the same distribution. In both places I have broadband internet. Lingo
looks interesting: "You get unlimited minutes each month to speak with anyone in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe" says their website, for 20$ a month. I could carry the box with me when I travel between Belgium and NYC.

Feedback and or experiences welcome!

I spent yesterday and today upgrading my Colombia site to Drupal 4.5.0, after my host had moved my site to a new server. Drupal wasn't hard to upgrade, it has a pretty decent upgrade script, even though I had to move first to 4.4.0 and then to 4.5.0. I ran into an error in 4.4.0, but after upgrading to 4.5.0 it dissapeared :)

Meanwhile, I am also setting up as an independent information architecture consultant. Tips on consulting books and accounting software are very welcome!

Blogflix is Photostory for the net. I've been waiting for this one. Haven't used it, but they should add audio as Photostory does (which was based on some solid social science research). Good: it does video as well. Also good: it's got the blog feel (I'm sure they'll do trackback for example, if they haven't already). Lacking: no audio for telling of stories. Stories are the key ingredient. Maybe text will do for that though, and audio isn't needed.

I will try it out with some unpublished India stuff. Promising stuff, because many of us take mixed video and stils now, so we should be able to publish mixed audio and stills easily.

I'm in Paris with Maria, so expect light blogging over the next week. Yes, my life rocks :) The hotel is in Monmartre and excellent. 50 Euro a day for a double is cheap for Paris. We'll be self catering a lot to keep costs down - bottles of wine, cheese, charcuterie and bread. What else can you ask for? Have fun.

Some of you might know I have an interest in Colombia, having lived there for a while. I also have an interest in the US elections. And there are many, many Colombians in the US.

So I figured I want to make a page that explains clearly why Colombians in the US should vote, and why they should vote for Kerry. Then I want to contact every Colombian I know and I want them to contact every Colombian they know and send the page around. Maybe a few more Colombians will vote?

I need some help for this idea. I'm no expert on US or Colombian politics. Post your name and ideas in the comments, and we'll work something out. We can have this up within 2 weeks, in time for the elections.

Videoblogging on the road

My trip to India is a good opportunity to experiment with videoblogging on the road. I'm just jotting down some thoughts here, I might expand on this post in the future. You can see all my India trip posts, including videoposts, here.

I took a small digital photocamera that fits in my pocket and also takes short videos, and an Apacer stand-alone CD writer that lets me write my memory card to CD. This way I can take a lot of movies (a day of movietaking - 20 or 30 short movies - fills up my 256M memory card). I just save them to CD and then empty the memory card.

At first I posted individual short movies. However, they were too short, my fan (there's only 1) complained he wanted to see larger movies. And in fact, I tend to take a few movies if something interesting is going on.

I've settled on a process of finding a computer with Win XP, using Moviemaker to join those few related movies together. I don't really "edit", I just throw them together and save the movie, which also optimizes it. I don't even review the movie - it takes too much time and I'd rather not spend my entire trip locked up in an internet cafe.

I tend to rent 2 computers at the time in the internet cafe, so I can use 1 computer to work with Moviemaker, and the other to do my emailing meanwhile. Moviemaker takes some time (can be 15 minutes) when importing movies from CD, and when optimizing movies. So I just spend that time on the other computer.

Then I send the movie to my friend's Gmail address who ftp's it to my website. I should be able to ftp it myself to my site, but I haven't figured out how that works yet.

When my friend lets me know the videos (I usually sent 10 at the same time) are online, I create posts for them in my blogging software. I spread out the dates of the posts so one movie a day gets posted, instead of 10 movies and then 2 weeks of silence.

A disadvantage of this technique is that my movies end up in a proprietary Windows format that doesn't play nice with anybody else's formats. But it's the only easy way I found to edit and optimize on the road. Win XP computers aren't in every internet cafe, but I could usually find one. And after optimizing, most internet cafes have enough bandwidth to upload a few movies.

Windows Moviemaker works well. It's very easy to use, and I only need to put a few movies together, so no problems there. It comes installed by default together with Windows XP. And it optimizes movies quite well if you choose Save Movie. I choose the highest quality, which still produces files that are usually below 1 Meg for my short movies.

My tiny camera is a Canon Powershot SD100 - I bought it last year for about US$300. It's stainless steel body sets it apart from other digital cameras. The memory card cost US$70 then, now they're much cheaper. It works great for taking videos - its size means I almost always carry it with me (except on the beach and when partying), so I can take a quick video whenever something interesting happens.

Questions and comments welcome. I'm sure there are other practical techniques for videoblogging while on the road.

Steph emailed me, turns out she also has some India videos on her blog.

This guy is trying to explain the difference between Indian and British English (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Afterwards I took the bus.

International phonecalls are easy (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg), little telephone boots are literally everywhere (even in the smallest village). It's affordable too, a 30 minute call to the USA costs about 7 US$. Internet cafes are also in a lot of places (though you can spend days without finding one), this one is in Mysore.

I love to take pictures of cows, they have great shapes that catch the light in always interesting ways. Big eyes, too. I'm not sure if this activity was any weirder to the locals than many of the other stuff tourists do in India (Windows Media Video, about half a Meg).

Monkeying around in Mysore (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

When you spend a lot of time on buses, you get bored and take a lot of movies of busrides (Windows Media Movie, about half a Meg).

The covered market in Mysore is beautiful (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Here are some more scenes from Mysore.

A lovely mail prepared in the train station (Windows Media Video, about half a Meg). This was a good eat, we had Masala Dosa (spicy pancake).

Mumbai (previously known as Bombay) is a busy bustling city. A lot of cars and there is also a crazy funky beach where lots of people with kids gather (Windows Media movies, about half a Meg each).

A beautiful little shrine on a hill in Goa (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

There are a bunch of tibetan settlements around Mysore (South India) - the Indian governement was nice to the refugees when the Chinese started fucking up Tibet. It's hard to legally visit (you need a bunch of slow paperwork), and I didn't want to get anyone in trouble by illegaly visiting (which supposedly is easy), so I didn't go. I filmed some tibetans in the internet cafe (Windows Media Video, about a Meg) in Mysore.

Indian trains are a must (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Second class tends to get crazy, this is in first class (I think).

a portrait (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Fishermen in Goa bringing in Sardines (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). You can see the sardine schools swimming (they're dark spots in the water), so the fishermen just get in the water with a net, find the sardines and then catch a load like this one.

I like cows (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

more getting around movies, on a bike and on the bus(Windows Media movies, about half a Meg each).

India is a country of many forts (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Goa is a great place to hang out on the beach, this was an evening in one of the beach cafes (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg) in which we were wondering about the origin of chess (it does come from India), so one of the guys ran to the nearby internet cafe and googled it.

Half of the fun in India is getting around (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). The movie shows a trip in a motorised riskshaw (3-weeler).

I've had to switch to the proprietary Windows Video format for reasons I'll explain in detail in a future post about videoblogging on the road. For the record, the internet cafe I'm in currently is fast but doesn't allow heavy uploads because they get charged for that.

Anyway, here's the first of the Windows Movies: sometimes the selling gets to be a bit much (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Gmail requires IE5.5+ which means I can't access it from 70% of the computers here in internet cafes in India who still use IE5.0.

Tiddlywiki: it's always nice to see something truly new. Click on any link there to realize why.

Writing on the road

I am writing some stuff on the road (different internet cafes every time) and I find myself longing for solutions that support writing on the road. I write in WordPress - not bad, but not perfect either. Any suggestions. The perfect thing would be a lightweight keyboard with a memory of its own (and some kind of preview) that I could use to write anywhere and then plug into a computer to transfer the text whenever I visit an internet cafe...

Ah Bangalore. The pizza! The cheap books! The proper coffee! The copied western atmosphere! After a few weeks of roughing it in South India, Bangalore, usually described as a place where there's not much interesting for the traveler, is a true joy.

Comment spammers

Why don't we work together to write scripts that STOP comment spammers or make their lives harder. Some comment spammers are well known and sell their spamming scripts for $$. We can stop at least them.

The sharing of stories

Here are some random thoughts about the sharing of stories since I am at a computer anyway. I might add pictures to this post later.

I was visiting a temple this afternoon, filled with extremely elaborate detail. You can walk around it and read stories of the kings that built it, it's like a kind of elongated comic book. The temple was used for ceremonies that probably (I'm guessing here since that's what ceremonies in temples and churches seem to do) were basically about telling the stories of the religion and rulers.

So temples are for telling stories.

They're really efficient since you can build a temple with a story on it, and the story will be told millenia afterwards if the temple survives. Your story survives. And many temples do survive, despite the destroying of temples and churches by competing religions as has happened in Europe, India and all over the world.

I saw tourists (Indians and foreigners) walking around the temple, reading the same, 1500-year old story. Stories are important because they explain the world, and in that way contain values and such.

Then I had to think about pictures. I remember visiting my girlfriends family, and 3 generations were standing around a photoalbum, and the stories of the family were being retold. I'm sure you've experienced the same thing.

Photoalbums are another medium that lets us tell the stories of our families, and in that way convey the values of our families as well.

An important element of these stories is their construction by the way: they are constructed by the entire family, watching pictures together. This way, it's a kind of democratic process that creates the stories of the family.

I'm fascinated by digital pictures. What will be the social constructions around those artifacts that will let us use them to share our stories? Emailing them just doesn't cut it. Microsofts Photostory is a good attempt, but not good enough. Printing them out also somehow doesn't cut it - it's not truly part of the media. So I'm curious to see what happens.

Comments? I'll add links and pictures later.

My survey of internet cafes in India continues, I'm still in Mysore. A small internet place has 4 computers and DSL access, about 126,000 Kbps. About 50 USc/hour to use it, the same as in most places. I have pictures, but no easy way of uploading them right now. (It's optimizing them that's really the problem.) Interestingly, the person who runs it is a woman, and there are 2 women using computers and 1 guy (and me).

Videopost inside...