Dan’s Blog (2.0)

So what does Wordpress’s application for iPhone give you that sets it apart from just blogging through the browser?First and foremost, it allows you to blog while off-line. I’m writing this while sitting in the Tube, under the streets of London where network signals are not in abundance. Having the option to compose offline and then seamlessly publish could be a boon to people like me who often find themselves offline.

The mobile app also let’s you take photos, a feature that I am testing in this post, so more on how well that works later. [Update: there was an error sending the picture so some bugs still need to be worked out.]

On the downside, the app doesn’t have any spelling tools (actually a problem with all iPhone apps). The auto-correction software built into the iphobe can be both a blessing and a curse in this regard, both fixing up obvious mistakes and introducing insidious errors you don’t catch until it’s too late. (iPhone 2.0 has started to auto-correct ‘its’ as ‘it’s’ which can be particularly problematic).

One wish-list item for me would be geo-tagging of posts using the Skyhook-supplied location platform demonstrated at this month’s Mobile Monday London (and built in to the iPhone). I doubt even Skyhook, though, could locate me 200 feet below Tottenham Court Road. One more note on location: all iPhone apps now prompt the user for permission when they try to locate you. I believe this is a function of the underlying software - and if that’s the case then it’s good news for location privacy It’s not clear to me though whether the application must ask every time or if this is a one-time thing - that should be made more clear in the wording of the prompt.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:40 under Blogs, mobile 2.0
Tags: blogging, BT, Bugs, geolocation, iPhone, Mobile, RIT, time

1 Comment

So I’ve been doing some research on mobile blogging, trying to find the best solutions out there. The situation is pretty dire. So far, it looks like the best solution out there is actually from Windows Live (née MSN) Spaces. Windows Live actually lets you register, create a blog and start publishing it all through the mobile browser.

In contrast, Blogger has some information on mobile blogging that involves a convoluted “email to post” (which only works with U.S. carriers by the way — HELLO PEOPLE - THE WEB IS GLOBAL). TypePad claims “industry leading” mobile features but doesn’t seem to have any way to sing up or create a blog from the mobile and it’s also e-mail based. You can use Nokia Lifeblog with Typepad but you need to have a Nokia phone to do this. Wordpress is likewise a wash. Vox doesn’t have obvious mobile support either.

What’s going on here? It’s pretty easy to write a Web form that accepts a blog post. Even Microsoft can do it! I thought we were further along here, as a society I mean. Am I missing something? Are there other turn-key solutions out there for mobile blogging?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:04 under Blogs, Mobile Web
Tags: blogging, Blogs, mobileblogging, MobileWeb

29 Comments

I know I haven’t posted here in a while. Don’t worry — I’m not dead. I am taking a trip with my kids in the States and Candada. For daily-ish updates, check out my jaiku micro-blog.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 2:36 under Blogs, Travel

1 Comment

I will be “off the grid” for the coming week as I take my lovely and charming wife to an undisclosed location somewhere in the Greek islands to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. Back on the 25th, hopefully rested, relaxed and rejuvinated.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 18:58 under Blogs

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I have started a new blog, “Mobile Web Review,” where I’ll be reviewing mobile Web sites. My first victim is FlickR mobile. For what I had to say, go on over to Mobile Web review, hosted on Vodafone Betavine. Also, take a look at what my comrade in arms Kevin Smith is saying on the Mobile Web Technologies blog.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 18:34 under Blogs, Mobile Web
Tags: Betavine, flickr, MobileWeb

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People that I have never met came up to me and told me that they read this blog. Like… regularly. That’s frickin’ weird.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:01 under Blogs
Tags: www2007

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I’ve just added a label (as it happens, an ICRA label) to my site. Why? Because content labeling (or “labeling” depending on what longitude you reside in) is going to be an important building block of the future of the Web. If you pick up a box of breakfast cereal at the supermarket, you can look at a label and quickly determine if its ingredients are going to be suitable for you. For example, many products these days contain a warning label if they contain nuts for those of us that suffer from nut allergies. Even if you don’t have food allergies, but just prefer to eat organically produced food, you can look at the label. A content label for a Web site is analogous to such a food label, but is primarily intended to be processed by machines. The most deployed site labeling technology is ICRA (Internet Content Labeling Association) which was developed for child protection. Hence, ICRA is most appropriate for labeling “adult content.” The result has been that the adult content industry (keen to show they are supporting child protection and thereby avoid regulation) have embraced labels. And that’s the current state of labeling on the Web: lots of porn sites have labels. Most other sites do not.

But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for educational needs. A label can also tell you if content is mobile friendly, and that’s the theory underlying the work that the Mobile Web Best Practices working group is undertaking with mobileOK. Content labels can also be an important enabler in the field of content search and discovery, particularly on the mobile Web. This is what Google mobile sitemaps (for example) are all about — explicitly telling the search engine (the content discovery agent) about the content so the user doen’t have to wade through pages of search results to find what they’re looking for.

So it’s clear that a number of industry requirements are converging on the idea that some kind of metadata will be fed upstream from content providers to browsers and content discovery agents. But can these content labels be built on top of open, inter-operable standards? And will they be trustable? These are some of the questions that the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG) has sought to answer. This group is likely going to transform into a fully fledged W3C working group some time in the new year in order to develop its initial recommendations into a new W3C standard. This standard could enable a whole ecosystem of labeled content, labeling authorities and label verification services. You can already see glint of how this could work by downloading the Search Thresher Firefox plugin.

Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web. Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web. If you want to be ahead of the curve, hop to ICRA.org’s label generator and generate yourself an ICRA label.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:46 under Blogs, Mobile Web, Web
Tags: ContentLabel, ICRA, mobileOK, MobileWeb, searchthresher, W3C

5 Comments

So, the million-dollar question in this migration to Wordpress has been: will this enable me full mobile-Web-base administration and content creation? Well - here I am, using the native browser on the Blackberry 8700 and I’m happy to report the answer is “yes.” Not only have I composed this post, but I’ve also been able to moderate comments (OK - delete spam) and perform other admin functions entriely within the mobile browser. Kudos both to the Wordpress folks for making such a great admin and authoring console and to the Blackberry browser team for the great browser environment. The full keyboard on the Blackberry also makes it particularly well suited to mobile blogging.

It may not seem like such a big deal, but this is the first time I’ve managed to successfully write a blog post of any signifigant length from a mobile device. Yet another sign that the mobile Web is coming of age.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 15:12 under Blogs, Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: mobile2.0

1 Comment

We have had some great coverage of the mobile2.0 event appear in the blogosphere and the press. Here are four particularly good and detailed run-downs of the day:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/17/mobile_2_zero_event/

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/11/mobile20_great.html

http://jlarienza.blogspot.com/2006/11/mobile-20-san-francisco.html (in Spanish)

http://gigaom.com/2006/11/07/mobile-20/

I was particularly impressed with the coverage in the Register. They never print anything positive about anything, so we must have done something right. If you attended the event and you wrote about it on your blog or took pictures, please leave a comment or trackback on the mobile2.0 event blog, here.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:34 under Blogs, Mobile Monday, Mobile Web, Mobility, mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2event, mobilemonday

2 Comments

Well — I’m off Blogger and on to Wordpress. The whole process was surprisingly simple. I’ve been wringing my hands about doing this for months now thanks to the Wordpress migration tools, the whole thing was virtually painless. I feel like I’ve gone from a Volkswagen to a Ferrari. Wordpress is so configurable. It’s got a whole ecosystem of plug-ins and themes (including the aforementioned wp-mobile plug-in which detects mobile browsers and feeds them mobile-friendly pages). It’s open. Most importantly, if I want to change it in some way, I can edit every single file.

Now — I say the wp-mobile plug-in is cool, and it is, but there is a big problem with it, and that has to do with, what else, device detection. The plug-in knows you’re browsing from a mobile device because it matches the user-agent string against a list of strings that are hard-coded into the PHP program. If you read my previous post on Device Description Nirvana or are familiar with the work of the MWI Device Descriptions working group, then you’ll know that this issue of device descriptions is a thorny one. In the world of device description nirvana, this plug-in would use an API to query a global database of user agent strings to definitively determine if the incoming request is from a mobile device or not. More importantly, it would be able to use the capabilities of these devices to make intelligent decisions about how best to adapt the page for that particular device. Until that time, however, I wonder if some enterprising soul will at least integrate this plug-in with the WURFL open-source project.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:02 under Blogs, Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, W3C, WURFL

2 Comments