antti.vilpponen.net

I talked to a few of my friends today on the possible development directions of my website. The reason behind this is that I usually find myself way too busy to write a blog post that takes more than 15 mins (and if I do find time, I do it at Arctic Startup). When I have about 20 seconds of free time I usually blast a status update with Moodblast to various services such as Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku. On top of that there are services that collect my various behavioral attributes that I’ve taken to share with my friends, such as Goodreads books, last.fm music, etc.

Now why in earth should I have a blog that I update so seldom and leave the other services’ value to the sidebar for the visitor when I could create a website that focuses on me and what I’m up to on the services mentioned above (and a lot more)? What I’m talking about is basically a website that aggregates all my activity from various web services into one place, being my website, and make that data useful in a totally new way. Furthermore, the visitors themselves could determine what service they would want to visit and learn more about.

This service would be something of a lifestream aggregator - a single website that aggregates all the activities into one place and lets the services themselves take care of the stuff they’re best at. I’ve already got some ideas for this so if I find any spare time during the next month and a half I’ll try and make a run for it :)

View Larger Map

Above is the first draft of my coming summer’s motorcycling trip. I’m planning to do a 2 week (approx.) trip through Europe. The total lenght of this trip is about 5200km and it starts and ends in Rostock.

The southernmost tip of the trip is a few hundred kilometres below Barcelona. I’m planning to go down through Switzerland, visit Spain and ride through Andorra up through France to champagne country’s Reims, through Luxembourg to Amsterdam. From Amsterdam I’ll be riding through back to Rostock. I might have to do some cutting out as 2 weeks is a relatively tight schedule for a 5200km trip (almost 400km a day).

I just made an observation how development of online applications and the wide use of fast internet services has made some attributes of an e-mail obsolete.

Gmail doesn’t have it visible anymore, but most desktop applications do - do you know what attribute of an e-mail message I’m talking about?

Size.

On desktop computers, it’s become obsolete - in mobile devices it still matters. For a while. When certain metrics are becoming diminishingly unnecessary, you should consider them as unnecessary to begin with. Measuring them is of no value to the end user and therefore you shouldn’t harass the user with the information.

“Our global online service”, they say. Why do companies keep promoting their services as global when they are talking about online services and applications? I think it just shows your shortcomings in understanding the internet as a network as it ALWAYS is global (unless you work to limit it) and not a medium where you broadcast to from the comfort of your own office.

Anyone else come across anything similar or is it just me?

One of the best online education video resources I’ve found to date: The Stanford Educators Corner. A huge array of videos from world acknowledged speakers.

Strongly suggested.