antti.vilpponen.net

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.

You seldom find good stuff. Tonight I’ve found it I reckon. It rocks :)

Update: As the sharpest have realised the time of the post - I wasn’t at my best after a long night out. :)

Here it is, the 90 minute keynote in 60 seconds. Enjoy.

My friend and partner, Hannu Ripatti, has been writing a blog for sometime now, called Garbage is an analog concept. He has a lot of good entries there already, but I especially like the “Dinner in the cave“.

He writes about his blog (which I agree with 100%):

I believe that the ongoing digital revolution is going to be one of the landmark moments in history. It will not only change the way we do business and communicate. It will change every aspect of society from education to privacy and beyond. There will be many challenges, both technical and intellectual, but in the end I truly believe that we will all benefit from the revolution.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams - two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of - I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.

Google has just added IMAP support for Gmail. This is something I’ve been waiting for a long time, ever since I signed up with GMail.

The problem from the user’s point of view has of course been that you can’t really sync your devices in a useful way. You can try to read it through the webpage, but since many mobile browsers don’t work that well with AJAX, you’re stuck with Google’s own Java application (which I never found that useful to be honest).

However, I believe this is a major step forward in true usability of the service for people who access their mail from multiple sources. Good stuff Google!

Have a look here how to add the IMAP support for your mail application.

Why doesn’t YouTube support RSS-feeds? This is really weird because it would make perfect sense for Google to enable this feature so people could follow video streams through Google Reader, for example. I have been experimenting with some videos and it would be really cool to be able to follow other people doing similar things through their RSS-feeds. At the moment you have to login to the site and check your “subscriptions”, which is basically the same thing, but so web 1.0.

Google, why not open up a bit?

Loic’s new company is called Seesmic. I love the way he is launching the company - through short videos, keeping people hooked, always coming out (and giving users) with something new. If you ever look into starting a company, be sure to watch these.

There’s more on the sites of Techcrunch and Ben Metcalfe.

Sony has made a strategic move in it’s online music business and has decided to adopt Microsoft’s DRM as a technology for its online content. Sony had been trying push its proprietary ATRAC along with its own music player for PCs. Smart move, although I don’t support DRM that much. I guess Sony was trying to go the Apple way and create their “own” DRM that would create a technology lock on their customers - thus artificially enhance customer loyalty.

Apple has an incredible customer base, which is full of evangelists that promote Apple and support them in their products and decisions. Sony doesn’t have this. It’s quite obvious that even Apple was taking a gamble with their “own DRM”, but succeeded in it because they were the first to market with their iTunes music store (that actually took the customer point of view of shopping for music) as well as the sleek and cool iPods that were once again superior to products already on the market. Sony didn’t have any of this with their online strategy.

So why try to create a walled garden in very competitive market? Beats me. Sometimes these decisions are made so high up, based on figures and calculations by highly paid consultants that money is poured into the most stupidest of ideas.

(via Guardian Unlimited)

I let my Flickr pro account expire on purpose to see how the change would affect me. After the expiration I realised just how much I am into the service - although I don’t use it that much to be honest. Flickr has put its cashpoint (a term I coined for this) into an excellent spot to start cashing in on the user experience.

You can upload 100 MB a month, have the last 200 photos visible and a total of 3 sets to categorise your photos. This is just enough to get hooked onto the service, but not quite enough to feel satisfied what you get to do with the service. I have over a 1000 photos in Flickr (as far as I can remember, since I now only see 200 of them) and when you have that many photos you need good ways to sort them out - hence the sets. Three sets gets you nowehere - you need more, yet another reason to pay the $24,95 a year for the premium account.

Furthermore, Flickr has an excellent API that third party developers have taken full use of. There are hundreds of different applications that you can use to play around with your photos. For example, I have an Wordpress plugin that pulls my photos from the Flickr account to this blog. The plugin of course sorts out the photos and keeps them in a nifty order, just the way I want them.

I think I’ll have to dig in to my wallet and pay for another 2-year period of Flickr membership - it’s definitely worth it.

The lesson here?
Open up your services a bit, encourage developers to build applications into your platform and community and ultimately: give the users just enough so they get hooked (but there’s a lot more they get when they pay for the service). Another great example of opening up your service comes from Facebook - the all new F8, the Facebook platform. When Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old CEO of the company announced the platform - there was a lot of buzz created instantly.

No wonder, there are now 10 pages of applications available for the Facebook community. Also, small startups get extremely attractive market visibility for free. Facebook on the otherhand gets content and tools for their users to create more stickiness. Pretty much a win-win situation. iLike, a music network announced they instantly added 400 000 members to their databases, not bad a for a small startup. For the urgency of the matters, this letter gives some insight to the explosive growth.

Interesting times ahead for Facebook. Something that many web communities should take a note of, definitely.