listentoblogs and blogbackupr - ingenious and lightweight mashup innovations anyone can use!

Still no time to blog lately, but I did take the time to try out the awesome idea listentoblogs. Eric Wahlforss, Henric Berggren and David Kjelkerud had a brilliantly simple idea, which they implemented largely during 24 hour (!) business camp - make a spoken mirror of the Internet and turn blogs into podcasts.

In the same way you can subscribe to a blog RSS feed (do subscribe to this blog while you're at it!), in listentoblogs you can subscribe to the podcast mirror of a blog. No need for tedious blog-reading you don't have time for, set the podcasts to play in the car, on the bus or when out walking.


There ought to be several types of people interested in recording and listening to podcast from listentoblogs, like blog owners wanting new visitors, drivers or factory workers - anyone spending a lot of time when they could listen to something but not read, blind people, friends of either of these groups or just someone wanting a bit of good karma. I think obviously listentoblogs should have way more users than it currently has, so if you don't find much you like there, don't be discouraged but go ahead and record something yourself! In the meantime, check out my recording or just press play here! :

I always know where my towel is! Almost... on Listen to Blogs

My second friend of the day is Jonas Lejon and his blogbackupr. It is also exactly what it sounds like, it will follow your blog, record and provide in various formats backup of the blog you can use in an emergency or maybe if you want to restore it somewhere else when switching blog locations.


Jonas is no less than a super-productive genius when it comes to web services, just check out the list of the sites' "friends". He runs many sites of various sizes like download11 (which you may have used but never known about) and tweetvalue but his recent most brilliantly rising star is bloggy.se or as it is soon launched internationally, cuzo.com. He is now mainly working on the Facebook / Google Friend Connect functions before launching the site - soon there will be an international, friendly and more flexible twitter which you can use with your Google or Facebook account, no other registration needed! Twitter has the size, but bloggy/cuzo is much nicer, It's gonna be awesome.

I always know where my towel is! Almost anyway...

 

Have you thought of, that if someone is able to maintain the lifestyle of an intergalactic hitchhiker, and still know where his towel is, it's logical to assume they are generally reliable so thus it should be safe to lend them either of the things they may be currently missing? Well, that's the thought of the late Douglas Adams in his legendary bestseller "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" anyway, and today on Monday the 25th of May 2009, we celebrate the (a tad late, but that's fine) 8th anniversary of the his death day. He passed away at age 49 from fatal cardiac arrhythmia while at his gym.

"The Hitchhiker", as it became generally abbreviated to, made a very very strong mark in my early youth. I was pretty much obsessed with it and read the five-part trilogy probably at least five times. I marked particularly funny passages in the book and shared quotes from the book ad nauseum, and it was it which taught me that sometimes bypasses just have to be built, that total perspective can be detrimental to your health and that for some, it can make perfect sense to resignate to a life of meticulous sandwich making.

Eventually I grew up and grew tired of the quotes and silliness, and loved other books, but none were probably ever quite as popular as Douglas Adams' master work. Anyway, I made a little interesting list in my head at some point - some norm for literary development in a nerd:

1. the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
   
2. the Principia Discordia
3. the Foundation series
   
4. the Illuminatus! trilogy
5. a recent addition, Daemon

What nerd books have you read and loved, or do you think either of my favourites do not qualify for the list? For some ideas, check out 32 Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read .

(PS. It's really heart-warming to see on twitter that I'm not alone to cherish his memory: #towelday)

Who wants to be an engineer?

Being an engineer in Estonia, I have gotten used to working together with Estonians in IT, most of which are college dropouts of some variety, if they even had the time to go to school before aggressively starting building their work experience or running their own companies. So - who wants to be an engineer, when there are so many other opportunities to spend your time on?

Obviously an engineer doesn't work twice as fast just from spending twice the time on educating themselves, which may be cause for sarcastic remarks, but there are two things I would argue which are equally forgotten when people think of higher education:

• With higher education, you can acquire the knowledge, perspective and skills to achieve completely disruptive things. You can learn about patterns, learn from the mistakes others have already made throughout the years, and you can push forward to things in a smarter way
• Engineers get to do immensely cool things. My favourite example is my old friend David, now lead engineer at Illuminate Labs. He started out as some very nerdy but skilled graphics coder, and now their company are presenting at the San Francisco Game Developer's Conference and are the ones to thank for beautiful graphics of major movies and games like Mirror's Edge. There are many more examples, such as my friends at Spotify, MoYuMe and Bloggy, he role of an engineer may be intangible, but with an education from Universities such as Chalmers or KTH, the world can be truly by your feet and you can achieve whatever you dream of

Engineers blogging from a nuclear reactor in central Stockholm

The Websmurf blogging Saturday strikes again, this time from the KTH R1 nuclear test reactor in Stockholm. It's an amazing site of cultural heritage and science history. The topic of the day is engineers, technology and education, so stay tuned for great posts about that during the day!


Watch Björn's live video of the presentation we got (in Swedish, he's also got walk-arounds and other stuff in his bambuser channel):

Other bloggers during the day:

• Judith Wolst
• Christian Rudolf
• Peter Sandberg
• Miriam Olsson
• Johan L
• Björn Falkevik
• Jesper Åström
• Erik Starck

Nerd tip 1 - Put your video conference window by the camera!

Many of you have probably tried for example Skype video conferencing only to be frustrated by that it doesn't feel like very natural or good communication. I discovered a very simple and possibly obvious remedy to improve the situation - put your video window close to the camera!


Of course you need to look into the camera in order not to feel absent, but I hadn't thought of that where you position the video window matters to connect when you pay attention and look at the window with when you look into the camera. In all of the three windows above I am looking at the video window, but only in the middle one would it seem like I'm paying attention to the person I'm talking to.

Of course this works also when you want to record something on camera like I did above. Please excuse that I'm otherwise so inexperienced in front of the camera and speaking according to a script :-) .