First snow picture feed pipe

Because first snow fell today, and in honor of my friends over at MoYuMe, I was compelled to build a small Yahoo! Pipe continuously listing the pictures people show on twitter of their local first snow, all over the northern hemisphere! You can check it out here.


The point of making a Yahoo! Pipe (yeah, I know it would have been cooler with the other type of snow pipe) is usually to get an RSS feed. This you can plug into Google Reader, or as I've understood is popular among non-nerds, bloglovin'! The address for the first snow feed to copy and paste into your RSS reader is this.

The pipe looks like this, it is free for anyone to clone and then edit, and I would love if you let me know if you do something useful with it! I used some tricks to get it to work, if encouraged enough maybe I can dissect it in the blog sometime. In general I'm not super-happy about Yahoo! Pipes, it has stability problems and is a bit inflexible, but it's fun to play with. Also Amazon S3 seems to dislike me hotlinking the pictures like I do, so your mileage may vary. Enjoy!


You can also of course see yourself all the messages, not only pictures, of people loving the first snow on twitter, or read my other posts about microblogging, yahoo pipes, or other nerdy things.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse...

"The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride." (quote)

Tonight it hit home with me how messy my online footprint has become. Sure you can just google "unclecj", but each of its pieces, including this blog, is very neglected. I barely even open my Google Reader anymore, EventBox sort of passed away with my old harddisk, Jaiku and bloggy are all but forgotten and my ambitions to write on several exciting topics are simply moving nowhere. Indeed my "workflow" is very streamlined, microblogging through ping.fm and stuff, which also means I take time for almost nothing outside of the everyday flow.

It took me a long while to figure out I used my OpenId to connect with twitterfeed, and what happened to feeding my blogs to twitter before I simply don't know. I would love to clean up my blogs and post some new things, but it's not gonna happen, I'm simply too busy with more important commitments.

So, enjoy some fear and loathing while I'm being confused. I got some cool books while overseas, good stuff.

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 had a dream: that I could read the hive mind

Last night I had a dream, actually a very pleasant one, that everyone had gone insane. Since it's just one of those little things which feel fine sharing with the world, I posted it through Ping.fm:


For several years I've been a huge fan of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life", an amazingly complex, surreal and beautifully rotoscoped movie essentially dealing with lucid dreaming. It made me curious and I figured "can I somehow read about what others are dreaming of?" Sure I can, I can even make a blog out of it! (credit to @twostoreys, @astoriaxattack, @bhl1, @meridianariel, @LivestockOne and @Suw for these dreams)


What cool things can you pick out of the hive mind?

Microblogging - because who has time to pause to summarize life?

You know it's funny, but it's really when I am the busiest my blogs look the most inactive. While some give advice on how to succeed with your blog and manage to blog daily, I honestly think that my friends have better things to do than churning through the useless crap I have stressed out, and if it was my calling in life to produce quality articles continuously - I would rather work for a newspaper and get paid for it. I'm happy with typing up the occasional strike of insight, even if that means the blog is quiet for a week or two.

But still, it's nice to allow acquaintances to "keep up with you", and that's what I've started to use microblogging for. My friend Christian thinks of microblogging as "too much hot air" and even though I disagree with him, I'll do anything to return his link love. Microblogging has really become what blogging couldn't be for me. I use ping.fm to post out to facebook, jaiku, twitter and some (because I don't want to choose, and it's not practical to visit them all manually), and then plug those services into EventBox which gives me essentially a strange chat room with comments from the lives of many of my online friends popping up while I'm at the computer. When I'm not by the computer, there's not really any stress to catch up either. I also can turn it of should I want to.

I'm a huge fan of our old IRC channel #basvrak and of course the Young Scientist's #fuf.org, and now I have the diffuse channel of the social internet as well. Splendid! So if you're curious about how I've been spending my holidays, why don't you have a look at unclecj.jaiku.com, twitter.com/unclecj or unclecj.bloggy.se, and maybe even get yourself an account there while you're at it!




There are loads of suggestions about how to put microblogging to it's best use, myself I like the concept of putting URLs on your thoughts and use especially Jaiku as a computerized, online public notebook, but everyone are free to invent their own habits. If you still think microblogging sounds strange, maybe you can take your time to check out the excellent video "twitter in plain english", explaining how "life [and microblogging] happens between blog posts". Now the thing I need to figure out is how to shake life into myloki for location, is there anyone out there who's actually gotten it to work?

Also, always remember, when you see an RSS icon ( ), click it to subscribe! Yes, that goes for the one on this blog as well. And while you're at it, if you haven't heard of Google Reader for keeping track of your blogs, you're gonna love me for suggesting it to you.

Go ahead and read more of my posts about microblogging, facebook or chat.

Young Scientists in the news - and I want to hear more about it!

Today, except for playing around some with a camera flash to see if I do want to buy one (do you have one to sell?!), I have been thinking some about locality and microblogging.

It just so happens that my good friends the Young Scientists were in the editorial debate page of NyTeknik (in Swedish). That's really cool, and I think they should be heard more in the education debate. But my point right now is that I didn't know about it, because as it happens, FUF's news feed is broken and I am not really in touch with any active members anymore (except now I've found one, but he's in the board like everyone else...). We've been trying to tempt people to join the IRC chat, with little success, and I'm just craving communication with the sort of cool kids which FUF members usually are.


Back in the day, we used to communicate with people through IRC - you chose one or a few rooms of like-minded, and that's where you'd stay, sometimes for years and it was tricky to find new places where you'd want to hang out. Lately, in microblogging platforms like Jaiku I've become excited by the "virtual rooms" continuously created as your friends participate in interesting discussions with their friends, and you may choose to follow the posts of a new acquaintance. No-one expects you to listen to all the conversations, but you end up shaping your "flow" of conversations towards what people and topics you are interested in.

Actually, currently this shaping of the flow is pretty blunt. You can select people (which by the way are few of my IRL friends so far) and channels (which are infrequently used), but not keywords, or most importantly, location. By combining keyword and location, my motorbike-riding brother could get all messages on the topic of "co-biking" in the Småland area if he'd feel like it, and myself, like a child playing with the walkie-talkie, I would just love to be able to watch the "buzz" of people in my own city. Somewhere dwells also the dream of resurrecting the concept of local communities and villages - if you could select to listen to the (public) messages of your neighbours, maybe they could start to matter to you again...

twitter, bloggy.se, FriendFeed and Voolife - except for Jaiku, Twinkle for iPhone is the only such service which currently truly excites me. Do you disagree? Tell me why!

I'll end this blog post with the thought that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", and the social internet version of it which now reads "If you as much as touch a keyboard, everybody kows you're a dog". It's extraordinary to compose an impression about someone from all the tracks he leaves online, somewhat like the guy who has gathered an amazing collection of material on Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett which I watched today...

Now I would buy an iPhone! If only it had buttons...

Yesterday the lesser of two annual events in the Apple world took place - the Apple WWDC - World Wide Developers Conference keynote (the more significant one being the January Macworld Expo).

Apple are really amazing about being able to create a buzz about every little thing they are doing. They used to broadcast the conference keynote live, but nowadays (apparently not for technical reasons) they keep them for a while but bloggers provide both live text and commentary. The day afterward, the event is available over QuickTime.

Of course, yesterday's event was focused on the iPhone (and is of course in both DN.se and NyTeknik). Some have complained that the keynote provided little juicy news for developers in terms of hardware or development tools, but the biggest thing for me is the new 3G iPhone, with GPS capability and roughly half the price of the old iPhone. The deal is: 8GB 3G iPhone with GPS at $199 ^* ≈ 1990 EEK ≈ 1190 SEK ≈ 127 € ≈ "Twice as fast, half the price" (with significant coolness added). I am very very tempted at getting one now.

Still, the major hurdle I've learnt of the iPhone remains - it has no buttons... It was the most revolutionary thing with the iPhone, to use as much as possible of the device surface for adaptable buttons and display, great. Though, it also requires way too much attention to input, it gives no feedback to touch so it may be the worst example but - how can you SMS while drivingwalking for example?! I have inherited a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, and it may be subtle, but it has a lot of features you require of your phone! Finding contacts, forwarding SMSs or texting, it is really fast when you don't have to pay attention to what you're doing and can just let your fingers type away. So Apple, it's great that you have been trying to cater to enterprise users, now please figure out a way to work with the iPhone even with minimal attention, and it will really start selling.

The second most interesting bang from the WWDC is the wealth and variety of applications which seem to be coming for the iPhone. Sure, games are fun, but I am really keeping a keen eye on location aware and social mobile applications like Loopt or for that matter, my friend Peter's social picture messaging application MoYuMe (I recently found him in a video by some Latvian blogger). If you think the GSM phone, IM and SMS have changed the way people live and what they do, the scale of the mobile social revolution is breathtaking. Reactionaries object that who cares about all that social and mobile silliness, but remember they said the same about mobile phones and SMS. You heard it here first (well, unless you heard it somewhere else before), and for a head start of understanding the revolution, head over to our friends CommonCraft explaining Twitter in plain English:

(Update: In Sweden Telia and in Estonia EMT will be selling the iPhone 3G, and at least in Estonia you can pre-sign up already. I think EMT's ad is much cooler than Telia's press release at least)

(Update 2: Teliasonera has released it's price plans for the iPhone 3G:

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 18 months
iMini	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	299 SEK	1695+24·299 = 8871 SEK	3295+18·299 = 8677 SEK
iMidi	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	489 SEK	995+24·489 = 12731 SEK	2695+18·489 = 11497 SEK
iMaxi	1000 minutes, 1000 SMS, 1000 MB	859 SEK	1+24·859 = 20617 SEK	2195+18·859 = 17657 SEK

No surprise really, after the initial pretty useless buzz Apple released, $199^* has the asterisk so to say - the subscriptions you this time probably will be tied to in the store are pretty horrendous. I think a "3G-soap" as they are called in Stockholm, a 3G USB modem for the laptop costs roughly 500 SEK per month, and that's still less limited and a lot more versatile than what you can do with an iPhone and 250 MB.

Swedish wireless access prices are generally ridiculous compared to Estonian and I hope to see that EMT will be less scotch. Also, count on me writing a piece on how to forever get rid of the despited "high speed extreme use"-clauses in broadband contracts, also discussed in Swedish here)

(Update 3: Estonian EMT has released the iPhone 3G too now. If I understand the newsletter correctly the contracts are all 24 months, so it's not comparable to the 18 months column above. I was saying that I think traffic should be cheaper in Estonia, but instead it seems they simply do not provide any "maxi" plan, and charge a bit more than Telia does in Sweden.)

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 24 months
i550	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	550 EEK (= 329 SEK)	2670+24·550 = 15870 EEK (= 9486 SEK)	3960+24·550 = 17160 EEK (= 10257 SEK)
i890	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	890 EEK (= 532 SEK)	1490+24·890 = 22850 EEK (= 13658 SEK)	2780+24·890 = 24140 (= 14429 SEK)