Category Archives: usability

Wanted: demo of WordPress’s ease of use as a CMS

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WordPress-3-5-1_161x182My company and I are bidding on a tender to build a website for a public-sector customer who subsequently want to content-manage every bit of content themselves.

They’ll have a resource of, like, two hours per week of one person, to create news, handle images, manage comments, interact with social media, etc.

In our offer we propose to build a WordPress site. They’ve received several other offers and apparently are not familiar with all the proposed content management systems. So now they would like a demonstration of each system’s ease of use.

Thefore I’m now looking for a video, animation or presentation that convincingly demonstrates how easy it is to create, edit and manage pages, articles, menus, text, images, embedded content, etc. etc. with WordPress. (not necesarily wordpress.com, though)

Suggestions?

Reading and sharing; the mobile saga continues

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[NEXT DAY:  I need to improve the shared reading feed!]

In my continued struggle to set up a system which would allow me to bookmark, save, tag, annotate, aggregate, integrate and/or share anything I read online (on machines with various degrees of mobility), I am now using Google Reader as my main reading tool.

(I have been complaining before about the lack of social awareness of the mobile environment)

What I read and what I can do with it next is important to me. I like Google Reader's "Note in Reader" browser plug-in, for it allows me to "keep" content on the web which I browse but haven't (yet) subscribed to.

Problem is, when browsing Google Reader on my S60 mobile phone I can only "star" or "share" the items in the feeds I have already subscribed to. Even the outbound links in those Google Reader feeds I cannot mark.

The best workaround I know for this is to bookmark links outside of Google Reader within the Opera Mini browser, then synchronize those bookmarks with Opera Link, view them in a browser on a PC or Mac sometime later at home or at the office, and add them to Google Reader manually, using the "Note in Reader" plug-in.

That's not a very smooth workaround! Please, tell me you know a better way!

While most of the above concerns the capturing of my reading, I would also very much like to share my reading (and annotations), e.g. on my blog, in the most integrated fashion. That means, I would like that reading to be published on my blog, just like any other blog posts.

I am already using a few services which call Typepad's API to post stuff, notably Delicious' daily links and Ping.fm. I wish I could have Google Reader automagically post my shared reading straight onto my blog (not as a sidebar).

Now I just looked at notify.me's relatively new Ping.fm feature. So I added my Google Reader's shared reading feed as a source to notify.me, then selected Ping.fm as a destination for this feed.

I set up Ping.fm to post stuff to my various accounts on social media and social networking sites, including my blog at www.josschuurmans.com.

Curious to see what will happen with this scenario:

Opera Mini -> bookmark -> synchronize -> Opera Link -> "Note in Reader" -> Google Reader shared reading -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> www.josschuurmans.com / Twitter / Facebook / etc.

Never mind the 140 chars limitations. Or actually: mind!

[In the meantime:] WOW! I just had a look and something did happen while I was writing this post. Interesting; to be continued..

P.S.: In an attempt to edit RSS feeds before subscribing to them in Google Reader, I was using Yahoo! Pipes earlier today. My goal was to follow (only) Marshall Kirkpatrick's produce on ReadWriteWeb, so I fetched the RSS feed from RWW into Yahoo! Pipes, then filtered its contents by author, to output a modified RSS feed.

Here is the pipe:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/josschuurmans/rww_marshall_kirkpatrick

and this is the feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=3MwoDOBS3hGSVPSx8cv2rw&_render=rss

I was able to add this new feed to my "myYahoo!" page but, to my surprise, I couldn't get Google Reader to subscribe to it. So, what's that about?

P.P.S: Do I hear you saying that all this can be fixed with an iPhone or a Nokia N97? How?

Mobile Internet sucks (= conclusion of 3 wks without ADSL)

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I’ve been without broadband Internet at home for about three weeks – I was “between providers”, so to speak.

Must say that, while I was still able to consume some of my daily Internet fix – browsing RSS feeds on my mobile phone -, it was at the same time a sobering experience of how embarrassingly ill adapted the applications on my Nokia N95 are to mobile Web 2.0 participation.

I’ll probably remember this period best as the time when Doc Searls went in and out of hospital and blogged  it all. Good health and happiness to you, Doc!

Data speed is not the bottle neck. It’s the lack of mobile client-side participatory software.

With my Nseries device and 3G coverage I could browse and email, but that was about it. No tagging, no digging, no blogging with any level of convenience.

So what I ended up doing was to bookmark the URLs I would have liked to tag, digg or blog and thus collect them in my mobile phone’s browser for future reference.

I hope to catch up blogging some of those bookmarks over the coming days.

Dugg: Nseries PC Suite Graduates, I Agree It’s Ready | Symbian-Guru.com

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"(…) The best new feature is the inclusion of Nokia Photos, which replaces the old ‘Image Store’ application, as well as Lifeblog, so it seems. The best part of this is that now, when you sync pictures and videos from your phone to your desktop, they’re no longer both stored lumped together in a folder in your My Photos folder! Videos are appropriately placed in their own folder within your My Videos folder in Windows XP, and pictures in their own folders within My Photos. I really love that, as it makes it so much easier to keep track of where things are at when it comes time to edit. (…)"

read more | digg story

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Dugg: Nokia Nseries PC Suite graduates from Beta Labs | IntoMobile

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"(…) The 300+ MB heavy suite is actually a collection of applications (Nokia Lifeblog, Content Copier, Nokia Application Installer, Nokia Multimedia Player, Nokia Music Manager, One Touch Access, PC Sync, Nokia Photos, Nokia Map Loader) that "seamlessly link your Nokia Nseries multimedia device and your PC."

read more | digg story

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Dugg: Becoming 2.0: all startpages, the comprehensive review. startpages part 2 | Justin Fenwick

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Justin Fenwick: "(…) I looked through 20 different options, which exhausts the lists of other older comprehensive reviews I found. (…) Netvibes is without question the one to beat. (…)"

read more | digg story

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Dugg: Ajax homepages market review | ZDnet.com

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[A lengthy analysis of the main Ajax homepages (aka personalized start pages), concluding that Microsoft and Google are set to dominate.]

Published February 28, 2006:

"(…) Over the past year many new AJAX homepages, aka personalized start pages, have been introduced to the market. Microsoft and Google have offerings, as do a host of small startups. First I’ll define what an AJAX homepage is, then I’ll do a feature comparison between the leading services. (…)"

read more | digg story

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Dugg: Netvibes Ginger is now open to everyone | Tariq Krim / Netvibes.com blog

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Posted March 4, 2008: "(…) Netvibes ginger is now open to any netvibes registered user. (…) Ginger features and performance improvements:

  •     General startpage loading time improvements
  • Prefetch feeds features
  •     Flash audio player improvements
  •     OPML import/export improvements (now available in adcontent/add a feed section)
  •     Mobile and iPhone versions improvements
  •     Feedreader content is not updated if marking all items of a tab as read
  •     New Ginger thumbnails
  •     "Send to my universe/Send to my private page" feature improvements
  •     New Premium Widget : Stechworld, L’express, Usa Today, FranceTelecom, Computer World UK
  •     Widgets Improvements: myspace, digg, FeedReader, Weather, multiple feeds widgets (Premium widgets), preconfig widgets

(…)"

read more | digg story

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Lifeblog is a blogging application!

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Yes it is, Ivan! :-)

Granted, Nokia Lifeblog is foremost an attempt at a memory prosthesis, as Christian Lindholm explained in that interview before the launch of the beta version in 2004.

Gordon Bell is making a more thorough attempt, albeit one that would be unpractical for the Nokia Multimedia Business Group’s target customers at this stage. But don’t worry, we’ll get there. (See also Wikipedia: "lifelog")

The content you consciously capture (photos, video, sound, text) is part of that extended memory, as is the context information which mobile devices will be able to capture for you in the background. Both consciously created or selected content and less consciously captured context are part of our human memory, so the metaphor still applies.

As you mention, Ivan, content and contextual information is not all that valuable unless it can be searched. True, or, to put it in somewhat broader terms: real value is derived from all that information only when you start using it.

Now, this is where the onions come in.

Huh?

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Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

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The following text is a condensed version of an article published on Nokia’s intranet (restricted access) on March 11, 2004. I’ve omitted part of the original text for reasons of company confidentiality and the confidentiality of interviewees.

[STARTS]

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

By Jos Schuurmans March 11, 2004, 16:00

HELSINKI, Finland. — A dozen brains at NVO Multimedia Applications in Ruoholahti have combined their visions of mobility, their entrepreneurial spirit, technological expertise and marketing skill to work on… the "memory prosthesis".

Well, sure, there you have an exaggerated metaphor. No external device is likely to replace the human brain any time soon. But the larger idea certainly holds water and the first tangible result of their efforts will be version 1.0 of Lifeblog, a preview of which will be shown at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, Germany, next week.

NVO Multimedia Applications team’s Director Christian Lindholm has been pushing the case for usability within Nokia for a long time. He invented the Navi-key and has, more recently, been standing at the crib of the Series 60 platform, which he is now actively promoting and developing.

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