Silberbauer Says:

As the last person in the western hemisphere: I’m now able to photomoblog.

Well… I guess it is easy if you’re either living in the US, having AT&T as your carrier or being the proud owner of a blogger-ready Nokia N-series or a fancy Sony-Ericsson. But living in Denmark (not supported by Blogger’s mobile service “Blogger Go”), having Sofonon as carrier and having a Nokia 6230i (which is a lousy phone for anything else than talking) – photomoblogging is up hill.

I’ve spent a lot of time testing different approaches:

• Blogger GO (not supported in Denmark)
• Shozu (Great Java app that connects to a web based distribution service that will push your images here and there. Doesn’t work well with my Nokia and Sonofon, though, and can’t connect to the new Blogger service which I’m using)
• The Flicker->Blogger interface (works great, but I can’t MMS from my phone directly to Flickr)
• Sending images directly to Blogger’s e-mail-interface (it doesn’t accept attachments)
• Using Gmail for mobile phones (to circumvent the Nokia 6230i e-mail- and MMS-features (but alas: Gmail Mobile doesn’t do attachments at all upstream)

I finally came up with this detour that in fact makes me photomoblog by MMS’ing an image to an e-mail-adress:

How to photomoblog directly to your Blogger blog (new version):

1) Set up an Gmail-address, if you don’t have one already (Gmail accepts MMS)
2) Set up a Flickr account, if you don’t have one already (To use as a gateway between Gmail and Blogger)
3) Let Flickr make you a special “mail-to-blog”-email-address
4) Grant Flickr access to your Blogger account
5) Set up a filter on your Gmail account forwarding all mail sent to a special pseudo address (e.g. yourname+foo@gmail.com) to your Flickr e-mail-to-blog e-mail-address

Now: Put your special Gmail blog-entry in your phone’s contact list – you may name it “blog”. Now, snap a picture and send an MMS to your contact “blog”. Gmail will accept the MMS and due to the filter this e-mail will be forwarded immediately to your Flickr account’s special directly-to-blog-e-mail-address as an e-mail prober. Flickr will convert this to an image with a description and push it through its Blogger-interface, and voila: Your image has been blogged!

So it is: Nokia > [MMS] > Gmail (sub address) > [e-mail] > Flickr >[Blogger gateway] > Blogger

Easy as pie…

The Danish E-business Prizes 2007 has been awarded – eight of them in all.

The show itself was OK. The Børssalen (the main hall at the 1624 Copenhagen Exchange) is a beautiful place and the food provided by “Gammel Mønt” was tasty indeed. Katrine Ring and Annette Falberg hosted the show. Neither is quite the Danish female equivalent to Billy Crystal, though.

Jesper Kunde from Kunde&Co. talked about branding and e-commerce. I think he came trough as an angry old man who really don’t get it. I bet that some of the audience – representatives from large corporations doing quite OK online, felt a bit puzzled when Jesper Kunde told them that they really aren’t. Martin Thorborg from SpamBut hey – he’s a branding guru, I’m just a consultant, so he may be right, and I may be wrong. Who knows. In fact: Kunde is right in many ways – it’s just that what he’s saying, we’ve been saying for years: Danish corporations need to understand that a corporate website isn’t enough and that the top brass has to focus on internet strategy as well as on off line branding. And that also on the net corporation need to differentiate between brands and corporation. Aaargh – it’s so obvious that it hurts. But I guess some people need to hear from a guru.

Martin Thorborg from Spamfighter (former Jubii and Yahoo) was great fun, telling us how he helped Pernille Aalund raise her revenue 400 % on dildos. He has a very straight forward way of saying things, but I like it. It’s refreshing.

As before mentioned I did a “lounge” with Andreas Johannsen (great guy, looking forward to working with him again) on e-business and social networking. It went well, I think, we got a lot of positive feed back. About 80 people showed up and we got quite a discussion going. The 90 minutes went too quickly.

As Creuna co-sponsored the event I also got to say “And the nominees are…” and to shake hands with the Minister of Science. Wauw – my own private mini Oscars-experience. (The image to the left is of me and the Minister. The Minister is the pleasant looking fellow to the right – I’m the short haired moody guy to the left.)

The logistics were very professional. The presenters were briefed, informed, and supported in every way by the nice staff. The timing was very precise and I felt it was all very professional staged. All in all FDIH did a great job this year.

But… and being a designer I have to mention this… (and I’m sorry that I’m always so negative): The big screen graphics sucked magnificently! Unreadable (and I was placed at the table closest to the stage), stamp-sized, screenshots of the nominated web sites flickered across the screen looking like something I made on my Amiga 500 15 years ago. No wait: The Amiga would have done better. Why not hire the fabulous Bottega Areté VJ-crew or someone else in that league to kick some visual ass instead? Maybe next year the 9th show will be really cool.

Are you a skilled information architect / interaction designer? Do you know how to communicate with the client and how to make people realize how important it is to design stuff before coding it?

Then Creuna needs you for our Copenhagen office.

It’s common knowledge: If you want to get your message out there your site must be accessible to search engines, especially Google. That’s why I normally tell my clients not to use Flash for the entire site. Yes, Flash can access databases and XML, Flash makes all that nifty effects possible and Flash will show in the same way in all browsers (if it shows at all, of course).

But in the end: Content inside the Flash file will not be indexed by Google. Unless you spend a lot of time and money on shadowing your pages in html and in other ways tricking Google to index your site, your content is nonexistent as far Google is concerned as long as it’s wrapped in Flash.

So, in my – and most other web professionals’ – opinion, Flash is great for doing the icing, not for making the cake itself.

That’s why I’m so happy to find out that the NRA (National Rifle Association) website is almost pure Flash. If you google NRA member and gun rights wacko Wayne LaPierre, or the title of some of his articles on nra.org, you won’t find the NRA website at all. Fantastic. In that way children won’t accidentally stumble upon NRA’s unhealthy message: That guns are great toys and that we are safe as long as we have the option to gun down each other.

Now, if only the large tobacco companies, arms manufacturers and religious fundamentalist organisations would be so kind as to hide their content behind a Flash plugin too, the web would be a much healthier place to be.

Wikipedia shows us that the combined knowledge of man is incredible and that Web 2.0 technologies can be used for something truly great.

But don’t forget that Wikis aren’t inherently good in any way – the very same technologies may be used for spreading stupidity and idiocy. Although it seems that to use Web 2.0 technology for that kind of misinformation you’ll have to control who’s contributing – to keep all us liberals out, you know. So, where Wikipedia is for all of us to edit, the fundamentalist Christian alternatives are not. And it makes sense: If they opened the door, saneness would be pouring in from all over the web.

On Conservapedia (a right-wing christian answer to the “liberal biased” Wikipedia) I stumpled upon a very short article on Thomas Edison which I’d found could benefit from some improvements. Among other things, I’d liked to add that Edison was a an atheist. But, as I’d expected, I am was not allowed to create an account on Conservapedia – I guess it’s only for American folks of the faith and keepers of the truth.

Wikipedia is biased, Conservapedia says. How about this description of “Atheism” in Conservapedia:

“Atheism is closely tied with Secular Humanism. Popularly-known Atheists and Secular Humanists include Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Other famous atheists include Pol Pot and Stalin.” [...] “No atheist has ever been elected leader of a democracy. The only political systems under the control of atheists are totalitarian and/or communist“

Biased? Naah.

Other scary reads are:

Conservapedia on “Dinosaurs“, Conservapedia on “God”, Conservapedia on “Liberal”

Also, don’t miss out on CreationWiki on Dinosaurs which answers that old question of how Noah did manage to make room for those bulky dinos inside the ark? Well:

It should be noted that although the Biblical description of Noah’s ark states it as large enough to host even the largest known specimens of dinosaurs, it is logical that younger / smaller varieties were taken aboard. Reptiles are the only terrestrial vertebrate that continuously grows as long as they live. Mammals on the other hand, have an adolescent period following which there is no further growth. Therefore, it is arguable that many of these “terrible lizards” were simply much older than modern varieties.

Mind boggling.

If you want to attend FDIH‘s “E-handelsprisen” (The Danish e-commerce prize 2007), get your ticket now. There’s only a few left.

I’m going to second Andreas Johannsen (his blog – in Danish) on his panel on social networking and e-commerce. If you’re into B2C e-commerce, you should join us. We’ll be talking about the value of letting your customers network on your own site, and why it is important that you also join the buzz outside your own shop.

Two days ago I made Axure aware of a bug in Axure RP Pro 4.4.0.471 that made special characters, like the Danish æ, ø and å, render badly in Firefox.

Today the new release 4.4.1.745 is ready