Silberbauer Says:

Really good slideshow about the economics of micromedia, connected consumption and the snowball effect.
Nice to see a web 2.0 slide show that’s not focused on technology but on the development of the New Media Economics.
Although 107 slides is a lot, I liked the intelligent analysis of broadcast/blockbuster media and micromedia. Enjoy

A small YouTube clip from a Tom Peters presentation. Play the clip for your boss, the next time he wants to benchmark you against the current Market Leader
Enjoy !

Heads up: Geeky stuff below.

Wordpress is very easy to install on your own server if you have even the slightest knowledge of how a web server is put together. But getting those old Blogger-URLs to translate to the new URL scheme was hard work for a non-techy like me.

Here is how I did it – in case others have the same problem (actually, some do):

Redirecting the RSS feed

First of all I wanted the old URL to our RSS feed to work so loyal subscribers won’t have to re-subscribe to the feed. The old feed was published to silberbauer.dk/rss.xml but the new feed is to be found at silberbauer.dk/feed/.

I tried numerous ways of rewriting the URL with mod_rewrite – nothing worked. Somehow my rewrite-rules conflicted with the rewriting that Wordpress does on it’s own to make pretty URLs.

Finally I asked my very (very) smart Creuna co-worker Guan, and he told me simply to use RedirectPermanent instead. It works like a charm:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/ Even FeedDemon/Newsgator accepted the “301″ and continued looking for the feed at the new URL.

Making old Blogger URLs point to new Wordpress posts.

Then, I decided to make old blogger-URLs redirect to the Wordpress version of the posts. First, I sat up Wordpress to generate pretty permalinks that look as much like the old blogger links as possible, e.g.:

Old Blogger generated permalink: http://www.silberbauer.dk/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20.html
New permalink: http://silberbauer.dk/wp/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20

As you’ll notice: Only the “/wp/” and the missing “.html” differentiates the new URL from the old one. So with RedirectMatch we can redirect the URL using regular expressions:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2

Archive URLs

In exactly the same way the old archive URLs are redirected to the new archives:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

My .htaccess file now looks like this:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/
RedirectPermanent /index.html http://silberbauer.dk/
RedirectPermanent /index.htm http://silberbauer.dk/

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2
RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


Hello Wordpress! Why? Because it’s niftier. The admin-interface is so Web 2.0 that we almost wet ourselves. Forgive us the default template.

And oh yeah: The Blogger RSS Import plugin by Ady Romantika really rules.

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…

We’ve experienced some technical problems with posts and comments that did not publish as they should, so now we have moved our blog to the beta version of the new Blogger.

Not that you should notice much of a difference. The URL hasn’t changed – neither have our linguistic and social skills been upgraded.

We had to turn on word verification for comments, though. That means if you’d like to comment on a post (please do!) you’ll have to enter some random letters (like you know it from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail etc.). Sorry about that, but we’ve had some brain dead comment spam coming in lately.

Best regards,
Silberbauer Bros.

I’m cited in Berlingske Tidende – one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. I commented on the miserable user experience Danish citizens meet when trying to obtain a “Digital Signatur” – a personal certificate nessecary for access to the Danish e-gov solutions.

“[...]Men det hjælper ikke, at der er flere ting at bruge signaturen til, hvis folk som udgangspunkt ikke en gang kan finde ud af at hente og anvende signaturen, mener brugervenlighedsekspert, Klaus Silberbauer fra internetkonsulenthuset Creuna Danmark.- Der er tilsyneladende ikke tænkt på, at alle danskere skal kunne finde ud af at installere en digital signatur, før succesen er hjemme. Som det er nu skal en borger, der ønsker en digital signatur, igennem en veritabel jungle af fagudtryk og meget dårlig brugervenlighed, siger han.

Han mener, at det er det offentlige Danmark, der fejler ved ikke at støtte nok op omkring indsatsen med at sælge digital signatur til danskerne: – Langt de fleste kommunale og statslige websider henviser blot til TDC’s website og håber så på, at borgeren vender tilbage med en digital signatur. Men det sker ikke altid. Ofte vil borgeren få en dårlig oplevelse og måske helt opgive at hente en digital signatur, og det kan øge distancen mellem det offentlige og borgeren. Det er ærgerligt. TV-spots er ikke nok – indsatsen skal arbejdes helt ned i de enkelte websites design, lyder rådet fra Klaus Silberbauer. [...]“

http://www.berlingske.dk/business/artikel:aid=758434/

I’m featured

…on the web 2.0 bandwagon.