As discussed in my post about presentation technique I try to make slides that only illustrates what I am talking about. If I hand out anything it is always done after the presentation, and it has to be more than the slides alone. People want some kind of summary, for internet stuff they want the links etc..

At the Norwegian Computer Society I talked about blogging and how I gain knowledge and valuable contacts through this activity. A bit about the relationship between my blog and my professional life and discussions around tools like Flickr, RSS Readers etc…

This is a little experiment. I have written short summaries of what I was talking about for each slide and publish all of it here as a reference. Both for the people that attended the presentation and for the people that did not attend. It should be able to get some info out of this little post even for the people that missed the session this evening.

Maybe this could be a way to extend the discussion that was started during the presentation:
– Is it a good idea to try to define “blog” strictly?
– What RSS feed readers do you use?
– Do you have any special blogs to recommend?

My short answers. It’s difficult to define what a blog is in detail. Some of my thoughts are given in the presentation. As for feed readers I use Bloglines and Netvibes.

My recomended blogs are here:
– 10 essential blogs
– The media center blogs
– The blogs that I subscribe to in Bloglines right now

So for the presentation. This is what you get if you save a powerpoint presentation as a web page. It is extremely ugly, but works. Still, you can also have a look at it here in the blog:

Yes, a web site. Eirikso.com is a web site. And a blog.

So why call it a blog and not a web page? The word ”blog” is worn out. Because it right now sounds cool everybody talks about it. In general, talking about a blog instead of a website or a web page is because you want to emphasise certain aspects of your website. If the site has an automatic archive, a possibility for comments and trackbacks, feeds and last but not least…

…maybe the most important aspect of a blog and the main reason for the success of this format. Simplicity. It’s very easy to update and edit.

I post an article on NRK’s new Online Spotlight service. Cory Doctorow picks this up and questions NRK’s use of Windows Media as a format. This starts a huge discussion that is carried out in the comments on the original post and on several blogs and web sites.

I can’t really find anyone suggesting a working alternative for NRK in this discussion. I post a new article requesting people to come up with alternatives. A new discussion starts and some interesting alternatives comes up. Absolutely enough to work on and do some tests.

I post an article on how to convert video for use on your iPod. Through the comments I get more suggestions and learn about software and methods that I didn’t know of.

I post an article on the fact that the popular picture sharing service called Flickr just passed the market leader Webshots in traffic. Suggesting some reasons for the success of Flickr. The founder of Webshots, Narenda Rocherolle trackbacks to my blog and also comments on another service called Photobucket. Representatives directly from Photobucket comments on Narenda’s site. It’s interesting how it’s possible to reach important representatives and start a discussion at a high level trough web publishing.

I try out several software packages to remote control my media center from a PDA. One of them is useless because of horrible performance. The blog post spreads among the media center blogs and forums. Half an hour later I have a comment directly from Tim Cutting, president of Niveus Media. The company making the solution that I had problems with…

I ramble about Apple and how stupid it is that they have choosen to make their AV cable non compliant with other AV cables. It doesn’t take long before people politely informs me that I am wrong. That apple solved this the only sensible way. I learn something and I humbly have to edit my post… 🙂

I used a blog to be able to communicate with my beta testers during the development of a Media Center service for the NRK.

The beta testers got an email adress where they could post bug reports and attach screenshots. This adress automatically posted incoming mails as articles on the blog. Incoming messages defaulted to the ”open bugs” category. All bugs could be discussed by all beta testers and project members through the comment area in the blog.

The project manager and programmers where authorized to assign new categories to the bugs that where mailed in. Most of them went over to the ”fixed” category as the porogrammers fixed them, some of them to the ”feature request” category etc.

Posting directly through mail or MMS is popular and opens extra possibilities.

Five young and upcoming athleets where equipped with a Nokia 6630 each. On NRK’s web site they all had their own blog and the phones where set up to make it easy for them to post small stories and images directly from the mobile.

Some of the stories that we got would have been impossible to get without these tools. The snowkiter Bjørn Kaupang had an accident during the world cup at Hardangervidda. He blogs on his way to the hospital where they are going to analyze his neck and try to state if this accident has caused him serious injuries or not. For him it was a way of passing time and have a feeling of connection with people during the tense waiting. For the readers of his blog it was just as thrilling to wait for the posts and follow him through. Fortunately the injuries where minor.

Gunhild Sørensen of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation did a spectacular ride in a paraglider during the extreme sports festival at Voss 2005. All the way she posted directly to the blog at the Norwegian Broadcasting Coropration’s web site. The site is in Norwegian, but the pictures speak for themselves… From the blog:
“Now we are going to do some 360s. Øyvind (the instructor) asks me to hold tight to my mobile. This involves some serious G-forces”

With broadband and a laptop in an airplane it is of course possible to do whatever internet work you want. Including blogging. As of 2005, it is still quite cool to recieve articles written and photograped 10 000 feets above Uzbekistan.

Both The Norwegian Newspaper VG and Dagbladet hosts blogs for ”the average Joe”. They are quite clever in actually using the content from these blogs all the way up to their front page.

MySpace (blogs), Flickr (photos) and YouTube (videos) are all facilitating content for regular people. They have all had tremendous success lately… No doubt about the fact that people has content and that they want to share it!

I learn quite a bit by having a look at where people come from. About new sites and services that I did not know of. This was the place where I first found Netvibes and a lot of interesting media center sites. Not all blogs send automatic trackbacks.

I also learn new things about technology and what I write about by looking at what people had searched for when they arrive at my blog. The fact that ”quicktime without iTunes” is one of the most repeating searches tells more than the fact that I have actually written about it.

A little curiosity… For a couple of days eirikso.com was bigger than Adresseavisen, the biggest newspaper in the third biggest city in Norway. (Thanks, Oyvind :-))

Alexa states clearly on their web page that the statistics they collect will get less accurate for small sites. eirikso.com is absolutely a small site. Still, it follows my own statistics quite well. One thing to note is that the Alexa chart does not match the first spike in the real statistics from eirikso. That was traffic from a Duch site linking to eirikso. I guess not that many Duch people are using the Alexa toolbar that collects the data. When linked from more American related sites like digg and BoingBoing the spikes match better, like the last one in the chart above.

Most popular so far. The time lapse video of the view from my living room window. And the insane supposition about the fact that it could be possible to render all television pictures that exist and ever will exist.

In addition to this, the post about Bob the Millionaire has also been one of my most popular.