You'd better be careful with your relationship status displayed in online communitys: A British woman was killed after changing her status on facebook! Read more here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 10:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

As most of you know, I'm working for a new company now: the classmates.com subsidiary Stayfriends! The purpose for this internet community is to reunite with classmates from school. I would like to invite all of my friends, to join the network and become a contact of mine there.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 15:50 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

[Trigami-Review]

Prologue

Travelers always have been an interesting target for web communities – they seek information about places far away – and they want information tailored to their specific needs and they want it reliable. All those are requirements an internet community about travel can give them. People writing about all those places – probably people similar to them be it backpacking or staying in 5* hotels can be found in communities. Also you’ll have the chance to make a picture of those people visiting their profiles or following their posts, and therefore be able to judge about the reliability about information.

But I don’t want to write epic descriptions about travel communities in general – just to set up those three features I would seek for in travel communities:

• get information about places far away
• tailored to my needs
• get community functions to connect with other and to allow me to judge about reliability

Depending on the extend those features are fulfilled I might be interested in sharing my own experiences in such a community

The community

Thanks to Trigami, I was made aware of the chance to have a glimpse at the new travel community dodo.com. Choosing the exotic and extinct dodo-bird (not to confuse with the professor at the University of Bamberg, carrying that first name) as an mascot. Dodo.com provides six main navigation sections.

• The first home sections gives an overview about current community activities like new travel tips, new members, new fotos, new videos and new travelogue entries.
• The second section “travel tips” shows user reviews about something the different sections remind me a bit to qype, where you can write reviews about places, restaurants and sights, too.
• “Travelogues” consists of peoples travel experiences. Each entry there is accompanied by a map, showing the location of area it is about, and information about the member writing the entry.
• Then there are two sections with Photos and videos. Each is offering “new” and “popular” items, and a categorization via country. You are also encouraged to upload your own material – but it hast to be attached to a travelogue.
• The last section probably is the most interesting one – the classic “my”-section being the gateway to most of the individual community settings & connections. You can get an overview about your profile there, change your Profile, see all your travel tips, travelogues, photos, videos, bookmarks and of course your friends and messages.
• Apart from those main features there is also the obligatory (?) making of Blog with information about the making of dodo.com. It’s quite interesting to catch a view pictures of the young team behind dodo.com there.

My thoughts

So far dodo.com offers all features, which are quite essential to publish some travel information on the net. All items on the homepage are well structured and easy to understand. Even a total beginner, or people not to familiar with Internet communities should have no problems in getting around at the homepage. The requirements I stated in my prologue are partially fulfilled. I can retrieve infos, I can judge a little bit, by looking into people’s profiles – but how can I tailor them to my needs? Some more categories e.g. “backpacking” or “luxury travel” or at least a basic folksonomy could greatly improve likelihood to find interesting information.

But it is still beta so the features are yet(?) limited. They provide a well working homepage, but they lack some excellence I would hope for, in such a new piece of social software. Things I would like to see there:

• Possibility to link external media sources – connect the community to your feeds on Flickr, Youtube, Blip.tv, picasa, Gallery2
• Connect your personal profile to other travel related pages e.g. Couchsurfing and hospitalityclub
• Make the content accessible via Folksonomy (aren’t tag clouds always a nice gimmick?)
• More options for your profile. If you’ve seen a few facebook profiles, you know how much time people might actually spend organizing there user profile. A portfolio of widgets and the possibility to post own marked up code should be a minimum

I'm really interested in following the further development of the community.

You're chance to win!

In order to encourage users to register and become active members of the dodo.com community the makers are making a draw at the end of the year, giving away a trip worth 10.000 EUR. The more activity and the more persons you invite into the community, the higher your chance to win! So if you sign in to dodo.com – be kind and use my invitation link.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found, on subject, Travel at 12:25 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

[Trigami-Review]

Ever tried to use video calling on your brand new UMTS phone? Guess most of us will answer that question with a clear “No”. Rates up to 0,99 EUR, while a normal call is priced at 19 cent or is even free (since many of us have flat rates) this feature is still really uninteresting. It also requires UMTS connection enabled – and most us will switch of this feature, since it is power consuming. Well, I don’t want to write a statement on why not to use that feature, but rather point out a possibility on why it might be interesting.

The Berlin base ViiF mobile Video GmbH, which calls there product “your mobile entertainment community”, offers a service which could get you to at least try out the video call feature. There software uses this video call feature as interface to get videos of your phone and into the internet and vice versa. Currently this feature is free for customers using the German O2 network. All that is needed is an UMTS connection and a call to the service number 22557. No special software or data rate needed!
Especially the feature enabling direct vlogging caught my attention – media directly to your personal weblog is the promise you get at the ViiF homepage. Unluckily I’m currently at my parents place in Truppach with no UMTS coverage, so I won’t be able to try this feature before I at least visit Bamberg or Bayreuth. But I’m really curious, whether this vlogging feature will work any good, since I’ve tried to start a kind of mobile vlogging some while ago, but never kept up with it. If the ViiF service produces any reliable quality I might get back on track here Also it will be interesting to see, which kind of Media they will offer in there community. Probably some of me readers in an UMTS area could try the feature and comment a few words about this?

As long as the ViiF manages to keep there call rates low, considered an enabling technology – enabling to distribute and receive content without having to subscribe to expensive data rates, and without having to tweak your mobile phone too much. With all those mobile carriers still trying to get back the billions they invested in UMTS licenses and their UMTS network, I really hope this can be done, our mobile market needs such innovations - at decent prices, though! I’ve subscribed to the ViiF-Blog and will be watching their progress. Also expect me trying this vlogging feature soon.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 17:25 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

Ever wanted to include a basic survey to your blog? If your Blog script or provider is not offering the required functionality for you, you might want to have a look at Netvoting.com. This new web 2.0 platform, which is currently been tested in a closed beta does not only act as a community to share votings, but also offers little widgets for your blog to include. Writing this article for Trigami, I have had the chance to participate in the beta and get a look at the platform.

The community is set up with all current Web 2.0 features, like folksonomies and user profiles, the possibility to connect to other voters, groups and comes with a kind of standard web 2.0 design. So it is quite easy to play around there, and the handling is easy, too. Of course the connecting element in this are the votes you can offer there, and in which you can participate. The downside of this element is, the fact that every vote you cast can be viewed by other users of the community. I’m not sure how the privacy of this information will be handled in the full version. But the creators should really create a feature to create some privacy here, e.g. only let connected people see your votes. For me personal the community would be pretty much useless, without such a feature, since I don’t fancy strangers knowing every vote I cast there. I also won’t need the feature of this voting widget, since s9y comes with a very own plugin to create polls.

Well, we will see how this community develops once it’s launched! Probably interesting to come back once there is a little live there. If you want to have your own look you might want to register here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 00:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Users of the student community schneckenhof.de, which is a local party community in Mannheim, have produced their own movie. In six episodes the team around director and writer Niels Reinhard created a satirical homage about student life. The motto: “Sex, Drugs & Rock'n' Roll in the year 2007”.

The movie has its premier on November 14th at the Cinemaxx movie theatre in Mannheim. Starting November 15th the episodes will be released online on schneckenhof.de. The creators say, it is the first movie project produced exclusively by users of a specific online community. I'm quite curios to see there work

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 17:47 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)