If you thought just sending your bookmarks to the web and use tags to categorize themwas state of the art, then you are at least living one year in the past! I was until I did a little research today on how to organize bookmarks for our workgroup. Meanwhile bookmarked pages get cached, you may add notes, and share them to your private group. Where? have a look at diigo.com.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 15:09 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Just recieved the very interesting link to a collection of free publications covering topics about "Social Media Marketing". Some require registration at different pages, but might be worth the hassle. Any volunteers to download and compile an archive?

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 17:45 | 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)

The Grützekraftwerk is right - BBC has the some of the greatest content in the world. Watch this about facebook:

via FreieNetze.de

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 21:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Starting tomorrow with a get-together at the Klosterbräu brewery, I will attend a Workshop about further developments of the internet in Bamberg. Since the workshop is about new movements in the web, of course current web technologies are used to support it. You can have a look at the workshop weblog or even use the workshop wiki. Using the conference tag "dnn2007" pictures taken can be found at Flickr, articles related to the workshop can be discovered via technorati, and also related links via del.icio.us.

The program is very promising, and I’m looking forward to interesting discussions.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in university at 01:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

www.flickr.com More of juergenhoesch's photos

It took my a few days to decide but I value the chance to share my pictures with a broader range of people worth spending some 18 Euros (thx to the strong Euro!!) on a Flickr subscription.

So I could bring back my older pictures including Edumedia 2006 conference and get enough capacity to share my weallspeakfootball picture there. I’ve also started to geo-tag my images. It is possible to discover the places where the pictures were taken on a map. Unluckly Yahoo, to which Flickr belongs does not yet have the maps in the quality I'm used to by Google Earth - but the maps are sufficient to toy around with. This whole geotagging is a nice feature. I hope it will be done automatic by the next generation of digital cameras.

Now, I’m very curious whether there will be more interaction on my Flickr images than on the images posted in my very own gallery.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 19:26 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

At the moment I feel blackmailed by Flickr. It let me upload a lot of pictures – but over half of them are being held prison by the system. I had to learn, that additionally to the upload limit (which kindly has been raised from 20 to 100mb a month) and the fact that images of free users can only be accessed in low resolution, there is a limit on the number of pictures that are been shown by the system. This limit is 200 pictures. That’s a lot if you only post pictures occasionally, but not if you want to make a huge number accessible. This is what I tried after vlogeurope, because the audience for whom I had taken the pictures would have had easier access to the images – until the limit hit.

So Flickr is a free service – how can I complain about the limitations of something that is free? Well, the only thing I need Flickr is to enable me to interact in a certain social network. I’ve got my own stand-alone gallery up and running, so far holding 22985 items, it suits me very well, I’ve got all degrees of freedom I could ever dream of using an image gallery– but it is not connected to a social network. Flickr is a social network, into which I’ve already been sucked into slowly step by step.

So, will I pay the ransom? I’ll decide later..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 02:05 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Wired Author Keith Axline created a ten step guide presenting steps how to use the Social Software platform Flickr to attract a possible partner for a real romance. It is a quite interesting guide on self-promotion.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 13:40 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)