Click To Hit

The Ops and Product Management crew were up very late last night and although the maintenance had to be extended a little we did add a first step to prevent comment spam from affecting our customers so overall things were a success.

What's that first step? Well something that will at least limit programmatic attacks which are the most damaging to the system and people's blogs from a cleanup perspective. Word Verification images are that first step, and to see a great example click the comment link on this article and check it out.

With this new defense I now feel much more comfortable turning off authenticated accounts as a requirement for commenting.

 I decided to put up a video of my cat who has learned to use the toilet all by himself in order to highlight the Video capabilities of the 6670 and how to use this with a blog.

Considering the native file format for videos is .3gp which is pretty standard for cell phone video formats, this eliminates the ability to directly post videos to your blog for videocasting on the fly since it's not supported for web applications without a special player.

I found a converter with a quick google search called Zwei-stein that allows you to convert .3gp to both Quicktime and Windows media formats pretty easily. It doesn't have the best UI I have ever seen, but it works. The only problem I experienced so far is that the conversion seems to speed up the video just enough to make the audio sound like a chipmunk which you'll notice in the example above. They have a newer version called ZS4 which I havn't tried yet so I'm hoping this will correct this issue, but either way I'll follow up as I learn more.

I used the instructions on this web page to create the code to embed the video in the HTML above, and attached the video to the post to get it into the RSS feed so this would be considered my first official videocast.  More to come…

AOL has released a very interesting survey where they asked questions of approximately 600 bloggers to find out why they blog.

Number one reason? ”It's Therapeutic” it seems…

I'm not so sure about that. When you look at this previous article you could assume that self help would have been the directive or a huge benefit to the first or second generation of bloggers, but not so sure how therapeutic it would be to share photos of my family, or talk about hobbies and things I do professionally.

Although writing this blog does help me think through things in a little more detail before hitting that POST button, it doesn't help with my personal stress level nor help me figure out the meaning of life.

Either way some great food for thought.

I haven't had a chance to really play with it to any great extent, but it looks typically googlish; simple, understated, yet pretty targeted and results oriented.

Check out the article by the BBC here to learn more.

Some further evidence (Scroll to the third paragraph) that photo sharing is one of the largest in-demand features on the Internet.

Sites which host users' photos have grown more than 400% to 14.7 million users since January, according to a NetRatings report. “The large rise in blogging activity has lifted other sites,” said Jon Gibs, senior research manager. “The primary beneficiary has been image-hosting sites.”

IMHO I would say this is attributed to the fact that most blog providers, especially the free ones, don't have half of the Photo Management features of Blogware or require third party services to host the photos. As you can see by the photo albums I have in my navigation to the left, megapixel photo albums with slideshow capabilities are a real snap to setup with Blogware.  Not to “toot our own horn”, but definitely easier than any other service I have tried and in my job that's most of them

Here is one of the latest reports from an employee with Directnic Registrar whos offices are in New Orleans.

Reader discretion is advised, this is not the type of report that would be broadcast by traditional media…

My prayers are with all of you…

I decided to make a move and upgrade the Motorolla v400 I acquired about a year ago to the new Nokia 6670 smartphone so I may highlight some of the great moblogging features of blogware for customers (True 1.2 megapixel Photos) as well as some of the best native Videocasting support of any hosted service (support for up to 10 minutes of recorded video).

It'll be interesting to see how the speed factor plays out in posting these higher quality images and video files on the go. I'm also very excited about some of the applications usually reserved for the pocket pc market such as video and photo editing, the office suite, and synchronization tools for integration with your desktop calendars and address books .

Either way I'll report on my experiences and start to play around with videoblogging now that I have a mobile tool that inherently supports these features *almost* as well as Blogware does.