Grounded In Reality

Andrew Foote, Andrew Silver and I are at BlogHer 08 Conference this weekend in San Francisco. It has been aware that posting to Twitter in 140-character format has been much more popular than full blog writing. Well, get back to your blogging roots ladies because Twitter’s Fail Whale is in FULL FORCE. I am not sure if Twitter planned this or they are just simply unaware of the popularity the application has among the women influencers online, but this is the most inopportune time for a shut-down.

If you look at the top Twitter search trends for the past 3 days, just under the new Batman movie is #BlogHer08. Moms are on Twitter, and I am honestly waiting for the day that mommybloggers go on strike against Twitter…and I have a feeling its coming soon.

‘The Andrews’ and I will be back a little later with conference updates, but for now, I can say that these women are amazing and the learning curve is steep. Be ready to step up.

After a terrible week of grey New York weather, myself and the rest of the New York Digital team were thankful for a bit of sunshine at the AIDS Walk in Central Park on Sunday. The AIDS Walk is the largest AIDS fund raising event in the world, and with over 45,000 participants in New York, it raises millions of dollars annually for those affected by HIV and AIDS.

For me, being new to the city and a Brit, it was a good opportunity to see more of New York, and I was excited to check out Strawberry Fields and the Dakota apartment block, the scene of late Beatle, John Lennon’s, death.

Of course, we also made use of some new technology and shared photo updates in realtime on Andrew Foote’s Twitpic page. If you want to keep up with the latest developments in mobile social networking, download Twitpic, a new Twitter application which means you can now Twitter with pictures and video. It’s great fun and designed so that you can update your friends with pictures, video and a short message direct from your mobile. I am definitely a convert!

Thanks to family, friends and all at GCI who sponsored us. Our first foray into fundraising was pretty successful and we managed to raise over $1,000 for charity. Oh, and for those that didn’t get a chance to sponsor us this time, there will be plenty more fundraising initiatives from the digital team later in the year, so watch this space…

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Charlie Hart
GCI Group Digital

In addition to being writers, the next wave of pro journalists will also be videographers and audio techs. Today’s half-second news cycle is demanding that reporters evolve into multimedia producers who can publish text, audio, and video on the fly. The old school system of deploying multi-person camera crews to cover news is coming to an end. It’s too clunky and slow. Arming reporters with internet-enabled recording tools is the only way publishers can keep up and cover maximum ground (not to mention scoop the average college kid with a camera phone and moblog widget).

In a sign that publishers are adapting, Reuters and Nokia just completed a cool experiment to illustrate the emergence of mobile reporting. Reuters armed several of its reporters with gadgets that make publishing stories from the field a breeze. The centerpiece of the toolkit is the Nokia N95 smartphone – a video-shooting, photo-snapping, GPS-mapping, web-surfing device that also happens to let users email and make calls. Participating reporters were also given a Bluetooth keyboard to crank out text-heavy articles, as well as a microphone and tripod to assist with A/V production.

Check out this video interview with Google’s Vint Cerf to see the toolkit in action. The quality is a bit jittery, but it’s a good example of where things are headed: instant, raw, behind-the-scenes, and comment-friendly.

Next steps for Reuters and Nokia? They are planning to use the kits to teach journalism students about the importance of mobile reporting. Interesting that Reuters didn’t choose to use a multi-media press release to communicate this story.

If someone came up to me on the street and told me that the United States was the greatest country on earth, I couldn’t argue with them. If someone came up to me and said that pizza was the greatest junk food on earth, I would agree with them. I’d especially agree with them if it’s from Ray’s on 12^th and 7^th Ave. in NYC or Giordano’s in Chicago.

But if someone came up to me and said that the U.S. has the best cell phone setup of anyone in the world, I would definitely argue with that theory.

Let me start with the fact that I just got back from Israel, and they blow us out of the water in so many ways.

• First, everyone has a cell phone and they are constantly on them. The prices are very cheap for cell service and everyone takes full advantage of it.

The funny part is that no one in Israel knows how to turn their phone on vibrate. Go there and see how many cell phone types of rings you can hear in a day. My guess is I heard about 10-15 different ones a day for two weeks.We went to Yad Vashem, which is a Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem.  A person tells you to shut your phones off as you walk in. Within a minute of being in the museum, someone’s phone started to ring.  *Just a tad annoying*

• Next, let’s talk about how all the phones are unlocked around the world, except in the U.S.So for those of you with iPhones, enjoy your time with AT&T for your two-year contract. 

The only company that allows you to unlock your phone is T-Mobile and even then you have to have a business contract or have your phone for a certain amount of time before they will do so.When I went to China a few years ago, I bought an unlocked Motorola V60 and it’s great to travel the world with because it’s almost more than half the cost of turning on your American phone and using it.You can buy unlocked phones online, but it will cost you more. You can also go online and unlock your phones with different kinds of services, but it will still cost you a few bucks.

• Finally, let’s talk about the fact that I had better cell service standing on the borders of Syria, Lebanon and Israel than I have in Atlanta, Georgia.

I was at full bars for 90 percent of my trip, and I never once dropped a call. As if that wasn’t enough, when we drove through the West Bank by Jordan, my service switched to a Jordanian carrier. You know how I know that? They sent me a text message to welcome me.  They also sent me text messages to offer me a chance to win $10,000 U.S. and a kilo of gold. And when I was leaving their coverage area, they texted me to thank me for driving through their area.Tell me the last time Verizon did that?

We may be ahead of the curve in many areas, but we aren’t even close to being on the backstretch when it comes to cell phones.

Google has quietly rolled out a GPS-enabled, mobile version of Google Maps.  As an existing user of Google Maps on a mobile device (and a perpetually lost traveler), I can attest to the ease and intuitiveness of the mobile version.  Enabling GPS functionality provides a “You Are Here” functionality and, most importantly for marketers, a new channel for presence advertising.

Imagine receiving opt-in offers for a latte on your BlackBerry® when you walk by a participating Starbucks (a GCI client).  Show the barista the digital coupon and enjoy a cool drink to ease your travels.

Granted that this is an early adopter technology as majority of mobile devices are not GPS-enabled, but the BlackBerry® 8800™ is a good example of the new wave of mobile devices with in-built GPS.

Leo Laporte’s move to Jaiku from Twitter caused both the crash of the Jaiku server (he has more than 4,000 followers, a greater following than Robert Scoble), and put Jaiku on the nanoblogging map.  (I have not heard of Twitter prior to SXSW Interactive 2007, and only heard about Jaiku on TWiT when Leo made the move.)

I’ve been checking out both services, and my initial recommendation is Twitter over Jaiku.  Though I think Jaiku has some very nifty functionalities (it invokes Apple’s userability while Twitter reminds me of a functional PC), I find that for now Jaiku:

• - Lacks instant message (IM) integration / alerts;
• - For the U.S. audience, it is likely to have inconvenient down times since it is based in Helsinki; 
• - Certain American carriers are blocking Jaiku SMS alerts, a bug that the company is working through;
• - Though offering cool Growler and Quicksilver scripts for Mac users is applicable only to a niche Apple market

For my U.S.-centric clients, I would have to recommend Twitter, for now.  That said, the market is young and it is too risky to predict the future of either service—and that of emerging competitors.