Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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Subscribe to raanan.com via Email

Tonight, on WordPress.com, we launched Email Subscriptions.

You can now subscribe to this blog via email and get nicely formatted posts delivered in your inbox whenever I publish something new. Just put in your email address into the sidebar widget on the right, titled “Email Subscription”. If you are logged in to WordPress.com it’s just 1-click, but anyone can subscribe, you don’t need a WordPress.com account to use this.

With various options like RSS readers, Twitter, and Facebook — I’m still impressed by the usefulness of receiving certain updates by email. Maybe out of habit from my NY subway days, but I still read paidContent.org daily summaries via email every morning.

Like paidContent, what’s also cool about this new email subscription feature is that you can elect to receive digests:

When a user subscribes to a blog they will receive an email containing recent blog posts. The subscriber can select how often this email is sent (the delivery frequency – immediate, daily, or weekly), as well as when this email is sent (the delivery window – a specific day and hour).

If you’d like to learn more, check out the announcement post.

reMail Pays foursquare a Compliment

I’ve been using reMail, a great little email search app for the iPhone, and it’s proven very handy. It has all the features you wished the built-in iPhone mail search would have, and the app is now free for google apps/gmail users.

The reMail app was updated recently with a new UI and some other new features, and I noticed a new screen called “Usage” which I took a screen shot of below (and edited out the bottom portion which shows the most popular email addresses for emails searched):

Notice anything familiar ? 🙂 Seems like reMail has copied the whole ‘game’ aspect of the popular foursquare service, where app/search usage equates to different levels, much as foursquare does:

I like the direction of showing usage stats in reMail, as it feeds into all of our obsessive thirst for stats.  But in this particular instance, I think reMail could have focused on a more interesting sets of stats instead of putting in work to make it a game — but who knows, maybe this is helping with their usage numbers.

In any event, if imitation is the highest form of a compliment, foursquare should be feeling pretty good 🙂

WordCamp NYC 2009 This Weekend

I’ll be heading to WordCamp NYC this weekend, which at present time already has 607 attendees registered!

It’s not too late to buy tickets, so if you are in the area, definitely check it out.

A few highlights include:

  • 8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*
  • Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions
  • Sunday morning unconference
  • Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap
  • Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com
  • Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style
  • Fantastic shirts
  • Yummy lunch on Saturday
  • Door prize raffle
  • Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)
  • Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project

Should be a great event, and looking forward to seeing lots of familiar faces and a few news ones too.

If you are trying to get in touch with me to meet-up during the event, feel free to drop me a note here.

WordPress.com: The Hero Is In Your Pocket

We had our company off-site last week, and we worked on a ton of really interesting projects that will be launching in the coming weeks.

The first project is now live, and it’s the launch of mobile themes on WordPress.com to specifically format the blogs for smart phones, and also for standard mobile phones. It works automatically to detect mobile visitors, and even pulls in a custom header to make the look & feel unique:

So if you have a mobile device handy, check out raanan.com on your mobile browser to see it in action.

After the Deadline Joins Automattic

After the Deadline, a service that would have saved me countless hours back in the day, is simply an incredible ( and adaptive ) contextual spelling and grammar checker.  The service,  run by Raphael Mudge,  is now part of Automattic and we turned it on live today on WordPress.com.   If you are running self-hosted WordPress, there is a plugin at WordPress.org that you should download.

Best way to describe this service is by watching this video and checking out this example of the NYT.

Mesudarim: Best TV Show You’ll Never See

I’m way behind, but I just got done catching up on season 2 of Mesudarim from the Israeli Channel 2 Keshet network. What an amazing show – with a great opening:

Mesudarim which roughly translates to “hooked up / set for life ” is a show that in many ways is similar to HBO’s Entourage, but centered around an Israeli tech company that has a “big exit”, and focuses on what-happens-next. Mesudarim is supper funny, really well written, and even has political and social commentary weaved in just a bit.  To top it off, Jeff Pulver even had a camaeo as Steve Balmer in one of the last episodes of the 2nd season.

So why is it the “best TV show you’ll never seen” ? Simple, like all top Israeli shows, and really any top shows outside the US, the only way it seems to garner a larger international audience is by getting an option deal and getting remade in english, like “In Treatment” on HBO which is based on another popular Israeli show “BeTipul”.

While that model is fine, it amazes me that this tiny country puts out some of the best music, TV shows, and movies, but the content itself is often not seen or consumed by people outside of Israel.  Mesudarim should be a big international hit at this point.  A few simple suggestions to address this:

1) why not start with simple subtitles (maybe even crowd source with a tool like dotsub) and VOD options for those living outside of Israel ?  I know there is a bit of a VOD service for this show, but my guess is that it’s hard to access for most english speakers.  And a personal request, that Ouriel and I have been chatting about for 2 years – please make the site works in multiple browsers and platforms, not just Windows/IE.

2) Make all these shows available on iTunes – lots of people would pay for ad-free shows.

3) Build an app for Boxee for top shows

4) Build a Hulu for Israel.  Between Eretz Nehedert, Polishook, etc (and all the realty shows) there is plenty of content to consume – and with subtitles I think it would find an audience.

So what do people think ?  Any chance of this happening ?

Here is a promotional clip for season 2, and lots more clips on YouTube — can’t wait for season 3.

WordPress for iPhone App Development Update

Lots of activity on the WordPress for iPhone app lately as you can see from the timeline.

A ton of work has gone on behind the scenes to make the app faster and make it work with nearly any WordPress theme, something the current app struggles with when it doesn’t find the required XMLRPC/RSD info. In addition, the app is receiving a pretty big UI update, as you can see from this screenshot below that I took tonight running the latest version in trunk. Keep an eye on http://iphone.wordpress.org for more details soon:
WP-iPhone-8-29-09-v2

Google Maps Adds a Raanan.com Feature Request

Well, I’m sure there were other compelling reasons too 🙂

Google today rolled out an update to Google Maps that adds crowd sourced traffic congestion data:

When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.

Sound familiar ? 🙂 In April 2007, I wrote about “Why I love in-car GPS, and how it can be made better“:

What we need, in my opinion, is an opt-in, open standard for sharing in-car/traffic information that any device and any opted-in person can tap into…
And as GPS is incorporated more and more into our mobile phone devices, that should give us a huge installed user base of in-car and mobile devices sharing information about traffic and other conditions. That would be infinitely better than participating in the manufacturers small group of users, and would dramatically increase the chances of having tons of good data on the highway you were looking to avoid b/c of traffic

What’s also really interesting to watch for me is how companies like TomTom, who now have a compelling iPhone app, will deal with Google Maps. My hunch is that they’ll incorporate Google Maps and their own navtech/maps database into some kind of hybrid best of both worlds model. They’ve done a bit of integration already with their TomTom on Google Maps.