The avatar service Gravatar was acquired by our company Automattic today.
What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?
Overall it’s a real good fit for us, and I’m excited about our future plans. More details here.
Gotta love GPS !
After using various GPS units in car rentals, and thinking about next generation p2p GPS devices like the Dash, I finally decided to go out and buy a GPS device for myself. The market for these devices is in a phase where innovation is accelerating, adoption rates are picking up pace, and expectations for the “next thing” dominates product coverage.
My research for this purchase included googling around and finding a good review of the Nuvi 350 on the Signal vs Noise blog (Dec ’05 review) . And also consulting with my buddy, and GPS expert, Wilson Rothman.
It’s been about two months since I chose the Garmin Nuvi 350 after looking at various models. Overall it’s very solid and gets the job done, and for around $350 ( bought in Aug 2007 ) it’s hard to beat.
The good:
– A crisp display that does well in all light conditions
– The maps are easy to read
– Directions are accurate 🙂
– The voice prompts are helpful and well timed
– If you miss a turn or want to hunt for an alternative route the device “recalculates” very quickly
– The price point was spot on for me
The bad:
– Bootup time could be better — takes about 10 seconds
– Locating the satelite on bootup can take 20-30 seconds – would be nice if it just remembered the last place you were at and asked if that’s where you were.
– Looking up a business name seems too slow to be useful
– In theory it’s portable enough to take on a hike or any other use outside the car. In reality the battery drains so quickly after a charge, that when I go and check the device after being in the car overnight, the battery is almost always completely empty.
The ugly :
– No complaints of anything terrible
Wish list:
– No easy way to transfer address info from my desktop machine to the device. Many times I’m on my macbook pro usually using google maps or yelp to find something, and I would love to be able to email-in or via SMS send the address to the GPS unit. Instead I email myself, and then punch it in when I get to the car
– Certain highways always get selected even though you know better roads are available. Not a big deal, but would be nice if it “learned” my preferences.
– Having to punch in the city name just seems weird. It knows what city I’m in, and should simply show the 5 nearest cities by default.
– Needs to be two way. The other day I had it find the nearest gas station and it found a 7-11 store that had no gas station ! Not a huge deal, and an easy mistake, but I should be able to flag that, and inform all other users of this mistake.
– More two-way options. Would be nice to have the ability to sync all the data back to the web, so I could review past trips, and mark places of interest for future trips.
– More sharing. Would be cool to see (anonymously) what were the most effective routes to take at certain hours based on what other people did, the most scenic, the one with the least amount of traffic, etc. Lots can be done in this area.
So overall The Nuvi 350 is a solid mid tier GPS unit, and I’m personally looking forward to the next generation GPS devices.
One of the great things about WordPress is seeing how it’s being used around the world. From the various language translations to hosted versions the level of engagement and creativity is super impressive.
A great example is what’s happening in Israel. The WordPress community in Israel is now organizing a WordCamp (english blog) on Oct 25th, 2007 in Tel Aviv. I’m sure it’s going to be a great event, and looking forward to seeing when the next one will be held — I’d love to attend 🙂
From their blog:
About WordCamp Israel
WordCamp is coming to Israel on Oct. 25 in Tel Aviv! Lorelle is the keynote speaker, and the lectures and panels will be covering topics like WordPress installation, blogging for business, and more.
Via NewTeeVee:
Go grab version 2.3.
What’s new you ask ? From the WordPress.Org development blog:
- Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
- Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new
api.wordpress.orgservice which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.- We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.
- Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
- There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.
I wrote a couple of months ago about My favorite videos that are marketing / HR / recruiting tools.
After watching this video from my friends at Splendora, I think we can crown a new champion. Simply brilliant ! :
I had the pleasure of attending NewTeeVee’s Citizen News event the other day, and I came away super impressed. The GigaOm team really knows how to put on a great event with the right mix of content, interesting judges, a good crowd and spot-on sponsorships that really ad value to the event.
The topic centered around citizen journalism/news and showcased several video clips that were later voted on by the audience ( via SMS ).
You can see all the videos here — but I wanted to highlight two in particular that really stood out for me, and turned out to be voted on #1 and #2 respectively by the crowd.
The first video was an installment from the “Alive in Baghdad” series, “Sectarian Violence is a Daily Experience”. Really compelling content, and unfiltered in a way that conveys maximum information and clarity. For all the mentos diet coke content out there (which rocks!), it’s great to also see truly powerful journalism being done by a small group of individuals who have the power of online distribution. (More great investigative journalism highlighted recently in a post by Marhsall Kirkpatrick)
The second video is called “Bodega”. It was very well produced and instantly genuine — to the point that I felt like I jumped back to new york, and was grabbing a yoohoo after a yankees game !
First time I haven’t attended the US Open in New York in years, but watching it live on HD is pretty good 🙂
Huge win tonight for Shahar Peer of Israel, and great to see Blake advance too.
From the 2004 conference, but just posted a couple of months ago. Really interesting & entertaining. I don’t necessarily agree with the final conclusion — I have more faith in technology, but a definite must-watch:
I have one of the very first Blackberry 8700C models, and I’ve been itching to upgrade for a while. At first I was convinced I’d pickup an iPhone, but managed to hold out. Next I was going to wait for a Blackberry with 3G, WiFi, GPS, and a camera. Once it became clear that this combo was still a couple of revisions away from launching, I settled in on looking for a good deal on the Curve. I called AT&T and got a really good deal, ordered it, and then saw that the new Curve was just announced in Europe with GPS 🙂
Unphased I eagerly unpacked my new phone a couple days later, and have been happily using it for the past couple of weeks. Here is my take on it, with a very strong emphasis on how it compares to the 8700.
The good:
– Form factor is much better ! The slightly smaller keyboard really makes a difference — the phone is also much slimmer and not as bulky. It actually feels like you are carrying a phone again.
– Keyboard is actually better too. The feedback/response from the keys is stronger, and within a day I was used to the somewhat more narrow, but still full QWERTY, keyboard.
– The scroll wheel replacement with the joystick is a good thing. I thought I’d miss the scroll wheel, but the way the joystick is implemented actually opens up many new uses, and makes navigating much easier.
– Having a camera again is great. I missed having a camera ever since I switched from Nokia phones to the Blackberry. The 2 megapixel camera on the Curve takes surprisingly good photos, and combine it with email->Flickr and it’s really useful.
The not so good:
– AT&T loads up the phone with all kinds of extra icons for the “ATT Mall” to shop for themes, ringtones, etc. Not a big deal to hide them, but depending on which theme you run, it can add all kinds of extra icons that simply get in the way. Not quite as bad as PC “craplets“, but for a high end phone, I would have much preferred some kind of gift certificate in the box that would let me try out some premium “shopping” items — not a bunch of icons that really shouldn’t be there.
– Battery life. Definitely not as good as the 8700. I somewhat expected it with the camera usage, and I do use lots of data applications (see “going 100% mobile” post) — but I find that by the end of the day I can be down to just 1 bar. My solution – I carry the charger with me in my bag, and charge up at various times during the day.
– OS stability. I probably had my 8700 freeze-up maybe 4 or 5 times over the course of a year with heavy usage. So far, the Curve has frozen up on me twice in 2 weeks. Both times it happened while using the camera application — so I need to see if it’s a storage issue perhaps.
– Lack of bundled apps. Would have been nice to see a solid IM app like JiveTalk bundled in. I am now running the google mobile pack — Google Maps, gmail, Google News, Google Search, and mobile gTalk. I then added in Yahoo!Go, and also an RSS reader Viigo (my Viigo review here)
The bad:
– Really nothing to complain about. I wish it was 3G, Wifi, and had GPS support 🙂 But otherwise this is a great upgrade to the 8700, and should hold me over for a few more months.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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