Tag: technology

Jott: Phone Blogging

Jott Phone Blogging

Jott is, as I described earlier, a great free service you can use to send yourself (or others) email and text messages. You’re out and about. You hit your Jott speed-dial number on your cell phone. You speak your message, and Jott transcribes your speech reasonably reliably. You get a handy message in your inbox that you can put into your GTD workflow.

Now Jott has announced a bunch of new features, including letting you speak your Twitter tweets (see the example from my test in the graphic above) or your blog posts. You can link your WordPress or Blogger blog to your Jott account, and then when you dial the number and it asks you, “Who do you want to Jott?” you answer “WordPress” instead of “me” and whatever you record is transcribed and posted to your blog.

Here’s what happened when I tried it earlier today. It isn’t perfect, but it does also include a link to the audio file on the Jott site. Maybe it would transcribe better if I wasn’t a Minneso-o-o-o-o-tan.

This has limitations: if you want to include Technorati tags, you need to add those later. There’s also a limit on how long a message can be (it’s longer than Twitter’s 140 characters, but it does cut you off after a few sentences.) I think the post’s title is always the same, too: Jott Blog Post.
But this does further illustrate some of the wonderfulness of Web 2.0. Applications talk to each other. They work together. And they just work. There are WordPress and Twitter applications in Facebook, now there are in Jott, too. Shel Holtz also has a nice Jott review focusing on the Twitter experience.

I think this is a great move for Jott, for search engine rankings if nothing else. When people use Jott to blog, the post includes two links to the Jott.com domain: one to the main page, and one to the audio file of the post. But obviously the main benefit for Jott is the visibility on blogs; as lots more people will run across it and will give it a try.

Jott phone blog

Why don’t you? It’s free, like everything else you see on this blog.

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Jott Blog Post

One of the really interesting futures in web 2.0 is hole applications can be develop they can work together. In this case I am working with Jott’s to devolop a blog post for my wordpress blog. I have also expermented with Twitter. So I am going to see how this works out with the a blog post.
Click here to listen

Powered by Jott.com – Try it at 1 (866) JOTT123 – Jott.com

Later: I did this from my cell phone on the way to lunch. I think it’s kind of neat that you can click through the link and hear exactly what I said, because the transcription isn’t perfect. I’ll have some more thoughts on this and on Twitter with Jott later.

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Facebook: A Series of Tubes?

TIME magazine’s recent article – “Why Facebook is the Future” – contains this excellent synoposis of what Facebook really is:

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not.

And so, with that description of Facebook as “a Net within the Net,” we can’t help but refer to Sen. Ted Stevens’ definition of the internet as a whole to help us better understand what Facebook is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE]

Sen. Stevens’ speech was repeatedly ridiculed on The Daily Show and elsewhere by those  who thought it demonstrated a, well… less-than-complete understanding of the internet and how it works.Yet some of the chatter about Facebook and its suitability for business use doesn’t sound much more enlightened than either Sen. Stevens or Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, and her explanation of why U.S. students don’t know much about geography…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

Using Facebook for business won’t “plug up the tubes” and get in the way of the personal messages you want to deliver. It’s also not just for college students; the 35+ age demographic is the fastest growing segment among its 35+ million members.

Sure, many of the applications developed for its platform are pointless diversions, but there are some quite useful ones. For example, file sharing applications like Files and MediaFire provide shared virtual hard drives for file exchange. I’ll be reviewing those in a future post. Both provide handy work-arounds to the file size limits most people have in their email, and without the complicated language of ftp servers.
Others have raised the red flags – or red herrings – of inappropriately personal applications causing embarrassment. For example, a SuperPoke user might inadvertenly slap, bite, kick or pinch a business colleague instead of poking.

Egads! The solution to that would be, “Don’t slap, bite, kick or pinch your professional associates.” Or don’t install SuperPoke. Or why would you poke a co-worker when you could send a message instead?

Others suggest that personal photos posted by others, which appear on your Wall or in your mini-feed, could be embarrassing. Those situations can be substantially resolved by adjusting your privacy settings for your limited profile and not showing your Wall or mini-feed to your professional colleagues.

For some people who wouldn’t think of using Facebook for business, the language I just used is foreign; that’s because they haven’t tried Facebook, and so they are making judgments based on rumor and hearsay instead of personal experience.

Facebook is an information-sharing utility. It works well for personal, diversionary pursuits, and it works equally well for sharing information and creating discussions of professional topics.

Just as the same internet “tubes” carry personal and business emails — and even 10 movies at one time — so can the same Facebook infrastructure facilitate maintenance of personal and business relationships without getting things “tangled up.”

And there are even some map applications that could help Miss Upton.

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Crisis Communications and Social Media

Crisis Communications Social Media
I met Dennis McDonald in Washington, DC a month or so ago. He has written an interesting white paper on the role of social media like Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. in disaster/crisis communication. Here’s his conclusion:

In this paper I have recommended that social media and social networking should be incorporated into how schools plan for their response to disasters and emergency situations. As the reports I cite here demonstrate, this is part of a much larger and more complex situation. It is also a changing situation given that technologies and usage patterns continue to evolve.

Fundamentally, to me this question is really a no-brainer. Young people use these systems day in and day out. They blog, they use social networks, they constantly are text-messaging, and they know how to exchange information and share files. Such systems are second nature to them.

To fail to take the existence and potential value of such systems into account in planning for what to do in case their lives are threatened would be irresponsible. But we do need more thinking, research, and experimentation before we know what makes the most sense.

Dennis wrote his paper in the educational context, but I think his conclusions are more broadly applicable. His main thought is that in various recent tragedies no one method was sufficient to communicate with affected communities, and you never know which means will be knocked out, so you need multiple systems. Given the fact that these means will in fact be used (see the Virginia Tech and Minneapolis Bridge Collapse examples), these media should be part of your crisis plan, too.

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Free WiFi at Airports

free wifi at airports
In a previous post, I commended the Las Vegas airport for offering free wifi for its patrons, and also alluded to Rochester, Minn. providing the same. Today I’m in the Jacksonville, Fla. airport where the wireless internet also is free. Good deal!

That got me to thinking that there must be a directory on the internet someplace that has a listing of airports where the wifi is free. Sure enough, here is the free wifi at airports directory.

You might want to bookmark that page for when you are traveling, because this makes it a lot more convenient to get to the airport in plenty of time to get through TSA. With free wifi, you can arrive early and then continue working (or updating Facebook…I couldn’t break my string of mentioning Facebook at least once in every post.)

This becomes a GTD tip, too. It extends the range of places where your “@ Online” context is valid.

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