Social Media additions
If you read my blog posts via RSS reader, or get them sent to you by email, you might not notice what’s happening on my blog. Go on, have a look.
I’ve added a small graphic to the top right of every post, underneath the comments icon. It says ‘Retweet’, and allows you to do exactly that. Clicking on the icon will allow you to retweet the post via your Twitter account. So if you like it, share it!
A couple weeks ago I started incorporating photos into all my new blog posts. These photos are taken from Flickr’s Creative Commons photo pool. They’re photos that are made available for the public to use, for free. So every post will have a photo included in it. Just to spice things up a bit.
Why use Twitter?
I still have friends that aren’t on Twitter, or don’t use it very much. I think they’re like many people who are missing out, but I understand that’s only because they don’t understand the value it might have for them. So I decided to write this post to see about ‘educating’ people who just don’t get it yet.
Now, I know many of these people might not think they need ‘educating’, that their life is perfectly fine without Twitter. But that’s also what they said about the internet back in the mid-90’s. “Why would I need to be on the internet? I have TV, newspapers, magazines…”
And businesses! “Why would I need to be on the internet? I have a perfectly good entry in the phone book…”
We can laugh about the past (and often do), but exactly the same thing is happening today. Instead of ‘the internet’, however, it’s ’social media’ (eg. Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
The changing nature of life and blogging
I’ve been pondering the changing nature of my life and blogging, and I’m finding that it’s too ‘difficult’ to find the time for writing long-ish posts or articles about the things I used to write about.
Technology today is moving everyone to communicating with text-messages or short status messages on various social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. It’s much easier to provide a brief update on what you’re doing ‘right now’ than it is to write an article…
So today I found a means of integrating my Friendfeed output into this blog, and if you click on alan’s lifestream at the top of the page there, you’ll see what I mean.
This page will show you what I’ve been doing most recently, with Twitter, Facebook, items I share in Google Reader, as well as new blog posts.
Blogging from my phone
I decided to add a Wordpress app to my iPhone and then discovered my blog was too old… So I upgraded Wordpress from 2.3 to 2.6. That was a bit of a mission… And then I discovered my theme was incompatible!
So I managed to find a nice theme that I liked (incredible!), upgraded that and some of the plugins, and here I am, 2 hours later…
But at least I can blog via the iPhone now…
This thing is getting better the more I use it. I can take photos, blog, twitter… all from my 'phone'. The little keyboard still takes some getting used to though.
Oh… I can even make phone calls with it! Wonders will never cease…
My friend Alex and I blogged about a day in our life recently. Now he wants to do the same thing, but in photos. So starting tomorrow I'll be using this to take photos of my life over a 24 hour period.
More on the iPhone
As I’ve mentioned previously, I intended getting the new Apple iPhone, and on Friday night I did. I’ve been waiting for a good price to come out by one of the phone providers, and finally, Virgin Mobile came to the party on Friday with the best prices in Australia.
My original plan was to purchase the phone outright, and then go onto a cheap pre-pay plan with Virgin Mobile, but when they came out with the phone on Friday, their prices meant that I could go on a plan and pay less over time than if I was to follow my original plan. So I walked into a store on Friday after work and walked out with one half an hour later.
It’s sad that some people who signed up with one of the other major telcos (on their incredibly exorbitant pricing plans) are either still waiting for their phone to be delivered, or stuck with a very expensive plan.
