Comments on: Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities

By: Sean Conner

Sean Conner — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Careful, or you might find yourself turning into a gargoyle from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

-spc (Thinking of becoming a stringer for the CIC, eh?)

By: Michael McCracken

Michael McCracken — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

You sound like you’d be interested in UCSD’s ActiveCampus project. ActiveCampus was posted on Slashdot a while back with a ’stalking your buddies’ focus, but the kind of online commenting and serendipitous meetings are in fact exactly the focus of the project. An attempt to use technology to bring us together. Your post reminds me directly of conversations I’ve had with Bill Griswold, a PI on the project, after he noticed on the ActiveCampus system that I was working nearby, so he dropped in. Cool stuff.

By: Bryce

Bryce — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Blogwalking... I smell a meme.

Back in March I wrote a longish piece titled Blogging Anywhere that briefly described how I was using PDAs to weblog wirelessly back in Y2K and went on to discuss modern options, including the idea of running weblog software directly on the Zaurus. I've not actually tried to do so yet, but it's been on my mind lately as I consider switching from Radio to Movable Type. I'm already using MT under a Linux VMware guest installation to maintain a private weblog, with FTP pushing the static pages to my web host. Doing the same thing on the Zaurus doesn't seem challenging, but I'm not sure that using a PDA as the primary repository for weblog data is desirable.

If there was a way to keep two Movable Type installations synchronized...

I think the best solution is to have weblog clients for PDAs that are designed to work offline and take advantage of network connections when they are available. I wrote such a client for Pocket PCs, check out Pocket Blog. It has some problems, but mostly it works ;-)

AvantBlog is a Blogger API client that works with AvantGo. It's not as rich as Pocket Blog but can work on any platform with an AvantGo client supporting offline forms (Palm OS, CE, Pocket PC). handX weblog is another option for Palm OS users, but it is very limited and doesn't integrate with other weblog software.

On the aggregation front, PocketRSS and Pocket Feed are available now for Pocket PCs. I'm not aware of any Palm OS or Zaurus-specific aggregators, but AvantGo and Mazingo achieve similar ends.

By: Bryce

Bryce — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

One more thing, now is a great time to be thinking about location-based services. US cellular carriers will be required to provide location data to E-911 centers soon. Most are looking to GPS as the ultimate solution, which means that in a few years most cellular phones will have "free" GPS functionality.

I'd offer some links but this isn't something I've been tracking and I need to get to sleep...

By: Bill Seitz

Bill Seitz — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

If typing in real-time is more important than publishing in real-time, then of course things get simpler.

I often write stuff in my PalmV, then synch, copy/paste/etc to take it live later. Not super-clean, of course. (And aided by my use of a tool which takes StructuredText instead of HTML, so I don't have to worry about silly tags.)

I'm definitely intrigued by the open-ness of the Zaurus, though. I wonder how much it can really run at one time before hitting memory constraints? (Python? Medusa? MetaKit?).

By: Peter Lindberg

Peter Lindberg — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

If you want blosxom-style static publishing over rsync, check out Burger, written in Ruby. It’s very experimental right now, but it’s stable and it does what blosxom pre 0+5i did. See here.