Archives for April 2007

Lifecasting Ultimate Challenge

April 15, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Did you hear about the recent earthquake in Mexico? Where did you get the news? CNN? Guess where I got the news! I got the news on a twitter link which led me to an Ustream live video where a blogger was interviewing a Mexico-based blogger concerning the earthquake. I have to admit, that’s pretty cool – as cool as it gets. Trying to figure out what I’m going on about? Here’s the low-down:

The earthquake hit Mexico. Local(Mexico – based) twitterers started twittering about it. Indeed, the earthquake was first reported on twitter. Before long, a Mexico City blogger was connected to the Ustream chat. Chris Pirillo requested his Skype ID for a video chat. More people tuned into the live A/V stream, more people re-twittered the link, more people became active in the Ustream chat room, and the whole thing went viral.

As Chris puts it, “Dozens of people were talking to one another in real-time, while watching me speaking with a man in another country about an event that was unfolding quicker than could be covered by traditional media outlets.” (Read the rest of his account by clicking here)

What say you? New media rules, doesn’t it?

That said, this week’s cool sites are:

Ustream.tv – This is like a youtube of web-cams. It is a free platform that let’s anyone broadcast anything live, and for free, to the whole internet. Basically, now you can make your own justin.tv (see below). Ustream is a service that let’s anyone create their own 24/7 live web-cam show.

Twitter – A site that answers the question, “What are you doing?” The answer may very well be something spectacular or mundane like, “Oh, I’m filing my nails.” Twitter let’s you tell the whole world what you are doing RIGHT NOW.

LiveOffice Free Conferencing – “LiveOffice FreeConferencing sets the standard for innovative and reliable conference calling. It’s quick and easy to set up and manage, and free to use anytime—there’s absolutely no catch! Setup a free conference calling account now and instantly receive dial-in information with your conference call number and access code. You can invite as many as 250 attendees to your free conference call. Invite as many as 250 attendees to your free conference call session!” (from site)

Justin.tv – Watch as Justin lifecasts his life 24/7. As he says, “I am broadcasting live video of my life 24/7 to the internet. I started Justin.tv because I thought it would awesome for people to see what it was like to be Justin. I convinced three of my friends (Emmett, Michael, and Kyle) to join me out in San Francisco. Now, we’re starting a company to make broadcasting live video on the web easy.”

Go ahead, sign up for your twitter, ustream, and liveconferencing accounts and let’s change the world. I don’t think the old-skool media will recover from this new trend, do you? Then again, isn’t all this a bit too much? Now everyone with a computer and an internet connection can track his/her whole life and put it on the web. I’m not sure whether that’s an entirely good thing.

Now, to bust Some jargon:

Twitterers – people who use twitter.
Twittering – the act of using twitter.
lifecasting – broadcasting your life. Remember jennicam?

Filed Under: Cool Sites

How to Make Money Online: Introduction

April 14, 2007 by 2 Comments

The internet is undoubtedly all the rage as far as money-making goes. There is lots of money to be made. Making money is a good thing, so we should all jump in and try our luck. However, before rushing in like a fool, it would be prudent to think about what one is getting himself into. How best can one do it? Is it for everyone? Is it worth it?

There exists a preconception about the internet that is, indeed, a misconception. The internet is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Making money online is just as hard(or easy) as it is offline. You have to work and work hard. Roll up your sleeves and prepare to get your hands dirty!

The fact that you are still reading this means that you are probably serious about making money online. Perhaps serious enough to take the next step: planning, extensive planning. How exactly are you going to make your money? Do you need a website? You need to do some research and find out how others are making it online.

This is the first of a series of posts. The rest of the posts are

How to Get an Online Job

See How Easily you can Avoid Online Scams

Why Free is the new pink

How to Make Money Online : A Comprehensive Guide

Some Great Resources:
John Chow
Pro Blogger
Dosh Dosh

Filed Under: Make Money

The Secret to Life, Madmen, Sex and Some things In-between

April 11, 2007 by 12 Comments

Have you ever looked at a mad person? I mean really looked, noticing the facial features, hair, clothing buttons, etc? I have done that before and, like Mama Shady, I ended up wondering what was going on in her(the madwoman’s) head. What was she thinking of? Does she care about the things you and I care about? What does she think about God? All this gets me to awe at just how intriguing life is. Some of us are mad, some of aren’t. Maybe most of us are ;-). I hate it when people say that life is short – because I can’t think of anything that’s longer. Can you? Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that this statement does have a meaning : you have to live your life to the fullest; no regrets! But what is the secret to life? Life is about love. Think about it. Once you find something and/or someone (preferably both) you love, it’s all good – smooth sailing.

This short post was adapted from this week’s Comments For Beer winners. Here’s the link love:

The Church of Jacin delivers a powerful sermon on The Law of The Universe: You cannot be free of something until you love it.

Jason from Jakeldaily.com talks about how to generate free traffic to your blog by submitting your posts to news sites and social bookmarking sites.

Speaking of blogs, blueflux.net explores the ins and outs of blogging. (This blog has been built into a succesful blog without spending anything on marketing.)

Still on blogs, did you know that blogging as we know it is dead and gone? Nothing will ever be the same again – it’s the blog apocalypse! (Shokthx from digitalkeyto.info gives us this one.)

The wonderfully talented egm takes us on a journey through Boston via simply superb photographs.

Mama Shady explores the world (and intrigues) of madmen.

Finally, some sex (yes, the sex that is alluded to in the title). Aco of MyWordsOnly fame tells us why no-strings-attached sex is the best kind of sex – otherwise, sex just isn’t as fun as it can and should be.

Do you also want some Link Love from me? Well, you can have it. Just leave a relevant comment anywhere on this blog. Read the Rules.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

5 Reasons Why I Blog

April 11, 2007 by 2 Comments

One of the best things about blogging is that it is not something that you can do locked up in your own little world – blogging is a community thing. Every community has rituals. Blogging has memes (how do you pronounce that again?). Collis from NorthxEast tagged me with this one so here goes:

1. I Love to Write
I may not be as good as Stephen King but I think I can write quite well, and I love doing it. As someone who loves writing, I love having people read what I write. Running a blog has to be the best way to expose my writing to as many people as possible.

2. To Act as an Example and Experiment
I know someone with a killer idea for a new blog (no you won’t get anything from me) but he has little or no experience with computers let alone the internet. This blog is an experiment we set up to test the waters, so to speak. I hope to learn certain things from it (see #4 below) and also inspire him to get his own blog.

3. To Share
I read a lot and I’d like to believe that I gain a lot from what I read. I like to share, even knowledge, and right now, blogging is the best and easiest way of sharing my knowledge, with the whole world no less. Connected to this, I blog because its fun to do so.

4. To Learn
By my own standards, I’m pretty much of an internet newbie. I don’t want this to be so(at least not much longer) therefore blogging is my own way of getting into the internet and understanding how it works. Of course, I’ll be using this new-found knowledge to start making money on the net soon.

5. I’m Addicted
As I mentioned elsewhere, I find it fascinating that I can write something while under my sheets in the bed and, almost immediately, someone from China or Australia can read it. Isn’t this cool? So I blog because I don’t want the kids in China to have fewer options of what to read while on the web.

That’s it! Now it’s my turn to do the tagging. Mama Shady, Archer, Aco, Kirima and The Fun Hunt you’re it!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

In Search of Free SMS

April 9, 2007 by 9 Comments

UPDATE: If you take a look at the comments at the end of this post, you will notice some criticism. I’ve responded to these here(and also in the comments below).

Three months down the road, the most popular page in this blog is, by far, the ‘Sasanet.co.ke Opera Mini Hack.’ Everyday, I get 30-50 visitors to this page who are brought my way courtesy of google. It seems many of you are interested in sasanet, free sms and hacks. Not being one to let an opportunity go unused, I’ve decided to write more on sasanet and free sms.

Sasanet.co.ke – wtf!?

Please not that in this context, wtf has not been used to mean “where’s the fire”

Sasanet.co.ke used to be one of my favorite sites as it allowed me easy, free communication. I even came up with a hack specific to this site. Things change, however. Right now, I have an extreme dislike for sasanet.co.ke. Why?

Sasanet exhibited what I call classic jerky jock behavior. A jerky jock courts you, uses you then abuses you. Sasanet courted us by providing free sms services. I suspect this propelled them to widespread popularity and drove thousands to their site – that’s what they (sasanet) wanted. Later, they discontinued the free sms service and monetized everything on their site. See, that’s classic jerky jock. Now the thousands who visit (or used to visit) sasanet are probably either as disappointed as I am or got sucked into the ‘trap’ and now help sasanet make more money.

I’m not against making money in this way. In fact, I respect the jerky jock approach to business. However, I think the viability of this approach is ebbing away. Think web 2.0: freedom and equality geared to user (that’s you and I) satisfaction. This just goes to show that the web2.0fication of the net is not equal in all places. Kenya, evidently, still lives web 1.0.

With sasanet having gone the jerky jock way, does this spell the end of free sms services in Kenya?

There’s Always Someone Looking to Stab You in the Back and Kick You When you’re Down

The jerky jock approach is simple, fast, efficient, and makes sense (and money). As I said earlier, I think this approach cannot be used effectively anymore – it cannot work in the long run nowadays. The internet, after all, is the international network. This simply means that there is always someone somewhere who can, is and/or will compete with you.

Take sasanet, for example, they probably still make loads of money from visits to their site by people looking for free sms. Unfortunately, this is bound to be very short-term – the site’s visitors will eventually realize that sasanet cannot satisfy their need for free sms and will go looking for others who can satisfy that need. The lesson here is: do not go the jerky jock way. If you must go this way, make sure you don’t piss off your users (read customers) by keeping something, anything in it for them. Then again, if you must go this way, check your business model and re-strategize.

So, is there an alternative to sasanet.co.ke? You bet!

The Competition

Needing to send a text message to someone, for free, I went about on a search for a way to do just that. (No I’m not trying to spoil the sasanet party.) The search was too long for my liking but I did get results. The winners are:

First Prize – sms.ac: Just register as a user and you can send 3 absolutely free texts per day to anyone in the world. An added bonus: this site can help you make money. Plus, sms.ac is more than just a place to send free sms, its the largest mobile community on the net. An absolutely shocking thing about this site is that it is not ‘optimized’ for Firefox.

The also-rans: Both sendsmsnow.com and textnation.com provide free sms services. You have to register as a member of these sites before you can send any texts. A problem with these sites is that the recipient gets the sms as an email. This presents two problems:

  • Recipients must be able to receive emails on their phones.
  • Retrieving emails is not free in some countries. Countries like, you guessed it, Kenya.

So you send someone an sms and they get charged for reading it. This, in my point of view, is just plain evil good old robbery and begs the question : Isn’t safaricom even worse than a jerky jock? (I kindly ask Celtel users to elaborate on email retrieval charges, if any.)

My advice to sasanet.co.ke : find away to re-introduce the free sms service. As you can see, the competition is way behind what you used to offer (10 completely free text messages per day). It makes sense – you are likely to make more money that way. Did you know that sms.ac had, like you, scrapped free sms only to re-introduce it due to ‘public’ demand? Learn from their mistake.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you may want to subscribe to my blog feed or sign up to get free email updates.

Filed Under: Tips Hacking and Reviews

Light-Weight Browsers

April 8, 2007 by Leave a Comment

I have a rusty old laptop. It is old but it has served me so well over the years that I cannot bear the thought of losing it. Therefore, I still use it from time to time. The problem is, it cannot optimally run much of today’s software. That’s fine – I can do my work and homework on the PC – but what really gets to me is that my trusty rusty laptop does not run modern browsers, even Firefox, very well. It takes a whole 15 seconds just to start Firefox. Now this is a problem because whenever I’m on the laptop I’m looking mostly to kill time and nothing beats surfing the web at killing time. I wish there was a way to enjoy the net on my old laptop. Fortunately, there is.

“The only solution is to use browsers which don’t support all the Web standards, but are much faster and require less system resources. Such programs usually don’t serve CSS, JavaScript, or more complicated HTML elements. Nevertheless, they render most pages correctly and can be successfully used in everyday work. Of course, you can’t avoid situations in which you are forced to use Mozilla (or a similar browser).

Weak computing power isn’t the only factor in favor of lightweight browsers. Others include: individual preferences, the graphics environment being used (some of the mentioned browsers don’t need X), and operating system configuration. Lightweight Web browsers are useful and important.” (from site)

That’s a quote from Freshmeat where they review four light-weight browsers. Click here to read the rest of the review(with links to the browsers). If you just want the links to the browsers, here they are:

Happy downloading! (They’re all free.)

Filed Under: Cool Sites

Alternatives To Blogging

April 7, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Sometimes it gets to me. Blogging can be tough. So tough that sometimes I wonder, is there an easier way to do it than write consistently and continuously? There are probably very many reasons why people abandon their personal blogs or never start one in the first place. I bet you’ve heard, “I don’t have that much time” or ” I don’t have anything to write about” before.

I think nothing can beat the good old variety of blogging (in which this blog falls) that we know but here is an interesting alternative: Tumblr. “Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs. What is a tumblelog? To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create. You can find more information on Wikipedia. ” (from site)

Lifehacker gives a very detailed guide to tumbling.

Happy tumbling!!

Filed Under: Blogging