#blogs

Kontain — Share your life

· Comment


Kon­tain — Splash 20080919, orig­i­nally uploaded by stechico.

It seems that the Swedish firm, Fi1, has “re-designed, re-tooled, re-developed and even re-named” their 2-year old project Pro­pod, and have re-launched it today as Kon­tain2.

Kon­tain is a free web­site for you to blog and share your pho­tos, videos and audio with friends, fam­ily, even beau­ti­ful strangers.

Kon­tain is almost ready for an offi­cial beta launch in Octo­ber. Beta invites will be avail­able in a first come, first serve basis by sign­ing up at the site, http://kontain.com

Some fea­tures of Kon­tain are:

  • Search and explore mil­lions of media rich entries
  • Easy enough for Mom and Dad to use
  • Play­ful drag and drop organization
  • Easy upload­ing of pho­tos, videos and audio files
  • Designed by pas­sion­ate inter­ac­tive designers
  • Blog eas­ily with text and media
  • What You See Is What You Get inline editing

I can’t wait to test this out. But it’ll be hard to pull users like me who are still in awe after mov­ing from years of Mov­able Type to another CMS/blogging plat­form (like Word­Press). Then again, Tech­nol­ogy does crazy stuff to us human beings. It’s like freshly made lemon­ade on a hot sum­mer day, the thought of it just makes your mouth water. In the end, you just have to give it a try.

On a side note, I like the background-image treat­ment on their splash page. Also dig the flash movie right up top. Not to men­tion, the nicely picked pho­tos adding to the exment of the product.

  1. Fi deliv­ers pre­mium inter­ac­tive ser­vices and media plat­forms. From offices in New York City and Stock­holm, Fi has worked with and con­tin­ues to attract world renowned clients. In 2007, Fi was the first inductee into The FWA Hall Of Fame. [↩]
  2. Kon­tain is the cre­ation of Kon­tain LLC, a wholly-owned sub­sidiary of the award-winning inter­ac­tive firm, Fan­tasy Inter­ac­tive, Inc. (‘Fi’). [↩]

What is Twitter?

· Comment

A cou­ple of friends and fam­ily have been asking:

  • What’s up w/ the sta­tus updates I see quite often?
  • What’s w/ the “@” (at sym­bol) next to names on your status?
  • What the heck is a tweet?
  • etc.

Rather than point­ing them to Twitter’s site, I rather just show them this video:

I hope that makes sense. Thanks to Com­mon Craft. They have done a great job explain­ing it “in plain english” =)

Update
Some Twit­ter terms writ­ten by Peter Cash­more on Mash­able.

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

· 9 Comments

I was actu­ally think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and simple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a global con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­mented, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able discussions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if other users are also on coComment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­ally com­mented on, and only com­ments left by other cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­ier than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­puter.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coComment’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CMS/site-platforms it sup­ported, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing format,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(untitled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and hasn’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pretty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coComment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­pletely yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­mented some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-interactivity. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the other fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pretty much, like all the other “Web 2.0″ application-sites. =)

Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment visit to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]