WeeKee Today - technology and board games lover

July 22, 2008

Want a million dollars?

From a CNA article, 2 public anonymous individuals had actually provided a million dollar bounty for information leading to the apprehension of Mas Selamat inside or outside Singapore.

I thought that the Deputy Prime Minister would be the one coughing out the moolah for the capture.from his own pocket to demonstrate some form of accountability. Nevertheless it is really comforting to know that when it comes to the crunch, it is the ordinary Singaporeans folks who have what it takes to make the difference.

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July 21, 2008

Missing my tags

As i start to use Posterous to post more entries, i am starting to miss those useful features like tags and categories that are available in blogger. Tags are getting more and more important for me as i tend to randomly post entries on various topics. How you organize your positing on Posterous?

I am itching to do more stuff with the platform. Hopefully there are more features that are coming out soon to make Posterous a great blogging platform. Are you missing any features?

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July 17, 2008

On a bus trip

Last evening i had an interesting experience while taking the bus home. When the bus doors opened, the driver would greet the boarding passengers "good evening" and saying "Thank you and goodbye" for those who were alighting.

The passengers' reactions were mixed. The majority were the typical "working zombies" who show no form of emotions. Nevertheless, it brought smiles to some passengers though nobody returned back the greeting. I only managed a smile but i had to admit that i was pleasantly surprised.

The bus driver did this for every stop that he made. Every greeting he made sound sincere and it was something he chose to do rather than required.

The thing is that he is the exception rather than the norm for Singapore bus services. Imagine if the bus company has the ability to motivate not just one staff but all of their staffs to provide this level of politeness, won't that be great? Even something as normal as a bus ride will be a delightful experience.

This make me thing a bit more of the impact of social media on businesses. The web is constantly full of stories of how important it is for businesses to tap into the power of social media, to converse with their customers and to change the rules of customer engagment, etc.

I believe strongly in the role of social media and that its power should be something that businesses should try to leverage on. However at the same time many businesses today still have many gaps to fill in improving the various touch points with their customers.

From a bigger perspective, social media seems to shrink to become just one of the many elements that plays a role in building an intimate customer relationship across all touch points.

Perhaps something as simple as a greeting like "Good evening" might be a nice first step.

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July 17, 2008

On statistics

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital" - Aaron Levenstein

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July 17, 2008

Enabling PicLens on your site

PicLens by cooliris is a fantastic plug-in for viewing photos using the web browser. Its full-screen 3D presentation provides a really slick and immersive way of navigating through lots of pictures.

How about adding this cool feature to your site? If you are using Flickr to store your photos for your site, read on and learn how you can PicLen enabled your site in 3 easy steps.

Step 1:Get your flickr photo stream rss feed address

It will look like the following format:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=8640280@N03&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Step 2: Add the Javascript Code

Add the below code to the header section of your site (within the head tag)

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://lite.piclens.com/current/piclens.js"></script>

Step 3: Add a hyperlink to your site

The last step is basically creating a text link that will allow visitors to launch your slide show in PicLens.

You can also link it to a image. One thing to note is that if you are using blogger, you need to change all & to &amp for it parse the code correctly.

<a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start({feedUrl:'Insert your feed URL here',maxScale:0});">Start Slideshow</a>

You can now test out the slide show by clicking on the link. That was simple isn't it?

The only drawback is that there is no way to get the rss to retrieve all photos. At this moment, it only display the recently uploaded photo.

So what do you think of this feature? Share your thoughts and let me know if you manage to get Flickr to stream more pictures.

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July 16, 2008

Listings for small businesses

For small businesses without a big budget it may be hard to get generate awareness for your business. Thankfully there are a few services that you can use to help your potential customers to locate and understand the services that you provide. The listing sites recommended below are mainly useful for Singapore businesses. The services are free so there is no reason not to use it to generate some awareness for your business.

GoThere (Singapore): A useful site to get directions on getting from one point to another. I think it is even much better than the previous streetdirectory service that widely use in Singapore. GoThere uses Google Maps to provide location display and integrates with information such as directions, location of those dreadful ERP gantries, bus services, car parks, etc. The site encourages the community to contribute hence listing your business helps you as well as the site visitors. As visitors are doing more of location search, I find that listing here will be pretty useful for retail & F&B businesses.

HotFrog (Singapore): It is a Singapore business directory. It is easy to create add your listing and it also integrates with Google Maps which helps your customers find the location of your business. As the site focus is to create a business directory, I think it is more suitable for service related or B2B type of business.

88DB (Singapore): The 88DB portal is available in quite a few countries. I am not sure about the rest but for Singapore you get to post 2 free advertisements on the site. It operates more like a classified ads for both business and non-business users. It does not have a map feature but it allows users to post pictures and videos making it valuable especially for product related business.

Google Maps Local Business Center: This is the business listing service offered by Google. The service is free but the listing process is quite tricky. There is a validation process. Even i had completed the registration a month back, till date the status for my business listing is still in process. On thing interesting about this service is the ability to create coupons for your web visitors. Although this service is currently only available in US, I believe it is just a matter of time they roll this feature out in other regions as well.

Hope you find the services useful for your business. Do let me know if you have other useful listing services to share.

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July 16, 2008

On the difference between stress and panic

When your wife gets pregnant that is stress.
When your girlfriend gets pregnant that is panic.

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July 16, 2008

Wish list for Posterous

After playing more with the platform, I am really itching to do more with it. No doubt the developers must be rolling out new features, I thought i will share my wish list and hopefully they can consider them to be included in the upcoming features. Here it goes...

Photos goodness

It will be great if the photos uploaded to Posterous could be directly upload to photo sites like Flickr as well. This will definitely make it easy to blog and share photos on Posterous. The option to be able to choose how the photos are presented (in photo gallery or as individual pictures) would be nice too.

Email magic

One of the neat features on Posterous is the way it handle content in email. Why not perform more email magic? How about being able to identify quotes written on a new line and apply block quote style to it?

Another neat stuff would be the ability for the platform to recognize or for users to specify book titles, music albums, DVDs, etc. Posterous will then magically add an image of the book, music album, etc and link them to appropriate sites such as Amazon or iTunes in the blog post. Perhaps this could even generate some revenue for Posterous when visitors make purchases from visiting the links. To top it off, won't it be marvellous if books that you mentioned are automatically to Shelfari as part of your reading list?

Sharing the love

Blogging has evolved from a personal diary to a medium where people wants to share their content with others. Integration with micro blogging platforms like Twitter and Plurk will help users to easily share and update their friends on the latest happenings in their life. For a start, it will be cool if emails sent to Posterous will automatically post a tweet using the email subject as the message and with a link to the entry on the user's Posterous site.

Getting organized

To keep things organized, it will useful to be able to add tags to the post in your email. A magically generated tag cloud will allow visitors to quickly visualize the main focus of the blog and allow them to easily navigate to entries that they are interested in.

Uniquely me!

Last but not least, more customization options are definitely welcome. Different themes to choose from, CSS editing, adding HTML code, disabling email notification, etc will provide users with more flexibility on managing their own Posterous site.

That's all i have for now. Ain't too greedy right? Hope the folks at Posterous can conjure their magic to fulfill these wishes. Are these features useful to you too?

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July 15, 2008

Using PicLens with Google Images

PicLens is a great way to view and navigate through lots of images in your web browser in a fast and easy way.

The best thing is that PicLens supports Google images. Simply do a search for any images in Google and click to start the 3D view...and bingo, Google image in Cover Flow style.

A search term for motorcar in Google images

From this view you can easily scroll through all the images retrieved by the Google search. This is definitely much faster than the default view with limited number of images on each page.

A single click will provide a clearer view

Double clicking will bring the image to its full screen view.

Google images can be pretty fun to play with. Enter a search text and you will be surprise at the number of interesting images that are retrieved. With PicLens, it is now a breeze and an enjoyable experience to view through images. PicLens also support a 3D view of video from Youtube. The only grip that i have with the software is that i could not find a way to copy the images, limiting my use of this wonderful tool.

So what are your thoughts on this tool?

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July 14, 2008

The neat tricks of Posterous

If you are like me trying to blog but find existing solutions a hassle, you simply got to give Posterous a try and get the wonderous feel of Posterousity. In this entry, I am going to share more details on some of the nice features that should make the plaform a hit with the masses.

The good stuffs

What i really like about the Posterous is the way the platform handle images. I always find existing platform cumbersome when it come to images. You have to upload the images to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and then copy and paste the link in your blog post. Posterous simplify this process significantly. You can simply send all the images as attachments in your email and Posterous will automatically resized the pictures and nice slide view of your photo gallery.

Another neat feature is that you can also copy and paste images when composing your emails (if your email client support the feature) and then sending the email to Posterous. The images will automatically be uploaded. There is no need to work with any files at all.

Similar feature are available for media like audio and video. Attached an audio file in your email and you automatically get an audio player with your blog post. Sharing videos from YouTube is a breeze as well. Simply copy the link and you will get the video embedded in your entry.

The not-so-good stuffs

To be fair, the Posterous platform is relatively new and definitely there is going to be new stuff coming along the way. Currently the problem i face on the platform is flexibility.

For example, if you copy and paste your images in your email, you can't have it in gallery mode. It is only available if you send your images via attachments. There is also quite a new limitations on editing existing entries. You can't edit the attributes of your images in your posted entries since it is not encoded in HTML.

Once your entry is post, it is not easy to add in images to existing entries. You will need to use the cumbersome approach of uploading it an external site and linking the images in your blog entry. The good news is that I heard Garry will be getting this feature done real soon.

So far i have only cover the existing features and there must definitely be lot of other neat features that the folks at Posterous are working on. I am looking forward to dumping out my wishlist for the platform in my next entry and hopefully the fantastic duo at Posterous can make them come true too!

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