In English, that would be something like “NRK’s new “sandbox” for all technology, gadgets, new media and other important things in life.” Have a look or subscribe to the NRKbeta feed.

I’m the daily editor, so if it sucks, I’m the one to blame. Feel free to tell me if it does (also if it doesn’t I might add…) We’ve just started so expect things to speed up the next weeks, it’s a little slow and thin at the moment. But hey, it’s a beta!

If you’re a U.S. resident, listen up: You must rid your vocabulary of the term “cell phone”. We’re one of the few economies on the planet to refer to a mobile phone accordingly. If you care to find yourself in any of the worthwhile mobile development circles, begin using terms more widely accepted: “mobile” or “mobile phone” or “handset” or “handy”. If you’re not sure which, go for “mobile”. Such as, “Yo dog, check out my new mobile.”

I live in a country where 102,5% of the population has a mobile phone. That doesn’t mean that all have, but that many people have more than one number (and a few still doesn’t have a mobile). In comparison, 82% of all homes have a landline, and 44% have a DSL (or faster) broadband connection. Even with 5 and 6-year olds, 6% of Norwegian kids have their own mobile. By the age of 8, the number is close to 40%, by 12 the number is over 90%.

Make sure your site look good on mobile browsers. I just installed a WordPress plugin for mobile browsers on brilliantdays.com. There’s also a similar plugin if you want to make your site look good when browsed on a Wii.

Then I realized that I had recently installed the WP-mobile plugin written by Alex King (although I hadn’t yet had the chance to test it out on my Treo using Blazer.) So, I whipped out my phone, hit scottburkett.com with my phone’s browser, and voila, the theme was switched to the default theme. It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive.

The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin detects if your site is viewed on a mobile device, and delivers a lighter and friendlier site for small screens. But I made the same mistake as Scott Burkett; not reading the install text:

== Installation ==

1. Drop the wp-mobile.php file in your wp-content/plugins directory
1. Drop the wp-mobile directory in your wp-content/themes directory
2. Click the ‘Activate’ link for WordPress Mobile Edition on your Plugins page (in the WordPress admin interface)

Ah. So dropping the whole WP-mobile folder into the plug-ins folder was not the right way to do it. We’ll see if brilliantdays.com stays “nice” the next 24 hours. The last four days it has changed back to the default theme a dozen times.

And if you have a mobile phone or other handhelp device with a browser, go to brilliantdays.com and see if the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin does it’s job ok.

Twice the last 24 hours it has changed back to the default theme. Very strange. So if brilliantdays.com looks like it just has been set up, now you know why.

(googling “switching back to default theme by itself”…)

Update: This is getting ridiculous. I thought it would help to delete the standard theme. But then WordPress just changes the theme to the empty theme, making the whole site go totally blank for the whole night. Aaaargh. If you have any idea what this is caused by, please leave a comment here.

Update: Problem solved (I hope).

On your blog, personal webpage or e-sales site, you set up a Plugoo (very easy to do, by the way !). Visitors on your site can see the Plugoo and type a message in it to send it to you !

This Plugoo is directly connected to your Instant Messenger and forward you in real time all the messages your visitors send you. You answer to the visitor directly from your Instant Messenger, LIVE !

So if I’m online, you’ll see it in the box below. I’ll install it in the sidebar when it moves off the frontpage.

Update BoingBoing reports that there has been some strange things going on with their feeds. As of today (updated 28.12.2006), they have “only” 506,067 readers…

Not to bad. Who is it that almost every marketer in the world wants to get?

Clever idea for marketing and viral too. Pretty soon all your favorite blogs will post these…

So here are the ones that have sent the most traffic to brilliantdays.com since September 2005 (search engines, social bookmarking, corporate sites, forums and directories NOT included).

Eirikso.com
Aharef
Presentation Zen
StyleMac
Eric Mack On-Line

Adam Rice
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection
sugarfused.net
Kevin Lim
Paul Stamatiou

Thanks people!

I also have picked out a two articles I recommend:

What is good PowerPoint design? on Presentation Zen
How to make illustrations even if you can’t draw on Eirikso.com

Who are your major sources for traffic?

My site gets 60% of the traffic from referrers, 20% from searches and 20% direct. What’s your numbers?

The logo is supposed to combine two things:

A stylized sun – something you need on a brilliant day (and here’s why the site is called brilliantdays.com), and a stylized Ø – the first letter in my name. It’s a special character only used in Norway and Denmark. So I ususally just write my name with an O instead: Oyvind.

Why a green sun? I just like the colors.

What do you think?

I have lots of tweaking and messing about with PHP, CSS and HTML before I’m happy. But I think it’s a good start. It felt good to get rid of the heavy green line at the top. I may reintroduce some more color up there, but for now I’ll stay with lots of white. It’s summer!

Drinking.

Both cork’d and Winelog let you register the wines you drink (or store), get recommendations and share your drinking habits with trusted friends. And total strangers.

Both look nice and web 2.0. And I’m sure quite a few will start logging their Cabernet Sauvignons and Tempranillos.

I wonder what’s next? The sexlog? “Check off what parts you…” Hm. Maybe not.

Niall Kennedy wonders who’s going to read all this, when your shoes, your shoes, iPod and car has it’s own feed.

The availability of this new data will cause us to rethink what we want to share with the world, and where we want to access this personal information. Our gadgets are talking, but who should be listening?

Anyone listening? Or are we all going to suffer from infoglut…

The site should be bulit up around usergenerated content like blogs and videos, hoping to become the public service version of MySpace.com. BBC also plan to their entire programme catalogue online.

Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology says the new site will allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, according to Guardian Unlimited.

At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want.

Either the BBC plans a new clever DRM model, or they simply drop the whole DRM thing and let their users do what they want with their programs. If the latter is true, it will be a whole new way of thinking from a major broadcasting company. And a way of thinking that will challenge other public service channels and also commercial channels.

See what other quality sites say about this at TailRank.

Search

BBC today also unveiled a search engine with everything they made: Their own words: “Info about every single BBC programme, ever. It’s a vast catalogue, but it’s not comprehensive. A guarantee of accuracy. We’re very proud of it, but we know there are mistakes.”

Creative future

Now, imagine if all DRM and copyright rules were dropped for one month. All over the world.

Just copying others work and selling it would still be illegal. But making your own versions… Editing it. Adding. Subtracting. Changing. Mix. Fix.

What would happen?

The world would see the most creative month in the history of the world.

Yes, lots of money would be “lost” for the people holding copyrights.
Yes, it would be impossible to change the rules back after a month. Because the results would be mindboggling.
Yes, it would the legal mess the size of Jupiter.

But if I’m elected “One ruler of all humans and planets orbiting the sun”, I would gather the wisest women, men and dolphins on the planet and have them think how this can be done – letting creative people still make lots of money. And at the same time let you and me explore and find new ways to use all the signals surrounding us.

Put this link into iTunes or your podcasting app of choice. Or use the button in the left sidebar.

I set it up today, and I can’t figure out why not all the latest posts are there. I’ll check back in a few days and see if it is fixed.

What do you think? The computer generated voice was much better than I expected, and it is a great feature for people who can’t read webpages for different reasons.

“Bhutan” on Flickr, by babasteve.

Have a look at some of the links and facts here.

Women are poorer. Women constitute about 70% of the world’s absolute poor – those living on less than a dollar a day. In the United States in 2004, there were 20.1 million women living below the poverty level. Worldwide, women’s access to resources and education still lags behind boys/men due to double standards.

Slavery still exists! Women and girls are the majority of the 800,000 to nearly 4 million people trafficked (bought and sold as property) internationally every year.

There are over 100 pictures tagged “macstickers” at Flickr at the moment.

Do you put stickers on your laptop, Mac or PC? I don’t. And if you do, which stickers do you have?

Take the test yourself here. Be honest! And put your result in the comments or make a trackback.

According to the test, I’m a “Benevolent Experiencer”. The report said “Your inquisitive nature, imagination, and hands-on practicality make you an EXPERIENCER.”. LOL. Ok, if you know me personally, e-mail me, and I’ll send you my result and PersonalDNA will let you compare your results to mine.

Update
Todd has noticed that you can hoover over the stripes to see the ratings. I hadn’t noticed! Thanks, Todd. Makes the whole thing a bit more interesting! And revealing…

But how do you enable comments on them?

Well, you cant. There is no such function.

So Chad Brantly made a way to hack this in. Just download his iComment software. It uses Haloscan to keep track of the comments.

And a “Put on site”:

Update Zach tells me that it’s Jeremy Keith that made the buzzword bingo, and there’s an interactive version at Jeremy’s site. Thanks, Zach!

The original idea probably comes from a Dilbert strip, this one. Which of course is a good excuse to mention that Scott Adams blog is much funnier that the cartoons he makes.

Look at Podcasting. Does it really matter where a band starts now? Not really. Indie music finally gets a steroid boost with the Podcast network. Humanisation has provided tools for human nature to co-opt the internet.

He then lists some good reasons why companies should start blogging:

1. Because the internet is humanising, and blogs help humanise a company.
2. Because the blogosphere helps keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, and being a part of that sphere adds credibility.
3. Because consumers are smarter today. E.g. – We’re sick of corporate speak. We can see right through it.
4. Because it means you can communicate with your communities unfiltered, and it promotes instant feedback.
5. Because it builds a network.
6. Google.
7. Because you become the expert.

So what is a “plog”? Amazon defines it as…

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

Authors with at least one book for sale on Amazon.com are eligible to participate in Amazon Connect.

In other words: Authors of books can make a special blog inside Amazon.com. Their posts will show up on your plog if you ever bought on of their books.

So here’s John Lithgow showing up on mine:

Now I can comments on John’s post, and rate it which will give him feedback if his post was worth it for his readers too.

I like this. It’s a good idea, and will…

1. Make Amazon sell more books
2. Make people want to log onto Amazon more often
3. Help authors connect with their readers in an easy way
4. And the opposite: Make readers connect with the authors

I hope more authors do this, and also start their own blogs outside of Amazon.

(The book I bought by John Lithgow was this)

Someone who reads 840 blogs is an edge case. But so is someone who reads dozens of daily newspapers, or runs 10 miles every morning. Their choices may influence our behavior–those edge cases are great at recommending things to others – but most people will be far more moderate in their behavior.”

Interesting discussion. What makes people early adaptors? What does it take to become an edge case? In my opinion none of the examples Elizabeth mentions qualify to be an edge case. Not average, but certainly not an edge case.

I’m of the opinion that we should be more aware of people doing different things, because they are always the ones moving things forward. And calling someone “an edge case” stamps people with something that sounds bad, which it really shouldn’t be.

And I disagree with “very few people will ever have the time or the inclination to read that many sources”. I think lots of business leaders will have to start using tools to track their industries and their fields of interest in the years to come. It’s a bit strange to see how little knowledge many people in high positions in huge companies have about finding information, following information, and responding to it. And web feeds are perfect for this.

With the tools available today, it’s a bit of work to follow 840 feeds, but not especially difficult. It’s like e-mail, except that the headlines in your feed reader are articles and posts, not e-mails. As software develops, more people will follow information from lots of sources, and following a couple of hundred feeds will not be unusual. It will follow the same pattern as e-mail did: It’s not many years ago I was the only one in my family and at work who had an e-mail adress. Now: Impossible to imagine living without e-mail for most people. Same with mobile phones: Even 80 year old people here in Norway sends SMS messages to grand children.

Few years from now lots of people will be reading lots of their web content from feed readers. Why would you want to check every site that interest you to see if there’s something new?

BTW, I have over 500 feeds in my reader as of today, so I guess I’m an edge case too. Related to this is the fact that over 200 now subscribe to the feed of brilliantdays.com. Wow! And thanks for reading my posts!

So who’s next? My bet: Amazon.com will buy Wists.com. Or maybe Yahoo shopping.

Why? It fits Amazon like a glove. They only need to add an extra “find this item on Amazon” under ever bookmarked item. Beacuse people will of course bookmark lots of stuff that’s NOT on Amazon. And being able to see what people bookmark at Wists all the time, would help them deciding which items to take into their store, which ones are popular outside Amazon, and what people in general wants. Some of the same reasons they bought 43things some time ago.

But for now, Wists isn’t owned by a big web company. But it’s still great!

If you haven’t used it, head over and make a new free account. Then drag the bookmarklet made for you to your browser bookmarks bar. Every time you see something on the net you would like to buy, click the Wists bookmark and Wists will show you a white page with all the pictures from the page you left. Click the picture of the object you want to buy (often there will be site icons, navigation arrows, ads and other pictures. But just choose the one that shows the object you wanted to bookmark).

When you have chosen your picture, the next page will ask you for tags. If you have bookmarked an iPod, you could tag it “ipod” and “christmas” and “Susan” (unless Susan knows about your Wists page and would discover that an iPod nano is heading for her christmas tree). To avoid that, you can mark items private. That way, only you can see them.

The items NOT marked private will show up on your Wists page, like these on my Wists page.

If you’re in a group, you could choose a tag that is special just for your group, like “ipod222albany”. You can see all items bookmarked with a certain tag by typing wists.com/everyone/ and then the tag. Like this: wists.com/everyone/ipod.

People use Wists for so much more than shopping: People bookmark Flickr pictures they like with the tag Flickr. And these are the items people have tagged “wishlist”. The most popular items on Wists are here.

There’s even whole sites based on Wists. Cribcandy labels itself “bookmarkable stuff for your home” and highlights cool stuff for your home. You can of course subscribe to the RSS feed of any user, like the Cribcandy Wists RSS or my Wists RSS). Or the RSS feed for a tag, like the iPod Wists RSS.

A few hacks:

1) Notice that when you are on Cribcandy or any page on Wists, you can copy any item you see to your Wists. There’s a link right under the picture (if your’e logged in).

2) Subscribe to all the Wists for a user by hitting “Add to my subscriptions” on a user page. So if you’re looking at my Wists page and want to subsribe to it, click Add (Oyvind) to my subscriptions.

3) If you want to make your won site, showing off cool things to boy or bookmark, just use Javascript to show your Wists on your site. Mine are here. Customize the settings first, then click “get code” in the lower left corner and copy the code to your site.

4) The Wists API lets you do all kinds of other neat stuff.

If you have more tips, add them in the comments below, or tip me! I would love to hear from you.

Or use this contact form:

Please give a reason why you’re sending me a link, not just the link. If you can’t give me a reason, I will simply ignore it.

Old way: Hire a PR firm

New way: Buy Typepad accounts for ever employee in your company. And maybe some users too.

Hello bosses everywhere. Read that again. Open up your companies. And win.

Also see Anina’s blog and the previous post here.

Clicking it shows a new page with lots of different options; feeds in all flavours.

Great Google! And much better than that crappy feed reader that went beta some days ago…

I don’t think they look any nice…

No. 1 looks like a strange star. I think people would confuse it with a star, often used as a symbol for favourites etc.

No. 2 is just bad. Very ugly.

No. 3 looks like a combination of a star and an 802.11 icon.

No. 4 looks like 802.11.

No. 5 is the best, but as a user says in the comments: Looks like a turban.

But why do Microsoft have to have their own icon for it? What is wrong with the orange RSS icon everybody else uses? I see the point in making an icon, but an icon for something so important like this should not be made by Microsoft. What’s wrong with standards…?

Plazes: That we not only have over 10.000 users but only the smartest and webbiest. Everyone from Jimbo Wales to Joi Ito to the research labs of Yahoo, MS, Google or Apple to the Web 2.0 protagonists to all the A-list bloggers is on Plazes. That’s been really a lot of input. And even though we might not be mainstream (yet), it feels good to have the support and feedback from the people that have a vision for the future of the web.”

Full interview here.

There are two press releases on the site of NewsGator, an ordinary one and a much better one.

I like this! Congratulations to Brent and his wife. Very good for them. And good for us. Many use both Macs, PCs and mobile devices. Now we can get a solution that keeps track of new articles across platforms. My subscriptions and read/unread articles will be the same when I read them on the Mac, the PC, the PDA or the net.

“Brent: Here’s what we have planned. Existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will get a free 2-year premium subscription to NewsGator Online. This subscription will include access to NewsGator’s online platform, including synchronization with NetNewsWire and other premium features. This will also include all updates to NetNewsWire for two years. All this will be available as of the next release of NetNewsWire.”

I think is part of a trend, on which there are quite a few examples lateley:

Flickr. When Flickr went from beta, all “early adaptors” (people who paid for the pro subscription), got an extra year for free, and also go two extra accounts to give away to friends.

ComicLife. Creators of ComicLife, Plasq, gave away lifetime licences and an extra family licence to people who paid for the software the first months it was on the market.

It’s a good trend, and one that makes both developers and end users winners: If people pay for stuff, they often get extra rewards for it. Which makes it much more fun to pay. The developers get their money, people are happy AND there’s a lot of buzz on blogs and websites when things like that happen (which of course this post is a proof of).

I look forward to keep using NetNewsWire, and the only bad thing about this is if the .mac synchronization in the app is taken away:

“Q: Will NetNewsWire still include the synchronization – .Mac, FTP, Bloglines – that it currently has?

Brent: The focus will be on NewsGator synchronization, because that’s how we can provide the best syncing. It will work across multiple devices and platforms — even including a web version. The existing syncing implementations will get bug fixes, but rather than scatter our energy across different types of syncing, we’ll concentrate on syncing via the NewsGator Online platform. ”

But hey, with the new Backup 3 from Apple, I’ll whip up my own sync…

Three reasons

1) It looks fantastic (it even matches brilliantdays.com’s color scheme) – AND displays close to everything I would like too see of vistor data for my site (with the right Peppers installed).

2) Peppers: Small pieces of code that make mint even better. Head over to the Haveamint supoort forum and have a look. Some essential ones:

• XXX strong mint – gives you IP’s and paths for different visitors.

• Feedburner stats pepper – displays your Feedburner stats in mint.
• Outgoing clicks pepper – shows you where your visitors clicked out of your site.
  Error tracker pepper – lists all 404 errors visitors get on your site.

3) The data is right here at my own site, not at someone else’s. Ok, that can be both good and bad. I use Statcounter as well, which I highly recommend if you don’t want to buy mint and upload updates of peppers all week…

Three feature requests

1) 24 hour clock in visits. AM/PM is so 1900…

2) More graphs. There’s a sparkline plugin underway. But I would like big shiny graphs like the ones Statcounter presents me.

3) Export data to my desktop in some nice way. I could dive into the SQL with the data. But that is a little bit beyond what I consider fun. So a little green button that takes all the data to a format Filemaker or Excel could mess with.

The Haveamint supoort forum is full of good ideas and help for installing mint and peppers. And every six hours or so, there’s a new brilliant pepper in progress.

Update

As for wish #2: Scott McMillin is on the case. Love it.

Very interesting. Which of these do you think is the most important? Mine would be no. 3. Encyclopedias and dictionarys are very important. But “just” raw data. It’s how you use the words and the data that makes people educated.

As you may know, Cory is science fiction author, a Boingboing blogger, and European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He talked about the case which started up EFF, the Steve Jackson Games case.

Here are some of my “impressions”, the things that I found interesting and thoughtful.

During that case, police stated that e-mail was like conversation in a bar, while EFF stated that e-mail maybe is one of our most private ways of communicating.

Cory was happy (and got applause) with the fact that the Broadcast flag was struck down by US Court of Appeals.

The speech was about “The politics of openness”, so Cory talked briefly about how he lives what he preaches (not his words!), by putting all his books on the net for free the day they are published, in all kinds of formats, and with rights for people to translate them to other languages.

“Copyright is a policy for regulating technology”
Cory recommended “Copyright communications policy” by Tim Wu. A must read.

In the old days, the composers were the “music industry”. The performers were basically trained monkeys, just playing exactly what composers had written. Having a famous performer were as unthinkable as having a famous piano. Then “technology” made it possible to save music the way it was performed, and performers became famous. Which made composers like John Philip Sousa freak out, claiming our vocal cords would fall off, like tails fell off when we stopped being monkeys.

Same thing happened again when radio came: Performers were afraid they would lose everything, as people could hear radio for free. They wanted a radio that charged people for listening.

Luckily, a way to compensate all parts were made. I think Cory said composers were paid 2 cents a composition for being played on radio? Anyway, radio generated 1000 times more money for 1000 times more people, and generated 1000 times more creativity and art.

In the years from 1976 to 1984 the VCR was the hot thing to discuss. Jack Vilanti, former chairman of the MPAA, told a Congressional panel in 1982, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Laughter.

NOK 10000
If you bought CDs for 10 000 Norwegian kroner 10 years ago, you can listen to them, make mp3s of them, back them up, make ring-tones from them, put them on your mobile/iPod/alarmclock etc (Cory said this much more elegant than I managed to write down!)

If you buy DVDs for the same amount, what can you do? Watch them. That’s it.

When Disney copied Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Will jr.” in 1928, to make Mickey Mouse “Steamboat Willie”, it was legal.

When Disney copied old folk fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers, to make “Snowwhite”, it was legal.

When Huckleberry Finn was published, a theatre play was up immediately, because all books at the time could be adapted to theatre – legally.

But you can’t take a photo of the Eiffel Tower and sell it anymore. It’s illegal. Apparently because then there will not be built any more Eiffel towers.

And DJ Danger Mouse couldn’t mix the Beatles “White album with Jay-Z’s “Black album”, making the highly acclaimed “Grey album”. That was illegal.

He also talked about Creative commons, geese with red ribbons (and then no ribbons), Charles Dickens being pirated until Mark Twain was, Canadians stealing US broadcasts – legally, harmonized copyright laws, WIPO (“a trade association pretending being a UN agency”), DRM (and how it’s NOT selling music), and the funny story about how the Russian state department warned Russian scientists going to USA, because in the US, scientists are put in jail for talking about the wrong type of maths.

The best way to keep a lock safe: Tell everybody how it works. Then, when someone finds out how to break it, patch it up again, and inform all the users what happened. Not telling how it works just leaves users in the dark.

The fact that ISP take down sites, when someone supposedly puts up copyrighted material, is a big problem. Why is it this way? Are car makers arrested for making cars used by bank robbers? Are restaurants owners arrested for having people talking about crime there?

Boingboing.net has about 150 000 unique readers every month. And close to 1 TB in traffic. Many ISPs can get you that kind of traffic for US$ 150 a month. Boingboing’s ISP has enough lawyers to not give after when someone wants to take down the site. Price tag: US$ 1 500.

Cory recommends “Collective licensing”. I think that means that one tries to figure out what percentage of the income each artist should get according to what percentage that artist is played on radio, tv etc. So if lots of people downloaded a track from the net, that artist would get better paid than artist not being downloaded.

Correct me if I misunderstood this!

Why remove Bit-torrent sites??? The only thing that happens, is that they go underground, where they are much more difficult to find. It’s like making an anti-resistant bacteria on purpose.

One person in the audience asked about Cory’s thoughts on the fact that copyright seem to expand every time the first Disney movies are about to loose their copyright. Cory answered that you can’t base your business on a 90 year business plan. That’s not a good way at all to run a business.

There were of course other things talked about, and Cory’s English language skills obviously are better than mine. I enjoyed his speech, and hope to see him back in Norway soon.

UPDATE: Lots of Norwegian bloggers have posts from the speech: Alf Kåre Lefdal, Jorunn Danielsen Newth, Børge, Håkon Styri and Erik Newth.

Gisle Hannemyr has an English post, with lots of pictures on Flickr too. Erik Newth also has uploaded pictures to Flickr.

And finally; Herman Robak recorded the whole thing, and has put up a mpeg file of it. It didn’t respond when I tried tonight.