Toluu is a service which allows you to upload their OPML files and share them. Sharing them allows you to discover more feeds which your contacts read, in addition to seeing which feeds you have in common with other users and new feeds you can discover from them!
If you don’t know, an OPML file is essentially a list of feeds which you subscribe to. Almost all newsreaders can export your feeds to one of these.
Nils kindly gave me an invite to Toluu and I immediately proceeded to exporting my OPML file from NetNewsWire, joining Toluu and importing my OPML.
Joining Toluu in itself is a fairly nifty process. Besides typing in your invite code, there’s very little else you have to do because you have the choice of using OpenID, letting Toluu import profile data off other social sites like Twitter or of course manually inputting it! Toluu can even import your avatar off third-party websites.
Toluu itself is remarkably simple to do, you simply upload your OPML and you’re good to go. You can add friends by finding their profile, but I think it would be fantastic if like Twitter you could download your email contact list into it. You can view your friends’ feeds and there is also a Twitter-like list of recent activity, in which you can see what feeds your friends have added lately.
You can also set Toluu up so that it updates your Twitter profile each time you add a feed. Adding a feed can be done by importing another OPML feed or manually entering the feed’s URL into Toluu.
You can discover new feeds by scouring your friends’ listings, by going onto the page for a feed you read (each feed has a page) and seeing who else subscribes to it and then scouring their listings or by using the ‘matches’ feature which gives recommendations and suggested contacts (it did a fairly accurate job too, pointing me to my fellow Grand Effect member: Paris Lemon!).
The site is fairly user-friendly and doesn’t unnecessarily use Ajax. The whole site is pretty self-explanatory, which is great!
Unfortunately, I have no invites but if you’re already a member feel free to add me as a friend. I’m computer.
Most people would consider the term ‘business ethics’ oxymoronic, but I imagine most people wouldn’t find the term ‘blogging business’ oxymoronic at all. Personally, I hold the view that a blog shouldn’t be operated as a business, even if it does generate large amounts of money, but should be operated as a ‘blog’.
Businesses generally aren’t social. Businesses operate to make profit. A blog operates to talk the audience, which is social. Whilst being social and profit-orientated can co-exist in any business, I feel that a blog should be more focused on the audience (and the blogger’s creativity) than the pockets of the blogger/owner.
A blog shouldn’t have a business plan, it shouldn’t have numerical targets or specific ways in which to achieve those targets.
Sure, a blogger can have targets, but my binding themselves to numerical targets, I feel that this would increase pressure which would only result in deteriation of quality of blog posts. Strive for quality; don’t strive for 1000 people to read that article. Strive to write things you believe; not what makes you the most money or what is the most popular view.
For me, blogging is a hobby. I realise that to many, especially in one of my blog networks (Grand Effect), it’s a livelihood. I have massive amounts of respect for full-time bloggers for the simple reason that I don’t believe I have enough creativity to churn out a couple of pieces of quality work daily.
My blogging schedule rotates around my real-life, hence the lack of posts over the past week, whilst it must take an awful amount of self-disciple to rotate real-life around blogging. Perhaps that’s why many full-time bloggers see blogging as a business, but I think what inspires a great blog post is experience from the real world… something which you will see much less of if you’re a fulltime blogger.
The minute a blog turns into a business, it ceases being a truly ‘personal’ blog. It’s importan, even if you are blogging for money, that you never truly let your blog become a business and always keep it personal… something which is key to social media and blogging.
When showing Google Maps to an elderly relative, I was amazed to see that all the bus stops in my village were on it. It got me thinking; how well do public transport companies/organisations utilise technology?
Railways
On my local rail line, everything’s quite old-fashioned. My local station is unmanned and there isn’t as much as a ticket machine, so I have to buy a ticket when I board the train. My nearest major station is a little more high tech, with a few CRT televisions with times on and an automated ticket machine.
In all fairness to the railways, The Trainline is a darn good service which gives train times in addition to selling tickets, although it would be nice if you could print tickets from it on the day, instead of having to collect them from a station or getting them through the post.
Some operators are slightly more innovative, like Chiltern Railways, who allow users to print their own tickets or have them sent as a barcode to their mobile phone. However, this still has to be done the day before and sadly their remit is at the other end of England! Germans are lucky, because apparently Deutsche Bahn seem to have a much nicer version of this service!
Google Maps and Google Earth seem to have all British passenger railways and rail stations too, which is nice.
Buses
As mentioned above, Google Maps now seems to have all bus stops but is unable to provide times and directions via. public transport for anything besides buses monitered by Traveline South East.
Traveline, which is used to plan journeys by public transport (air, buses, rail, sea), is not as well-known as the rail-specific Trainline.
Some bus companies also offer innovative payment methods, such as via mobile phone, but these vary from operator to operator. My local bus operator is trialling payment by mobile phone barcodes in other parts of the country, and hopefully we’ll get it soon, and you can also pay for a weekly or monthly ticket by PayPoint.
There is a long way to go and I would love it if they would kindly open up their databases, so their data could be used by third-parties like Google.
Overall points
Payment by mobile phone, and online, should be increased. This would surely cut costs (less tickets to print?) and would speed everything up. Also, databases should be opened up so sites like Google can use them to provide directions.
What’s the use of technology in public transport like where you are?
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for Wikipedia, are currently holding elections for their Board of Trustees.
Personally, I dislike the Wikimedia Foundation in many ways because I find it overly bureaucratic by furtherly complicating Wikipedia/Wikimedia’s structure, they don’t much (not taking an active role) and quite possibly corrupt (see the Jimbo Wales, our “benevolent dictator for life”, controversies). It’s still arguable that there’s a need for a board, to defend Wikimedia against legal threats and see the administration of donations.
The Wikimedia Community can vote one member to the board for a one year term and this is the time of year we vote. Unless you’re a somewhat active user of a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons or Wiktionary), you probably won’t be able to vote as you need 600 edits on one wiki prior to 1 March 2008 and 50 edits this year on that wiki before 29 May.
This year, there are 15 candidates and Wikimedia are employing preference-based voting using the Schulze method. I have to admit I don’t know any of the candidates, but they generally live in a different wikiworld to users like me!
Many of these candidates are present and active on multiple wikis, which improves their ‘chances’ as they’ll get votes from more and it shows they can communicate across wikis. Some Wikimedians seem to want Wikimedia to be more commercial whilst others seem to want the role of the board reduce.
And do excuse the very boring, very specialist post!
I discovered a new blog today which has just joined 9rules: Newly Ancient. Newly Ancient is a blog by a high school freshmen called Arthus (I think that’s equivalent to Y10 in England & Wales) who writes about education, amongst other things. Arthus’ articles include things like 5 qualities which make a good teacher. It made me think.
Education is probably one of the industries where the last thing anyone thinks about is ‘customer satisfaction’. In the UK, teachers and schools are judged on statistics and I imagine it’s the same abroad. Sites like Newly Ancient provide feedback to teachers from their customer and will no doubt help them improve.
Other sites on the internet also try to help teachers improve their teaching based on feedback from their customers… albeit in a much more controversial manner. Rate my Teachers caused a minor storm in the UK last year when it came under fire from teaching unions, but perhaps if it were used correctly (which it isn’t, how does ‘Don’t really like him … He is very anoying’ help anyone?), it could actually help people’s educations.
Instead of ‘rate my teacher’, why not have a ‘rate your lesson’ site which isn’t personal to the teacher but where people can comment on certain trends and styles in education. This would provide a wealth of knowledge and feedback from the customer and I’m sure many new ideas.
As great as having a blog for educators by someone being educated is (or people being educated, as is the case with Students 2.0!), I doubt many educators (besides the most open-minded and innovative) would read it.
Colin Blakely of Tech Status Quo emailed me for some help in promoting his blogs, which he hopes will help him pay off his student loans, so I decided to lend him a hand (why not?!).
Tech Status Quo is a general technology blog where Colin writes about technologies, the internet, software and hardware which interest him. Whilst he doesn’t have a more specific niche such as internet, he writes fairly detailed and passionately about topics which interest him (whether that may be offshore windfarms, social search technologies or funky wallets).
Colin is a fairly recent blogger having only started 5 days ago! His posts are all of a fairly high quality but I do have some tips for him:
- Change your design to something more refreshing; it doesn’t suit your blog’s tone
- Keep up the work!
- Choose a niche when you find one. There are too many general tech blogs (I’d know!)
So go, check out his blog, make a comment and subscribe for his feed.
When I joined Grand Effect, sarahintampa described me as having done ‘the blog thing for a long time’. Personally, I’ve never seen myself as a veteran blogger but how long does it take these days to become an experienced blogger?
sarahintampa is more experienced than me, having started blogging in January 2004 (I started in May 2005).
I would like to think I’ve come a long way as a blogger. My first posts were significantly worse than my latest ones and I originally used to just ‘repost’ other people’s stories mixing them with a bit of my sarcasm and cynacism!
Since becoming a blogger, I’ve switched from Blogger to MovableType and MovableType to WordPress. I’ve also joined 9rules and Grand Effect, and stopped relying on traffic exchanges like BlogExplosion and BlogMad for traffic. I like to think that as a blogger, I’ve matured.
So can experience as a blogger be measured in time? My answer is probably not. Someone like Jason Kottke is definitely experienced, having a blog which is popular with its readers and one which I’m sure he enjoys writing (I personally find blogging sometimes get a bit tiresome!), and based on the time he has blogged (since ‘98!) makes him a veteran. I would personally say anyone who started blogging before 2003 is a veteran because after 2004 it was starting to become mainstream!
To you what makes a veteran blogger? What makes an experienced one?
If you’re like me, you will probably check your RSS feed after you’ve emptied your to-do list and encounter several hundred articles! It is essential to check them frequently, but not too frequently, so it doesn’t take hours to read and you don’t miss any interesting articles.
There are ways to keep your RSS load to a minimum:
- Do you use public transport? Use your mobile to read your feeds. Consider using an online reader, like Bloglines, which offers a mobile version
- Use a desktop client, like NetNewsWire, which can sync with online services.
- Subscribe only to blogs which you truly want to read. Perhaps go for blogs with less frequent posts!
- Go for power reads if you can. For 5 minutes every couple of hours, check your feeds to ensure that you don’t end up with a massive load of posts to go through. Time yourself though to ensure you don’t go over 5 minutes!
- Give yourself a limit for one post… perhaps 20 seconds maximum per post (depending on your reading speed!). If you decide to comment, you can obviously exceed this!
Now, it’s time to practise what I preach!
Do you, like me, remember when Firefox 1.0 was released?
Our little browser has come a long way since then with RC1 of Firefox 3.0 having just been released.
Firefox today commands about 20% of the web browser usage share so it is no longer exclusively the browser-of-choice of the nerd, but of many ‘normal’ people too. Most websites will now support Firefox when a couple of years ago if you complained over the lack of Firefox support, you would get sniggered at!
So how has Firefox changed since 1.0 which was released nearly 4 years ago on 9 November, 2004?
Firefox 1.5 (29 November, 2005) lacked canvas and SVG support, the latter is now something all proper browsers have. These features are fairly minor additions compared to what was added in 2.0 (24 October, 2006): web feed previewing, search auto-suggest, anti-phishing protection, an improved addon manager and a search plugin manager. Firefox 3 will see an improved history and bookmark manager and much better OS X integration.
The beauty of Firefox, unlike IE, is that they don’t add dozens of pointless features to each new version but instead just make their product seem more polished and finished. I always find that Firefox seems ‘fresh’ due to the relatively frequent, minor twitches which are made to it.
Long live the Fox!
Google is often seen as the perfect business but they too have several products which, quite simply, have failed.
Firstly, there is Google Answers which Google shut in 2006. Google Answers was a paid question and answer service. It was much more professional and reliable than a site such as Yahoo! Answers but I guess the old ‘why pay when you can get it for free?’ ethos worked against Google!
Another thing, which in my eyes, is a failure is Orkut. Orkut is a social networking site made by a Google employee and owned by Google. Whilst Orkut is apparently very successful in Brazil and India, I expect most people in the developed world have ever even heard of it. The reason I say this is a failure is because it failed in its original target market (the US). On the other hand, Orkut does have 120,000,000 users!
Another, arguable, failure is Google Video. Google acquired YouTube and quite rightly decided to use YouTube’s brand but this was at the expense of Google Video. Google Video also revoked the DRM on purchased videos, such as Star Trek, last year meaning even if you bought them, you couldn’t play them. This service simply wasn’t popular!
That’s all I can think of!
Cambrian House (review), a website which allowed ideas to be crowdsourced (many people work together) into products, has ‘failed’. They are selling their assets to another venture film for much less than what was invested in it. As their CEO said ‘our model failed’. I am not going into this but you can read all about it here, here and here!
Everybody is saying crowdsourcing has failed but I beg to differ. There are so many successful collaborative, crowdsourced projects left. Whilst they may not style themselves as a crowdsourced project, it’s hard to argue that they are not!
The most successful crowdsourced project has to be Wikipedia. How many other encyclopedias can boast 2,000,000 articles made by over 7,000,000 users? In my opinion, 7,000,000 people can easily be classed as a crowd and 2,000,000 articles can easily be considered quite a lot of collective work!
The Open Directory Project is another crowdsourced project. It is one of the Word’s largest directories of websites and the moderators are all volunteers who work together. It is much more formal than Wikipedia and not quite as collabrative but once again shows how individual efforts combined can make something great.
Crowdsourcing hasn’t failed, just better business models need to be established on how to use it.
If you, like me, enjoy music but find the prices on iTunes (especially the British iTunes) extortionate, being expected to pay £0.79 per track, Amie Street may be the site for you. Whilst it primarily appears to be used by unsigned I was surprised to spot half a dozen bands whom I already have in my music collection (such as Wheatus and Vampire Weekend).
Amie Street is a site which recommends music to its users, then it allows you to buy those songs (or indeed, if the artist allows it, download them free of charge) and you can then recommend the song to others. If you recommend the song and the pr
ice increases as a result, you will get a share of that difference back. Prices change for the more people who download the song with a maximum of 98cents per song (still cheaper than iTunes!).
Some top names in Amie Street are Gary Numan, Badly Drawn Boy, Tay
Zonday (Chocolate Rain Guy), Wheatus and Vampire Weekend.
Amie Street is truly a social music shop and I love the way how pricing changes depending on the popularity of songs and how the users themselves can influence this by recommending songs, which involves the writing of a short review and having to compare the song to other artists (not each when you hear how unique some of these songs are!).
I also think the way it suggests music is pretty clever because it requires other users to tag songs as being similar to certain artists as you can use this to discover other tagged songs.
Best of all, the songs you download aren’t full of DRM and are nice, clean MP3s (the bitrate seems to be different for different songs).
You can put as little as $3 in your account in one top-up which will also get you 2 credits to recommend songs. You cannot recommend all songs or else you would, in order to maximise earnings. You can make $2.50 for referring a friend.
I would love to see how Amie Street, a fairly independent site, does compared to the likes of 7digital.
Needless to say, not all songs are available outside the US but I have not found one yet which has a US-only restriction on it.
If you join, please add me as your friend. My username is computerjoe.
Tags: music, amie street, itunes, mp3
Is social networking counter-productive? The answer must surely be yes. Patiently watching Twitter for replies to your Tweets will surely prevent you from doing work, or browsing Facebook will prevent you from preparing a report.
So why do people keep turning to social networking? I imagine for the simple reason it is fun. I have resisted joining MySpace or Facebook so I do not get addicted to them preventing me from doing work, and so MySpace doesn’t deform my HTML, but I must say I get sucked into Twitter (but I try to only occasionally check it).
I am sure I will have plenty of commenters telling me how to productively use social networking for the purposes of actually networking and advertising and I have to say well done to them. I still think it’s impractical for the average person to regularly update a site like Twitter and only people who literally work on the Internet or (in the case of 10 Downing Street) are hired to update Twitter have the necessary time to use it productively.
I even doubt having the news texted to you by the BBC through Twitter is particularly productive because you are distracted each time there’s a new headline!
Naturally, you can follow me on Twitter here or on FriendFeed if you really wish (I don’t use it).
About 2 years ago, I was fortunate enough to join 9rules, an exclusive blog network. Today, I have joined another upcoming (albeit much smaller, with a maximum of 10 members at this moment) blog network called Grand Effect.
Grand Effect is a network specifically for technology bloggers and I am joining some long-time blogfriends such as Sarah (in Tampa) and Ghacks. I look forward to becoming blogfriends of other members of the network such as eXtra for Every Publisher, WinExtra and SheGeeks, ParisLemon, The Last Podcast and Mark Evans Tech.
Even though Grand Effect already has a fairly worldwide range of writers, because Mark Evans and David of XFEP are Canadian; Martin of gHacks is in Germany (Guten Tag!); and several others are in the US, I hope to provide another European voice!
As well as being a collection of fantastic tech bloggers, Grand Effect is a great advertising opportunity for start-ups and tech companies who wish to penetrate the tech blogosphere as they could easily find themselves on several tech blogs.
I have already received a very warm from network members, so thank you!
On a sidenote, 9rules is currently having an admissions round so apply if you fancy joining!
Former fellow 9ruler Mashable has covered Grand Effect twice. (link, link)
Who Should I Follow? is a site which provides recommendations of whom you should follow on Twitter and I have to say it’s remarkably accurate.
The site is very simple to use: you input your username and it provides other users whom you can follow. It immediately suggested several 9rulers whom I forgot to add on Twitter and I proceeded to follow them.
Who Should I Follow, I expect, works on the basis of mutual friends. Naturally, this means you get the likes of Scoble and Kevin Rose many times but WSIF cleverly allows you to filter results based on geographic location and popularity (so you can avoid having Twitter superstars showing up!).
I love this site. Not only is it Ajax-powered, but it provides a fantastic service which genuinely enhances your Twitter life!
9rules is back, having just been redesigned and reorganised massively. Much more emphasis is now placed on members content, as opposed to notes, and I have to say it’s very well polished.
A couple of years ago, 9rules introduced notes which allowed non-members to contribute to communities (eg Web). This, obviously, reduced the focus on members content and filled 9rules with far too much content leading to information overload.
Thankfully, 9rules seems to be back on the right track. 9rules itself now has very little on besides member content which is categorised into communities (which have been re-organised so they describe their member blogs more accurately). Users can select favourite communities and blogs so new content from those will be displayed when they visit the 9rules homepage. You can also subscribe to community specific RSS feeds.
9rules still wish to involve non-members so notes and the like now exist on the external Chawlk site. This is done so users are not overloaded with a mishmash of links, posts and notes! It’s also done so members do not confuse membership of 9rules with membership of (what was) 9rules’ notes.
The design is very, very clean on both Chawlk and 9rules.
Keep your eyes open for a 9rules submission round!
With the new 9rules, everyone wins: members get more exposure, non-members can still contribute to Chawlk and members get a new online den to hang out in!
In the UK, Which? is an organisation who provide consumer advice to consumers. I’m sure it’s still the first port of call for many British customers but I wonder how many are willing to pay the membership fee of about £7.75 a month when they have the Internet to their disposal.
There are plenty of community-driven review sites such as Ciao, DooYoo and (in the US) Epinions. These sites can give a general feel of a product, service or company but are likely to be biased because people are more likely to blog about negative experiences and blog in the first few months of ownership of that product. I also doubt the conditions products are tested in are as ’scientific’ as Which?’s.
Still, if I ever google a product name I will get dozens and dozens of high-quality results off websites who specialise in that area. Then again, on these specialist blogs and news sites, it can be difficult to identify bias.
Another issue I expect consumers will have with using the Internet for consumer advice is finding a starting point for buying a product. Because technology develops so fast, if I were to search ‘good digital camera’, I could end up with results which are a couple of years out of date! The second result on Google dates back to 2002 (’Digital camera manufacturers often give you a choice of image size, typically between… VGA and… 3.7mp’). Sites like Ciao do try to keep up to date by maintaining ‘hitlists’ of the best products in certain categories (I do not know if this accounts for time or not).
The Internet is a much better, and cheaper, resource than organisations like Which? if you know what you’re looking for but if you are absolutely clueless it’s probably a bit overwhelming. I do believe that the paid content model of Which? (you have to pay to read) will not work in the long-term online and perhaps they should begin to rely on advertisements (but that would damage their neutral point of view) or else they will reduce in size.
Disclaimer: I am a member of Ciao, DooYoo and Epinions, receiving payments off all 3 for reviews. I am also current an advertiser for Ciao. This review is written completely independently to all of these roles.
The LG Venus KF600, provided to me by LG Blog, is a fairly new slider phone which is partially touchscreen. Unlike the LG Viewty, there are two screen (one of which, the InteractPad is touchscreen) and numbers and letters are inputted through a standard keypad.
The phone’s key feature, the InteractPad, replaces traditional navigation keys and updates depending what you want to do. When the phone is shut, no buttons are visible because it is a screen which will power off!
For example, if you wish to make a call, you will have buttons such as mute, in addition to the hard connect and disconnect on the keypad, but if you wish to use it as a camera, the screen will change to having camera buttons (zoom in etc). For bog-standard Java applications (the phone supports Java MIDP 2.0), like Google Mail, you will be given a fairly boring set of up, down, confirm and cancel buttons. I wonder if LG provide an SDK for Java developers to create interactive applications considering the default games interactively utilise the InteractPad. Quite impressively, this screen has a resolution of 176×240px in addition to the phone’s main 240×320px screen.
The phone is 2.5G, using EDGE which compared to 3G technologies is slow with a maximum of about 240kbps. Whilst I understand this is probably for cost cutting (or battery conserving) purposes I do think it’s a disappointment which may put certain users off. To be honest though, I have yet to meet anyone besides myself who requires 3G but it would be nice to support features such as video calling etc, which EDGE cannot.
I am not a massive fan of the phone’s browser but it seems somewhat fit for purpose (it does not like sites like Gmail due to their SSL (it doesn’t recognise the certificate authority) and provides no option to ‘cancel’ on sites with ‘questionable’ certificates). Personally, I would suggest the free Opera Mini.
The phone is light but the exterior, especially the battery cover, feels like it’s cheap plastic. One design feature I do like, though, is the fact the battery does not have to be removed to change the SIM card.
For the average consumer, features such as the phone’s camera and MP3 will be more important. The phone has a fairly good camera, with a resolution of 3 megapixels and a ‘flash’ (not a flash which actually flashes but one which simply acts as a light!) in addition to an image stabiliser. It is also capable of video recording.
The phone’s MP3 player can handle MP3s, WMAs, AACs and AAC+s. It also possesses an FM radio which requires you use their earphones which come with it (you’ve guessed it, the phone doesn’t have a nice, standard 35mm jack!).
The phone’s built in memory of 25MB is expandable using a MicroSD (TransFlash) card.You can easily buy a 1GB MicroSD memory card on Amazon for £5. You can also use this as mass storage by plugging it into a PC.
Call quality is absolutely fine and so is battery life, the phone having survived 48 hours with a GPRS connection (which was actually used for around 2 hours).
The phone supports Bluetooth, but not IrDA or WLAN, MMS and of course SMS. The phone also comes with some really nice themes, design by Keith Haring, which affect both the main screen and touchscreen.
What comes in the box?
- A pouch for the phone
- Manuals
- A CD
- A USB lead
- A mains adaptar
- Earphones
- A battery
Advantages of phone
- Half-way between touchscreen and a traditional phone
- Good camera
- Fairly good battery life
- Compact
- Fashionable
- Good interface and menu systems (despite what people may say about G!)
Disadvantages
- No 3G
- No IrDA
- No ‘proper’ flash
- Proprietary earphones
- Not cheap
An unlocked, SIM free KF600 will cost you £220. It is available on O2 and Orange 18 month contracts, being free of charge on O2 if you are on a £30/month contract.
Tags: lg venus, lg kf600, kf600, phones, mobile phone, lg, cell phones
Technology develops so fast. I doubt that in 200 years time, we could relate to their technology. Whilst it would probably be easy enough to explain and describe a CD to someone in 1950 (a type of record which uses light to convert the stored music into sound?), how about describing that to a 1750s farmer?
So, some challenges for commenters:
- A computer
- An iPod
- A camera
- A TV
- A Nintendo Wii
- A Nintendo DS
- SMS
Some, obviously, are easier than others. I would guess the game consoles are probably the hardest.
Do excuse how random this post is; I will have a review of a phone online tomorrow!
3G is becoming quite common in the UK and mobile phone networks are starting to take advantage of it by offering fairly cheap 3G modems for laptops. 3 provide a good value mobile broadband service, starting at £10 with total bandwidth capped at 1GB. This price plan comes with the choice of three modems, which are free on an 18 month contract, so 3mobilebuzz sent me a Huawei E169G to review but I imagine most dongles (what 3 like to cal the modems) are the same.
Setting up the dongle could not be any more simple. All I had to do was open the box, grab the dongle (which is about the size of a stick-shaped MP3 player), place the SIM card into it and put it into my laptop’s USB port. Christian Lindholm had more difficulty having to carve the dongle to fit in his MacBook Air but then someone pointed out that it comes with a USB extension lead so it will fit in any port!
As soon as I plugged it in, OS X opened an application (which is stored on a small piece of memory on the dongle) and getting online was as simple as clicking ‘connect’ and it immediately installed drivers and the relevant network interfaces.
In fact, the only issues I have had is getting a signal but when a 3 signal is not available, it seems to be possible to roam onto other networks. However, most places have a 3 signal but sadly my house, the lodge in the middle of a forest I was staying in over the weekend or my local pub do not have a reliable one. With a little strategic searching (moving out of forests, for example) and a little luck, you can expect an extremely strong signal and I was easily getting 1Mbps. 3 say that 85% of Britons live in HSDPA (fast 3G) areas, but it definitely isn’t 85% of Britain area wise! Looking at the map of 3’s website, everywhere in my town and most of the neighbouring towns are covered by Turbo just my estate is in a blackspot which can only achieve 2G!
You also receive free international roaming in Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy and Sweden.
Mobile broadband definitely increases your productivity. The fact you can work in a pub without paying extortionate amounts for WiFi, or on a train or in the Sports Bar at Center Parcs means that time where you would normally be without an internet connection (or an extremely slow phone connection) is now time were you have broadband! Naturally, you can use your internet for YouTube (I wouldn’t advise that though just because of the caps!), checking your emails, looking something up on Wikipedia or chatting over MSN, Yahoo! or Skype if you felt so inclined!
If it’s plug and play on a Mac, I would also expect it to plug and play on PCs because that is what most people use!
Price plans are cheap, starting at £10 a month as mentioned above for 1GB, £15 for 3GB or £25 for 7GB. If you are already a 3 customer, you can receive 50% of these prices. 3 has some other price plans which are well suited for bloggers such as the £25 Texter plan which comes with unlimited texts (fantastic for updating Twitter!) and 500 minutes as well as free Skype calls and free instant messaging! Naturally, if you sign up to a Texter plan you get a half-price mobile broadband plan (£5 a month is a worthwhile extra!).
Tags: 3, 3g, mobile broadband, huawei e169g, 3 mobile broadband
I am a semi-semi-pro blogger who specialises on Web 2.0 technologies. (my blog) I am an experienced Wikipedian, with over 7000 edits, and I write for Infopackets.
- Pulp – Common People
- The All-American Rejects – Can't Take It
- Green Day – Blood, Sex and Booze
- The Aquabats – Nerd Alert!
- BBC Radio 4 – FOOC: Featuring Bosnia and Saudi Arabia 19 June 08
- Feeder – Fires
- Feeder – Itsumo
- Feeder – Into The Blue
- Feeder – Miss You
- Feeder – Space
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- November 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- November 2005
- September 2005
- June 2005
- (Subscribe to this page via RSS!)