me.dm // phil campbell // centralized webmedia experiments

Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop

2009-10-24T13:59:46Z

i looked at mailplane before and really liked what it did but did not really think of a hardcore use of it. now that i'm getting into the emailing alternative route as well it makes dragging and dropping attachments super easy. i have seen a firefox plugin that will do it as well but i think this is a neat solution.

Posted via web from me.dm | blog

Using mailplane & iphoto intergration drag and drop dream to quick posting! ;)

2009-10-24T13:48:28Z

Awesome. a simple select in iphoto and drag to the application and it was done. then simply send up and complete. best thing about this they also get reposted elsewhere. i'm pretty impressed with that. i need to find a way however to be able to put in the email that i would rather not send to certain destinations as some of these will get reposted again - in future i want to stop that. happy days.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from me.dm | blog

Tweetvite :: Conkers Tweetup

2009-10-24T13:33:39Z

via tweetvite.com

Likely the share bookmark fast link, not as hardcore settings wise as the tumblr one but that is ok, it does what i need it to do. nice to see advanced options so i can post to the many different blogs i have. would be good to see tags in the advanced options - at the moment i have to put tags in manual, i'd like to have a button to put in the code style for it and maybe a tab area for the words or maybe a previously used tagcloud.

Posted via web from me.dm | blog

i'm so excited i could actually wee a little.

2009-10-24T13:00:59Z

Seriously things creatively on the design front are really feeling
natural again and about time too, even thou things are tough this is a
fantastic time to buckle down and optimise the stuff i have online.
and i have tons of stuff half finished or for whatever reason was not
ever working in the way that i wanted it. changing a lot of stuff
around, making sure that all my content management systems are
portable from now on and work in the same way i do. so i can blog
from anywhere - mobile or desktop and having tumblr/posterous as
platforms is perfect. the fact that posterous can use tumblr themes
blurs the line of 'platform' for me. it's all just data, in the
cloud. fantastic. ;)

So hopefully you will see an image with this post. That is the new
design and layout for the http://conkertu.tumblr.com design that i
have done. the slice is done and we are slowly rolling parts of it
out. bits like archives and such will be missing and we have yet to
link up the jquery popup elements for the geomap and such like but it
is coming! ;0

excited.

Posted via email from me.dm (exported from moveabletype)

bringing super fast internet to the sticks - conkers a great fibre provider?

2009-10-21T20:28:53Z

local. hyperlocal. eco. sustainable.

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those words are echoing back and forth through my head and have been ever since i started the initial rezpondr idea little under a year ago. we got so far and with some more development themes and time we could finish a version of it. i did design a theme for it that could spin off called doorstepr - pulling together those businesses locally that were producing social media and using the internet and toolset to get their realtime message out there about products, services and venues.

right now i'm involved with a project over at conkers (http://conkertu.tumblr.com) doing lots of social media, pr and networking to get the event/location ready for a tweetup on the 28th of november. the site currently has hardly any cellular and very slow dialup connections. we have a few options for trying to get a feed from bonded connections wired over from ashby the three miles to conkers and distribute that at the site - this option is about a grand (£1000) - we also have the possibility for fibre and we have found a wonderful guy that could get us fibre into conkers - the problem is fibre install is not cheap per year, but would come down the more people using it.

we could spread the signal out from their to a lot of local places - the caravan park, the yha eco-friendly base, rosliston forestry centre and moira furnace to name a few. all fairly close together and i'm sure with lots of scope for local villagers and business to benefit from the fat pipe too with a community development project connecting hyperlocal business.

we are talking 100 meg with the capacity to burst to 1gb here - not a crappy connection. we are not talking small feed here - this would totally transform the output from this area. i believe that you enable a locality digitally with a way to receive and broadcast and you increase the ability for that regions economy to dramatically increase.

imagine local bakers, farmers and even the caravan park getting in on the action. i'm also excited about the idea of hd streaming video from the amphitheatre @ conkers. obviously this would be not be possible for the first event on the 28th. we literally have five weeks to get some kind of internet connection in and this might mean that we do not have enough bandwidth for doing live video. conkers really is in the middle of the country(side!)

this morning we went to a number of places nearby to see what kind of internet connections they had and they are all pretty terrible. not just that, these places are fairly local to each other but do not have any connection with each other - they do not talk. i met a lady setting up a children's focused photography centre who i'll be dropping a card into - i need to get some cards and details over to all of these people i think - do some eco paper adverts telling people what we are trying to do - be interesting to get gauge interest in fibre and super fast internet - i bet lots of people want it.

so many local businesses could be enabled with social media if they have a decent broadband connection. so many great farms and bakeries around these parts could see an influx of custom from being wired and having orders and custom coming in from the local area. having the whole process streamlined and eco orientated spreads a healthy message. i'm really excited by this project it all feeds back in the ammoboxproject, rezpondr and doorstepr. all media, all local - all enabling.

where my head is at

2009-10-10T14:23:22Z

So things have been a bit intense in the last few months so much so that i've not really been having that many conversations with people online apart from doing my audioboo and my twitter messages. i'm sitting currently in a local cafe having some really nice spaghetti/seafood and i just asked to have the wifi rebooted because no internet connection. just thought i would check to see what the router was and it turned out to be a netgear. i just logged in with admin/password combination. unreal - people do not have a clue about security and what people could do with those details. Anyway.]]> So i've moved to another place up the road that has working wifi and actually pretty decent coffee. As i'm writing this i'm wondering why i was so desperate to move somewhere where i had wifi - i could have quite easily stayed there and just typed this out and uploaded it later from either home or somewhere in burton town that has wifi too on my travels.

Tonight is n0shIT at the greek restaurant and we have a few people dropping in which should make for a good night - i'm gonna try and lift myself out of this mental hole i seem to have placed myself into. I really could do with some positive vibes and direction right now, last few weeks especially have been a real mental drain. I'll try and post some more soon as soon as i have worked it through in my head.

I have a bunch of draft blog posts in evernote that i need to pump up a bit and get out. I am blogging more 'just over 140 character' snippits over on http://projectswebmedia.com and videos and pictures that i come across. I'm sure i'll be back to full strength soon.

the womworld/nokia twestival charity eurorush - going that extra mile.

2009-09-04T09:53:47Z

So after last years epic gumball rally trying to better that this year was always going to be a challenge especially as my contract has recently just finished and i'm now officially unemployed (self-employed unemployed, funemployed?) as a social media ninja part time api fiddler. This year however twestival is spread over three days from the 10th to the 13th of September so this makes things a little less of a rush in terms of planning for one day.

I'll be taking part in a charity 'by the mile' tour across europe starting in helsinki for nokia and womworld. Three media savvy people have been selected for this little mission across europe including @ruperthowe, myself and @vikkichowney.

]]> technology smartphone baton relay style exchange we will be flying as a team to attend the helsinki twestival and hang out with the awesome people there - i presume we will also be making a donation through nokia at this event.

We then will dip into a hat to pick our destinations and we will all single handed fly to each destination and make our way to another twestival event somewhere else in europe. we will obviously be taking photos and videos on the way (and audioboo!) and then will hand over the nokia n86 phone when we get to the destination. we then will fly back the next day to the uk to attend another twestival and finally end up at the oxford twestival on the sunday night. Every mile we do from location to location we will be raising money for charity - bonus!

I'll be updating my main twitter account @philcampbell with more details of locations you can see feeds from all three people while we are travelling around next week. I'm looking forward to seeing helsinki again - love that place - look out for my tutorials over on ammoboxproject.com in the next few days about equipment i'll be taking to the cover this little media mission and useful software you can use to do the same.

how apple could if they wanted to change the world of mobile computing.

2009-08-25T11:05:58Z

Just imagine for one moment that apple release this tablet in early 2010 with an iphone expanded os onboard and all those inbetween people thinking of getting a netbook, laptop, kindle owners decided to get one. Absolute win for apple with the new sexy piece of hardware on the market grabbing more market share. Nothing particularly that ground breaking thou. It's a step that lots of people expected - to see a half way house between the desktop and the iphone itself. Getting into a market that has postively overdosed on netbooks that they give them away with 3g contracts (smart move btw for all the overstocking/production) but that market is saturated pretty much now as well.

]]> apple were smart they would do something so radical that they could overnight change the world of mobile computing.   Imagine if you will a mobile tablet that could triple or even quad boot into different operating systems.    What if apple could release a unit that could run android, mac osx, mobile or jolicloud or (god forbid) windows.   Make the unit have an abstraction layer that enables the overlay keyboard/mouse controls within hardware - release a slab of technology that can be what a person needs it to be - your not open sourcing your brand/product but your opening up the world to say ok, we are a closed company but this is our creative skill and talent - this is how we manufacture, completely changing the landscape of mobile forever.

If we are moving towards a world of fast prototyping and system building with very custom operating systems to the user why not be the one that is the provide of multifunction hardware.   Be the replicator from star-trek, being able to request something and it work on it.   I'm not looking for uber geeky specs - i know you will give me a good experience that is what you do - but take bootcamp to the next level.   Allow your skills at making technology shine through and be the company that people remember as producing a tablet that could multiboot into anything.   What have you got to lose?

After all with nokia now getting into the laptop business you have to think that nokia are concerned that the swing of mobile media might lean towards that bigger screen that people will put up with a device that big, that mobile television for that to succeed was really about the size of the screen and that a mobile is too small.   Then think about the link up between microsoft and nokia.   Surely apple, this is your moment.

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the march of the homegrown guild gathers pace with new music video

2009-08-19T21:25:58Z

You have got to give it to theguild i do not know of such a more brilliant homegrown project that grew into something very professional and organized than this. If you have not seen season 1 and 2 then you should go and check them out.

]]>

You probably ideally should be a WoW (world of warcraft) player to really get some of the in-jokes - the casting is fantastic. feels almost like a homegrown officespace/theoffice combined (not a bad thing) series and the direction/story/elements they fused together are great.

season three is just about to start and they have just released this fantastic music video to promote the new series. I mean firstly the song is GREAT, really catchy and good use of the vocoder - i love everything about the video and felicia day really shows how impressive her talents are.

The main reason i wanted to remark about the guild thou was i'm blown away at the crossovers that are happening in this space using these mediums - firstly, the guild is based on a game that hundreds of thousands of people play globally around the world, the players are often very committed (i know, i was in an fps clan) and the social stuff you see in the guild really does exist.

Secondly, and what the guild does so very well is takes the concept of videoblogging and livestreaming and wraps that into a third person with funny awkward social elements that you can relate to or know a geek/nerd like this.

Thirdly, to take those concepts and then make a music video styling around the guild characters, a medieval set and give each character a reference in the video is just such good planning. I wanted to blog about it because i wanted to give them props on the planning, style and context of the video instead of the usual youtube 'omg this is like so awesome and stuff'

This does so much to bridge the gap between small content producer to full budget shoots and opens up the field for people who have the passion to put something together they have a clear idea for - of course it helps that felicia day is smoking hot (most anchor videoshows have an pretty lady up front - think titanic - ok ok, that's bad that sunk. . .) but what makes the guild is the social interactions between the characters and the 'fly on the wall' third person videoblog angle of us the viewer seeing the characters reactions. capturing the ambient content like this means that their is something for the viewer regardless if you play the game or not. you can understand social interactions between the characters with this added level of context.

I'm really excited for the third series. if the music video is anything to go by they want to come back with a bang. with 1 million views and counting on the youtube video you can be sure they are working ultra hard to make the series more awesome this time around. update from @theguild twitter account - 1M YouTube views in < 50hrs. 20,000+ per hour, almost 6 views per second. #datemyavatar FTW!

cull of social connections on twitter is healthy for positive karma

2009-08-19T17:51:26Z

Crossroads.   You get to them a lot in life if you watch for the signals and act on them.

Problem is i have pretty much been on autopilot for the last 12 months and my signal to noise ratio has shot through the ceiling on twitter that i cannot follow anyone anymore interesting people. that sucks. ]]> audiogravity over on audioboo for the next few days, got some cracking new apps/software for that sort of thing - i try my best to keep them under 10 minutes and discuss six urls on each. it's my yellow post it note of the day.

Actually looking at how that organic number of people has grown over the last years i'm pretty surprised at the amount of filtering i have to do using tools like tweetdeck to actually get to the good stuff. we are not always awesome all of the time and it can be annoying to sift through boring posts like this one to get to the good stuff.   I still have not found an ultimate way to do that yet.   I do know this thou, it makes you feel better by pressing the instant karma button to cut down on content - it will still be there when your ready, your not really missing out. ;)

I have actually switched to watching vimeo videos, the amount of insanely talented people on vimeo that are producing some very high quality pieces of work on little or not budgets is amazing. i still think there is huge value yet to come from that work, that footprint that people leave in the media snow of their talents.   damn, i miss videoblogging ;)

is wordpress really the best CMS out here at the moment?

2009-08-19T16:58:46Z

I recently switched over to using wordpress for the ammoboxproject and so far i am very happy with the way things are running, the installation was very easy and straight forward and i had a custom theme that i made in photoshop quickly sliced up by the awesome petr and within a week we were in business.

]]> The one thing that struck me was for one of the world leading blogging software was how quick to install and how light they have made to utilize plugins - very slick. My concerns however started to creep in when i was seeing a couple of updates in a number of dates - moveabletype seems to have a lot of regular updates but not in a number of days. that was a bit of a shock and i messed up my installation a few times with transmit by overwriting files instead of merging. always do a backup, no matter how urgent the vulnerability!

But it left me with this nagging question, was wordpress the best CMS for my needs? - my honest answer for installing wordpress was because i had heard very good things about the seo plugins and i really want to expose the knowledge and blogposts on ammobox to a broader audience outside of social media networks. people who were actually using gadgets and technology for the first time and to try and cut through the gloating bullshit you see on some of these bigger sites that try and argue the toss over which is fashionable this week (i'm talking TwiT with the pre over the iphone - talk about too much information) and actually give people knowledge that they need for these devices. Anyway, aside from that - i kept coming back to it, is wordpress the best CMS out there?

It's a lot of questions actually mashed together - there are plenty of free, open source software out there that you can install and use but often it is how the software actually intergrates into your day to day life. One of the major reasons i used tumblr for projectswebmedia is because i wanted to know that i would not have to worry about the hosting and i could post easily from a lightweight iphone interface. The rule of content management and hosting are changing on a daily basis and the increase in tools that fit into our daily grind will rapidly change as well. I'm not saying that there will be a one stop application but i think a lot of applications are going to have to change in interface based on the users ability to gradually learn and i think this is where customized custom interfaces will start to become the rage to maintain the media output you are putting out onto the internet. filtering is going to be a major factor with all this creation too.

I'm looking forward to melody coming out. a true open source cms system from some of the guys that worked at moveabletype - i'm hoping they will have taken some interface lessons from tumblr and some installation cues from wordpress. You can pretty much sway a community away from a product these days with flashy graphics, lightweight installs and regular updates to patch features and bugs - it really is an open world for providing the right tools for the job. I have a feeling that content management systems are slowing coming of age and we will look back in just six months and think how nuts we thought it was to jump through hoops to distribute something.

Overall i am pretty happy with wordpress, it has a stack of plugins that are super easy to install and the template system is really straight forward. I think the reason why 'i did not install the cms everyone else does' was because of my switch from the PC to a MAC - when something is popular it always becomes a target for attack, using a windows based machine taught me that! :)

why services like qik, bambuser need to look at better quality opensource audio

2009-08-17T14:15:08Z

I have been testing out bambuser 1.5.0 the last day or so on the iphone (latest version) - nothing seems changed in the frontend but i'm sure some their are optimizations going on in the code. I wanted to test out the yourcustomcable.com mic lead to xlr cable to see if i could get it working with bambuser - it does of course but it raised another issue that i have noticed before but never really mentioned on.

]]> audioboo.fm more for quickly publishing live hi-quality audio recordings i have noticed a leaning from me once again to have a respect for quality - even on a budge, if you can get it you should shoot for it.   In testing the xlr mic on bambuser i realise that the mic is great but the compression/codecs are really killing off what could be a good sound quality by using these broadcast microphones.   in fact, it even makes the video better to watch in some ways if the audio is at least half decent - because i know it is not i tend not to watch clips recorded on qik, 12seconds and bambuser.   The quality should be improving - i realise that adoption of codecs can take a bit of time but a quarterly tweak is not that much to ask for.

Again i understand the requirement to keep filesizes low but i think you need to think about the early adopters of these services, they want to go to the next level now they have found a use for it - the initial produce should mature in the same way that web browsers have incremental updates.   A lot of the time they do because of a new javascript engine.   we need to do this for web streaming content from mobile devices if this space is ever to be taken seriously.

I would have expected the quality to have got better by now.    I"m not expecting hd clips because of size but surely we should be looking at utilizing openvideo and some of the open source codecs like ogg into the mix.   Bambuser uses uLaw (for high audio quality) and iLBC (for low audio quality) - i'm not sure what the legal is around these if they are open source or not but i *know* there must be better compression.

when static speaks louder than the conversation - listening between the lines of socialmedia.

2009-08-15T15:00:35Z

I'm a people watcher. Always have been.

I get excited about the way people interact with our fellow human carbon footprints, their delivery and presence. The way people put you inside a box, test you with various routines and challenges. I spent a good chunk of my teenager years backed up against the wall of a nightclub over a decade ago listening to a 'tom' style character from 'middleofnowhereville' tell me how his wife was a bitch and rarely gave him sex. It was important to tom that he told someone you see. Fast forward to today and we have social networks. Where sometimes you care very little if anyone responds but you got your message out and sometime blag yourself into thinking your problem had been dealt with my sharing. Rub in a little bit of facebook for pain relief and a side order of twitter for pre-fabricated notions of people you think really exist behind that avatar and your good to go.

]]> twitter as much as you, but it happens. In fact i find myself enjoying those ideas of the 'unsaid and offline' conversations that go on, those little data packets armys of cliches that formulate grand designs of gradeur to facility their own personal ultimate digital signature statement. Yes, i actually still enjoy the unsaid conversations that happen offline (but are probably processed back to digital somewhere to 'fill in the gaps' on a profile of a person - they have the power you know) you know they happen on the phone, at the bar and in the car while your watching the miles rack up as you head home - like a digital version of an ann summers party - sleezy but just enough excitement to be worthy of telling people you were in attendence. Are we all a social radio beacon ready for others to tune (or out) too on demand. Is this the mecca we expected - the ability for us to voice. everything.

I used to concentrate too much on the actual conversation, assuming that honour and straight talking would enable those opposite to me to be frank back - but really establishing truthful, direct links with people on a human one to one level with the everyday dynamics of navigating our fragile souls on this bowl of dust is actually a really hard thing to do. you see we have personal firewalls, emotional deep rooted personal baggage that never quite arrived at the airport of life - we just collect it in a 'whydidthishappentomeagain' fashion and push forward to happier climates enabled by the 'oneclicktobuyhere' nature of the web and the pure crack inspired overdose of ideals and possibilitys of browsing a friends lifestream - we are containers of the march of the ideal world but the randomness that it is to be human. you can track it with stats and you can wrap it with ambient information but we are creatures of habits - the enabled ones. the keyboard thrashers - the digital nosey parkers. Are we not incredibly lucky to be alive in this space with all these droning data vats of human knowledge sitting waiting, watching.

It's good to exist between the pipes, a digital hippy riding the halflife tubestation of progress. watching the human race unbundle and distribute - will digital countries all exist to the same ideal, will we have digital nations with one mindset - and will they all move to belgium? - so i say this, enjoy the information and the conversations that you are privy too - but also seek out the message in the static - tune yourself in, the world is bigger than your ability to press the mouse button.

keep producing the media. sometimes the quality is not in the conversation but the unsaid nature of the way that media is delivered. may empathy become a digital asset that us early social ninjas will serve up like a precision blade of timing and clarity for the undiscovered country dwellers. let others rejoice in the connections and knowledge that this connected world brings.

keep sociable.

1 : inclined by nature to companionship with others of the same species : social
2 a : inclined to seek or enjoy companionship b : marked by or conducive to friendliness or pleasant social relations

being aware when your feel deflated as a freelancer.

2009-08-14T12:11:02Z

'no one can be wrong all the time, even a clock that has stopped running is right twice a day'

meh.

for the last month i have been trying to lift my head compressed, cold infused head out of the physical zoned out phase. i'm taking something for it now from the doctor, he said a lot of people who have allergys have it (like that is meant to make me feel special or something) and that the best thing i could do was blast nasonex, mometasone furoate up my nasal passages. sounds like some place that the trendy kids hang out in dubai.

]]>
not me thou, i'm sending out, filling in (those sites that do not run on a wank microsoft asp backend that is) forms for jobs - even none IT jobs. I'm deflated a little. I do rise above it at various junctions of my day thou by taking walks, listening to some electro lounge and working on my blogs. It's good to get away from the keyboard and screen once in a while.

If it keeps up like this i just might be blogging over on http://doledestroying.com - i shit you not. hang tight people, the bumpy ride just had the wheels come off.

38 awesome iphone applications for mobile media making

2009-08-14T11:20:59Z

quicklink | this is a crosspost from my ammoboxproject (it has pictures!)

Just thought i would crosspost this list of iphone applications here as well because my me.dm blog already has an established rss/email base or people and you probably do not known about the ammoboxproject. i promise to keep these crossposts to a minimum - just i would like to drive some traffic to that project as well indirectly. Anyway, in case you missed it - my 38 picks of iphone applications that i use will producing or absorbing socialmedia!

]]> media mobile mediamaker should own to get your message out there.    I have broken them down into five groups - i thought about making this into lots of seperate posts but in the end decided on the mega post.   i hope you'll find something in here that you can use in your daily mobile social media making!

communication

skype
when i first purchased my iphone3g it never even entered my mind that skype might actually make an iphone application for their service. i mean it makes perfect sense to make one but i just never saw apple allowing it to happen what with them being very closed provider/operator breaking into this phone space with their second version of the iphone.   luckily thou it did happen and it is great to get hold of people for an interview with ubercaster - being able to call people on skype via their iphones while they are at a cybercafe and pull them into a live podcast interview is fantastic and very interactive.   we aim to get some weekly chat sessions going in conjunction with these blog posts using this method once we can work out how to have more than one skype caller on remotely.   we might need to look at a hardware mixer to make this truly possible.

im+
i personally spend very little time using instant messaging these days - there is just too many things i like to be engaged in around the internet that is a little bit more lightweight, twittering or firing a response to a friendfeed/facebook link is more my bag but when i am mobile for any length of time i tend to talk to back home via gtalk - for this i use IM+ All-in-One Messenger. It's not cheap mind but i do like the fact that the full version (you can get a lite version for free) keeps your connections going when you break out of the app to load up other applications or take a phone call.   If you have a requirement for instant messaging in the field this is one of the best ones out there.

SHOUTcast
if you are not sure what shoutcasts are let me give you a little bit of education on them.   back in the day shoutcasting was the method of streaming audiostreams and music out onto the net - a lot of the radio streams you find in itunes are based on either icecast or shoutcasting protocols.   having the iphone application is great in that you can get people to tune into live podcasting shows directly on the iphone. it is also a useful tool to check that your audio broadcast stream is up and running from another device than the connection you are broadcasting from. we use a 64kps backup audiostream to a dedicated serverhost called tidyhosts as they have a reasonable 50 slot server for £10 a month which works perfectly for a backup to streaming video out from the ammobox if the connection at the venue is poor.

tweetdeck
if your a twitter user chances are at some point you have tried tweetdeck or heard from someone who uses it. for a long time i ran tweetdeck on my desktop mac and loved it until it started to take up too much of my time watching, sifting and watching the constant conversations go by.   now like the evil timesuck ninjas they are they go and release an iphone application which is actually really nifty and creative in the approach to show these columns.   the interface is snappy and clean and will enable you to keep up your desktop with the really nice sync feature of your searchs and custom columns.   if you have some time to burn on your journey and you have decent enough wifi/evdo you can certainly keep up with things from your mobile tweetdeck.

tweetie
the application that changed me from using tweetdeck. period. ultra clean interface, native mac osx support and written in cocoa (not some memory bloating air application - not tweetdecks fault per say btw) - the fad with air applications for me died very quickly when it was obvious that some work needs to be done on the way that air works.   i'm sure something newer is in the mix but for now tweetie on my mac desktop and the mobile are the way forward for fast communication.   the multiple accounts features of both are both super fast and easy to use.

information, blogging & distribution

tumblr
tumblr is a fantastic microblogging platform that has many different themes and the ability to use a custom theme for free. the iphone application is super easy to use once you have registered a name for your site - you have to do this initially from the web.   i currently use the tumblr app for updating projectswebmedia.com (oh i forgot to say tumblr allow you to point your own domain names at the sites too.   it is a very fast way when you are mobile to send micro sized twitter style content to your website.

ego
even wanted to check your stats in a clean, fast loading interface - with support for Feedburner, Google Analytics, Google PageRank™, Mint, Squarespace and Twitter the tracking interface reminds me of the widgets of mint in that you can click them to get daily, weekly and all time. a really nice light stats client.

byline
a fantastic rss reader based on google reader but with the ability to sync items directly to the iphone so you can download and take them with you. perfect for the plane or the subway or when you have no access to a data connection but you want to catch up on your google reader feeds. again, perfect for mobile and travelling to have access to your feeds or even syncing up rss status updates from your website registrations, signups and tracking.   sync when you have a data connection or wifi and you will always be up to date.

SkyNews
whenever i am out on the road or travelling by train i always like to keep up with the news and while skynews might not be the fastest in the world i find their iphone application to be fast and display videos and news stories in a nice lightweight fashion. it would be good if there was an application that had most of the major news services on it with a twitter feed of searched stuff as well that updated dynamically in a twitterfall sort of fashion. that would be very useful. also maybe geo news for your location maybe?

SugarSync
after looking for a decent complete system backup tool i stumbled upon sugarsync. the first thing that really attracted me to sugarsync was the pricing - for 250gb it worked out just under $20 a month (since then however i have installed carbonite for a year at $52 for unlimited transfer and storage) - what i do like about sugarsync however is that it has an iphone application where you can get to your content you have stored on their services.   i do hope carbonite do something similar.

iRail
how many times have you been at an event and your clock watching wondering if you should stay around and have another drink or risk catching a later train? - i seem to do it all the time. what is nice about iRail thou is not only does it work in the uk but all across europe which is very handle if you have a last minute job that you have been called up to do and your literally just having to rush to grab a plane.

Birdhouse
such a simple idea but often the best - how many times have you been wanting to tweet something you heard or saw or an idea that popped into your mind but you just could not tweet it because of no data connection or maybe your flying.   if this is you then birdhouse is for you.   an offline draft twitter app that you can store a message for later and post when you have access. i actually use it for generic messages for when i do live streaming so it is quick to push out the message. a must get app.

evernote
the weird thing about evernote is that i always felt there was something missing with it.   i started using on windows and found the application to be to complicated just to be able to store notes.   i really love the sync feature however and that was one thing that made me change back to it from the 'things' application after it would not sync one day.   the web version of evernote is dire and i still think the mac app is the best. the iphone app is ok, needs work but make sure you have data connection to sync your latest notes!

iBlogger
after finally biting the bullet and spending $5.99 on this app i hoped it would do what i needed because all the other blogging apps seem flaky and unreliable.   Not so with iblogger - for a start it supports a massive list of blogging systems so your pretty much covered there.   i use it for updating my moveabletype installations and wordpress. you can even add photos from the camera for quick updates for maybe a launch party when you just have to get the message out there.   a worthwhile addition for any blogger on the road.

MobileMinute
how many times have you really wanted to know just how many minutes or data you have used up on your iphone3g with o2 - i've nearly had my iphone for 18 months now and although it has been for repair once (for the microphone) i have never really know how much data tariff i have used on it - this can be crucial when your roaming. i heard about this app and was keen to try it.   i'm still trying thou because for some reason i get a message saying that it cannot access my traffic stats from the web.   update soon on this!

ftponthego
as a website developer you know that the moment you think you'll have a steady few days out of the woodwork and while your on vacation on the beach somewhere one of you clients has either uploaded something wrong or messed up a .htaccess file - you know the situation.   ftp on the go is a great little iphone application to allow you to ftp into your servers to correct things from wherever you can get a data connection. a very useful app - also allows you to save files locally. has tons of features i have not even touched yet.

dopplr
i have been using dopplr via it's website since it launched and i always like the idea, very similar to brightkite in some aspects but with a heavy lean towards letting you know about reviews of hotels and restaurants in the area by updates from the people you trust in your social grid. i like that. the iphone is brand new and although basic in operation right now shows potential as to where this is going to.   will be fantastic while travelling and look forward to playing around with it.

currency
how many times have you been abroad, even flew between two countries with lots of different currencys and been completely lost about how much your actually spending - on a recent 'ontheground' in denmark i had that situation when i just could not work out how much things were. having to have krona as well as euros just about finished me off - having a currency converter on the iphone is an absolute requirement so you do not over spend on those iffy foreign beers you just bought.

RSSplayer
pretty much everything the ipod player should be on the iphone - the video part of the ipod on the iphone is awful. the interface has been made to work around video when really it is designed for music only.   another problem is that you often have to sync to your machine to get videos over 10 meg even if your on wifi.   with rssplayer all that goes away, in fact any size can be downloaded and it has an intergrated search function and schedule guide so it can download while your on the move. a brilliant application for catching up with media on the go.

Locly
stuck in the middle of nowhere and need food, maybe transport or even just want to touch base with the local twitter users in the area - the super lightweight (no graphics) locly is a fantastic super quick applications for pulling back a bunch of information based on your geo location - find local flickr images, twitters, wikipedia, local events, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shops and supermarkets, taxi firms, films and movies, museums, hotels, banks/atm and gas stations. the locality in your pocket.

London Tube
i'm not a local to london (even thou most of my friends in america think that london is england) far from it i live over two and half hours away from london in the midlands, derbyshire and although i'm getting more confident using the tube i do have trouble getting around and working out what is the best tube station to - luckily we have applications like this now to help out route prep - this app does not require a data connection to work out the routes. brilliant.

Pixelpipe
Pixelpipe is a media gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 95 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. They provide free mobile & desktop applications.   For instance if you have a picture you want to distribute you can send it to pixelpipe and have it sent to a batch of other picture sites at the same time. very useful for getting attention to something very quickly.

audio recording

audioboo
for saying that i started out videoblogging and switched to podcasting seems a bit of a weird thing to say but for the moment that is exactly what i have done. audioboo is a fantastic iphone application that allows you to rapidly recording high quality snippits of audio and post them directly to the internet. you can also setup destinations that you wish to post an update too when you do this.   i have recently been using xlr mics with the iphone and it works very well indeed.

12seconds
one of the first video/picture and audio posting applications i had seen that approached the low bandwidth - quick post requirement of getting a 12 seconds video snippit on an iphone. utilizing three pictures you have the ability to post those with animation with an attached 12 second audio clip of your movements. a great little application for rapidly updating people without actually recording a video.

tweetmic
following in the same vein as the audioboo application this iphone app is pretty much a backup application just in case something horrible happens with audioboo and i want to get a live audio podcast recording done and sent out to the internet.   in testing i found the playback of the tweetmic clips jumpy and not as good quality as the audioboo application - also you have less embed options when i last checked and no api.

FiRe
touted as the 'field recorder in your hand' this brilliant application is ideal for those wanting to experiment with the latest and greatest gadgets for the iphone - utilizing the blue mikey, an addon block for the bottom of the iphone you can get some really amazing recordings and the application works very much like a true hardware field recorder with a proper vu meter and the ability to save your high quality recordings to soundcloud.   one to check out.

voxie
a recent new addition to my iphone purely for 'testing purposes' - another audio recorder but with a nicer interface - not sure i really like the web interface things to send audio snippits back and forth but the addition of the webserver is at least something to getting to your audio - an app without the ability to post it to the web always worries me.    i do however like the categorize features and the ability to flag media with different status.   The friends element so you can send audio to friends is also quite useful.

video recording

bambuser
one of the first video applications for the iphone3g that i used that did not require jailbreaking.   slowly the application is gaining more features and I'm very keen to try the application again now that we have the xlr to iphone connector working - should be no reason why the application will not use the new mic input which for quick interviews as a backup will work perfectly. bambuser are based in stockholm, sweden and are a great backup to the qik application if your nokia (you have a backup right) mobile phone goes down.

twitvid
not had chance to properly use this yet as it is designed for the iphone3gs - i'm quite excited about the advent of video production on the iphone but i think it has a long way to go before it can make it up to the high standards of quick video capture of the nokias.   saying that the ability to quickly record a video and post to twitter is very useful if you have a lot of followers and you want to update them quickly.

geolocation & camera

NightCamera
so we all know that the iphone3g has a pretty naff 2 megapixel camera for taking photos compared to some of the camera phones on the market - the iphone3g in lowlight is pretty dire still. what night camera does thou is actually pretty simple but very clever - it actually checks to see if the camera is stable by using the inbuilt accelerometer to see if the shot is steady or not before taking it.   also you can take smaller size pictures which makes for faster picture taking than normal which is good for a bunch of pictures.

Sparrow
a very simple geo location application to update your status to the yahoo fireeagle location service. lots of geo apps can be updated by the fireeagle service - one of them is the brightkite service - you can update with sparrow and it will also alert your brightkite geo service if you allows it access.   you can also set the level of privacy of your update by restricting the range of the geo update for area, region or down to street level.

iNap
not sure if your anything like me when it comes to events but i always seem to be mentally drained by the end of night from all the conversations i end up having about this social space and the interesting things that go on within it. this app has on a few occasions given me the chance to catch some sleep on the way home on the train. super simple - set a distance range from your destination you want the alarm to go off and it will play an alarm when your near! :)

flickit
one of my new top favorite apps for taking photos with and geotagging them. mainly because it really has a good system for tagging photos that you can setup in batch mode to apply to every photo that you take in the app.   you can also attach geotag each image with geo date from the onboard gps on your iphone

brightkite
the first real geo tagging application that i started using on the iphone. a really slick and well thought out application that allows you to update your geo location, add a note or photo or all three. what is neat about brightkite is that you have a social grid of people that follow your updates exactly like twitter and you can see people in your locality and chat between you.

camerabag
camerabag is a little bit quirky from the norm, it takes a photo just like any other app (i think you can even bring a photo in from your photo library) but you can then apply different filters/lens like it was taken on a retro camera or year.   the program has about six different settings and can make a bland photo quite interesting

autostitch
i have tried a number of panoramic iphoto applications and this one seems to be the most simple and power.   the others just took too much messing around trying to get things right - this one is a bit more sensible in the approach in how to use it. it can take really wide landscape pic. i'm looking forward to giving this a try out with boinxtv at some point with the 360o layer.

shakeitphoto
another of my top fav applications right now for graphics/photo processing on the iphone is shakeitphoto and the best of all it is only 99 cents. a bargain! - in classic/retro polaroid camera styli when you have taken a snap you have to shake the iphone to develop the picture - a bit of a gimmick for sure but the quality of the processed images are really nice.   check it out.

comictouch
a personal favorite also of mine for really surprise shots that you might have got by accident or when you have two people talking to each other but need to put a caption on before you post it - this is for you.   a really slick interface and to be honest i love everything the guys at plasq do (skitch anyone?) - very cool app.