This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
9:59 PM Tuesday, November 21, 2006
[The wave of the present?]
Over the weekend I attended a conference (more about that some other time) where I learned that the vast majority of the world's population has limited or no access to computers, but they do have mobile phones which they use for text messaging. In other words, Internet access via mobile telephones is the wave of the future for most Earthlings, if not already the wave of the present. This information led me to try to access Jonathan's Coffeeblog on my own Sony-Ericcson W600i. I did. But with all the bells, whistles, chiclets, links, gewgaws, and javascript jazz that I have added to the ol' Cblog, it took a long time to load and was very frustrating to read.
Thus was born the project to build a special streamlined mobile phone edition of Jonathan's Coffeeblog. This was a piece of cake with Tinderbox, the software that I use to publish the blog, which I create on my Mac G5 hard drive and upload with Dreamweaver. I simply (hah!) created a few new HTML templates to export a streamlined text-only version. Instead of the usual 12 most recent blogposts on my hard drive, I publish only the last three. I added some "about" links and a copyright notice. It works just fine.
To access Jonathan's Coffeeblog Mobile Edition, I made use of Mozes, a startup website that enables fans to send a keyword via their mobile phones to get a text message back from their favorite band. The keyword is sent to M-O-Z-E-S on the phone's keypad, which translates to the number 66937. To get the URL to Jonathan's Coffeeblog Mobile Edition on your phone, you just write a text message with one word: coffeeblog, then send it to M-O-Z-E-S. You get a text message back in a few seconds. Scroll down to the URL (which happens to be http://doublesquids.net/coffeeblog/mobile.html), select it, and go. The sleek, readable text version of the Coffeeblog will download fast. Hopefully, within days, Coffeeblog fans living in the vicinity of Kathmandu and Timbuktu (Tombouctou) will be able to read the last Coffeeblog post without having to hike 15 miles to an internet cafe.
Of course, this whole exercise presupposes that there are people out there who actually read Jonathan's Coffeeblog. My statistical service informed me just now that 1300-2370 page views will occur during the next month. No, that's not Boing Boing or even Power Line popularity, but for the long tail in a universe of 57 million blogs, it could be worse. The thing is, even if they access pages of the Coffeeblog, how many of these page views involve reading the whole thing, or more than a few words? Well, that ain't no big thing. If they even read a few words on those Kathmandu cellphones, I'll be a happy blogger.
More links: Kathmandu Tombouctou Cellphone Mozes
More images: Mobilephone Tombouctou Kathmandu
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