A quick post after having received an invite from TechCrunch to try out the Wix-experience beta.

I was a little skeptical, but for what its purpose is I am content and even a little excited. It provides some nifty widget creation options, and allows for a number of customizations.

Currently I have just scraped the surface. Though I can already conclude that its User Interface is friendly and simple for those non-geeks who just want to spice up their own profiles.

I have yet to try out integrating the widgets into public services offered. But they offer a wide range of custom embedding for myspace, facebook etc.

I finally got around to testing my first of Aviary‘s web-based applications, codenamed Phoenix. I really like what I see. Built intuitively with an interface similar to Photoshop or GIMP, Phoenix is a niftly flash based Image Editor.

I was impressed by their teaser back in July, and must admit this first tool alone was somewhat worth the wait.

The tools in Phoenix work well. Although  my Photoshop shortcus are rather useless I enjoyed playing around with my above picture online. The blur filter did not work exactly as I wanted it to. But I think that with a little more getting used to I could use Phoenix for main basic Image editing needs.

Now I will have to soon try out Adobe’s own online solution.

For years I have been listening to internet radio stations across the globe to fit my personal listening preferances, and escape all the commercials on my local FM radio. I bumped into Last.fm a couple of months ago and I have not turned back since.

Last.fm – the social music revolution (Last.fm About Us). You type in an arist or genre you like and Last.fm will play you music you should like. Based on your previous playlist, as well as playlists of people who have listened to the same song as you it finds your tracks. Last.fm is nicely intergrated into iTunes and other mediaplayers and will register the music you play there and feed that information into Last.fm – Scrobbling.

Screenshot of player window.

As I read of Wi-Fi radio slowly making its way into the consumer world, I do hope that Last.fm will jump on that bandwagon and find some way for me to listen to Last.fm on the fly. (A cellphone/mobile java-app would work – especially when wi-fi telephones become more affordable.)
Partially what I would be looking for, although a heavy workaround: Streaming Last.fm to Reciva internet radios (Logik IR100)

Joost is another online TV solution. It combines both software and content, with a dosage of advertising.

In April I gave Joost beta my first try. I tried it on a relativly fast PC’s with more than enough bandwidth. But I was constantly disappointed with the CPU usage and bandwidth the program required. Their content then was rather limited, still promising. Not personally owning a machine that managed to use Joost I forgot about it for a couple of months. Now for a couple of weeks I have had access to an Intel Mac and re-downloaded Joost to see a real boost in content and functionality.

The Mac remote works nicely with Joost and really gives the Joost feeling. Being able to provide the wide and impressive content obviously costs, and the ads in between every song or show proves this.
I could quickly now sit hours in front of the Joost-set. With the remote functionality it enhances the TV-feel, and allows you to relax. However I am still figuring out how to customize the content I believe that we will see a lot more of Joost to come.

At a first glance I found Joost’s featured selection more entertaining than Miro’s. With Joost you can’t download anything, but this is not a problem as long as the content remains searchable and accessible. Joost’s main downside for me atm is some of the lengthy advertising, I am find with splashscreens and short ads. But when I start to doubt whether this is an ad or a rogue channel this pulls down the Joost experience. Another Joost negative is the quality, although much better since April, they still have a way to go considering what you see is all transferred more or less “live”.

I first heard of Zattoo via TechCrunch, but I did not try it before a couple months ago. With Zattoo, as with some other services I have tested, I believe in trying the application a little more in depth over time before I give a verdict.
There is something about watching TV, next to real time – and not needing a tv-box and traditional receiver. After being introduced to Zattoo the TV in the living-room is only turned on mainly for movies, TV is now watched infront of the computer.

NRK2 live on Zattoo.

Their interface is simple, and offers you Audio and Video P-2-P (Peer-to-peer). The quality varies. Though on the 1.8 mbit/s ADSL line, the picture is decent most of the time. (A couple of mpeg like jolts and pixelations every now and then). As far as content goes, I would be willing to pay for more channels, so I hope Zattoo will be working on a service in that direction.

Apparently since none of the stream/material is stored, they do not run into many of the restrictions that would apply. In addition Zattoo restricts channels geographically. That rises my question what happens if I wanted to access NRK while overseas?
As the activity on Zattoo’s forum demonstrates Zattoo is in high demand and countries around the globe are hoping to have their channels be the next addition. (Øyvind Solstad, working for Norwegian Broadcasting, NRK, met the guys behind Zattoo in Switzerland(?), who told him about expanding Zattoo to Norway to include NRK1 and NRK2. I was overjoyed.)

You may have noticed that I experiemented with some of my Picture of The Week pictures on the photo-sharing site Zooomr. In general I enjoyed the concept, and quickly thought that I would be able to settle into the social photo-community of Zooomr.

There is no official “I forgot my password” page, and although I was 80% sure of the password when I first registered it would not work. After several emails to the staff they finally reset my password, though even with the new password I could not log in. Since I had not uploaded any pictures yet, I thought I would just re-register. I did, and everything was working fine, as long as I accessed my Zooomr page from the machine I registered on. The second hick-up was uploading. Some of my bigger pictures did not upload correclty, and since the upload had not completed I could not access the picture to delete, even though the pictures showed up as thumbnails on my user-page.

The final straw for me was yet to follow. When I tried to log on from another computer, even though I was now 100% sure of my password I was yet again faced with incorrect login credentials. Re-emailing the staff, and still a couple months later I have not received a reply. Before posting today I see that I am not the only one experiencing these problems, see here. Just today I researched the login topic again and finally was able to login again. Apparently even though login asks for an email address it wants your username. Who could have guessed?
I continue to wish Zooomr the best, and hope to give them a second chance in a couple months. Now I need a little break.

The popular TV-show crime series CSI:NY from CBS will include an investigation in Second Life in its next awaited episode, that viewers can also participate in, TechCrunch reports. I find this is a very exciting new step in the social media world, as it truly does add interactivity into a prime time TV-series.

As Hollywood, or the showbiz if you want, steps into the virtual realm of Second Life it will definitely give the virtual, other, second life of yours a very exciting and exotic opportunity to sharing in solving the mystery of this intriguing and entertaining action crime series. A two-way intergration of normally very single tracked popular tv-series will definitely cause a great deal of us previous sceptically towards Second Life and the virtual world to perhaps give it a new chance. And perhaps the actual investigation can teach you a couple things as well?

This tied in nicely with some topics from as seminar I was at today, discussing new social media trends, with several new media personalities in Norway. Amongst them Øyvind Solstad one of the guys behind NRKbeta.no talked about Second Life.

Anyway I will personally have to perhaps give Second Life a new chance, because I must admit it I think CBS has made a genius move.

TechCrunch reports that a project called Aviary has an ambitious goal of providing graphical online application to create multimedia artwork.

The online application range from Photoshop and Illustrator resembling applications 2d and vector graphics as well as a 3d application for editing and rendering. Some of their creative applications are code-named Phoenix, Raven and Hummingbird.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The complete list of their birds/tools here. Information will most likely be updated on their website: creationonthefly.com.

SE51 have an interface that lets users test drive OS X (Mercury) online. To boot the online machine click here. My guess is that there is a lot of scripting there so be warned it may not like every browser or operating system. (It took about 4 minutes to boot the first time, so have patience.)

(Via LifeHacker – which also links to an “online” Ubuntu)

Recently Google added some more translation functionality to Google Translate. It lets you translate a single word, and gives possible meanings that word might have.

I also recently discovered that you can Get Translation Browser Buttons which I will give a try soon.

(Via LifeHacker)