Mobile Stew

Jonathan Phillips aged 33 has no particular sporting ability, but thanks to a bet with his mates he is on the lookout for a country to compete for in the 2012 London Olympics.  He can't compete for the UK as apparently the government doesn't want another Eddie The Eagle embarrassing the nation in its moment of triumph.

He's started up a blog to track his progress and he's hoping to raise £1m for charity.

"So the plan is to find a country who will support me by
giving me a place in their team. In return, some of the money I raise
could go back into that nation."

Phillips plans to raise the million through corporate
sponsorship, while using his own money to buy the essentials needed to
train for ...

This week, Sony Ericsson has signed a deal with Google, which enablesSony Ericsson to integrate Google's Blogger.com and Google Web Searchfeatures on all of its future mobile phones.

This meansblogger.com account holder with the new Sony Ericsson phone can writeand post content to his blog on the move using the bundles software. Soyou can post content to your blog even on a vacation, travel or awayfrom a computer. This is the first any mobile handsent manfacturerporviding this kind of features related to blogging. This shows howpopular is blogging in the present internet era and it looks likesurely this is going to be a hit feature.

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Ricky Gervais is well on his way to enter the Guinness book of records as the world's most popular podcaster.  His weekly show for the Guardian's online site has averaged over 260K downloads per week to put it in the 2007 edition which has just been compiled.

Believe it or not I've never listened to a Podcast although I use my iPod nearly everyday.  I guess I love my music too much, but I think I will download this show to break my duck as I love the Office.

One of the bloggers that I follow, Russell Beattie, has not only decided to stop accepting comments from readers, but he has even gone as far as to delete all old comments.

Whilst I have to respect his wishes, I can't imagine ever doing the same on Connected Internet.  One of the reasons I'm hooked on blogging is because I like to see what other people think about my posts, and I feel that comments can add a lot of value to posts.

For me, a blog isn't a blog without it being shared with other people, and accepting comments.

Wow, Google really don't like their listings being 'abused'.  Google discovered that BMW Germany had been using 'Doorway Pages', pages which are stuffed full of keywords that thesite feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to realpages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot. Human visitorswill be immediately redirected to another page upon visit.

When Google discovered this they reduced BMW.de's Page Rank down to 0, which means that no BMW.de pages will appear near the top of listings.

I wonder sometimes though, whether Google is playing fair in all this.  When is a SEO technique acceptable?  The aim of all SEO is to get higher rankings - I don't think that banning people because you don't like some SEO methods, but then ...

Thanks to some very kind Connected readers last night I've been able to try out the Newsvine Beta service and all I can say is it is amazing.  If Digg and Del.icio.us are Web 2.0 services then Newsvine is Web 2.5. 

Newsvine collates stories from various Associated Press sources, but also allows users to create their own news columns.  These columns can be seeded with articles created by each user or from links to external websites of interest.

Each article can be tagged a-la Del.icio.us, and also voted upon and in a similar fashion to Digg, with popular articles getting promoted to the homepage.

However, Newsvine has some key features that I think will make it stand out from the crowd:



- Revenue:  Any ad revenue from any articles ...

If any readers are registered for the Newsvine beta could they please email me an invite.  Newsvine sounds like it could be an interesting service, based on what cavemonkey has to say about it:

...articles are automatically managed bythe website. The website figures out how the articles should rank by anumber of factors. The freshness of the story, how many times peopleview the article, and how many people vote for the article are allfactors which go into the rating.

Did I just say vote? Yes, that’scorrect. You can vote (and report) articles just like Digg; but sincethe votes aren’t the only factor, stories are less likely to be subjectto user stupidity. This system works very well, and just because no onehas voted ...

I would like to welcome Sanketh to the Connected Internet team.  Sanketh is the brains behind the Telecoms Trends blog that I discovered this week, and will start adding the occasional topical post to this blog.

I'm on the lookout for more guest authors so if you have a blog that you want to promote and are willing to contribute the odd post on Connected Internet, then please email me with your blog url and a brief summary of the areas you would like to cover.

I just followed through a shamelessplug on Connected, and I was surprised to find a very goodquality UK Telecoms and Wireless Blog called 'TelecomsTrends'.

The posts are of good quality including astonker on why 'Bluetoothis set to take over wireless from Wi-Fi' and I've added it tomy growing feed list ( I think I need to start pruning afew). 

Definitely worth checkingout.

TelecomTrends, Wireless, News, Resources, Articles

I really don't know who comes up with these products.  Fosfor has collected a list of the Top 10 weirdest USB devices ever which include the George Foreman USB iGrill pictured above.  Actually, I wouldn't mind one of these on my desk!

What's the dumbest gadget you've ever bought?