Amazing how easy to use a system can be, that works all like a wiki but adds a calendar function, contact management, bookmarks, todo lists and much more… it is really magic how the »magic words« of stikkit are working out. Just type in some sentences and stikkit will recognize what content it is about and convert phone numbers into contact details or date and time into a calender object and with some more simple commands your entry will be tagged with multiple keywords.

When I heard about the idea behind stikkit and the words triggering the creation of certain objects I thought about this as a techie thing only, as it seemed to me like learning a certain syntax for coding. Now after some quick tests I can really say stikkit felt quite intuitive to me - I did not really have to think about what phrases I have to use, I just typed in plain text and the system recognized most of the things I wanted it to do. This seems to me as quite an intuitive approach to simplify wiki interfaces, and after a few test entries one will definitly get used to this very promising approach… see the power of stikkit in some screencasts or take a look at the blog entry at 43folders for a more detailed intro.

Using stikkit I can also highly recommend the combination with the brand new dashboard widget for Mac users.

In one of the latest editions of WIRED I came across an article featuring Joost, the brand-new project from Kazaa and Skype creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. With the IPTV Software Joost they will now try to revolutionize the way we are watching TV.

Services like YouTube have changed the way we are watching and sharing videos in the internet. With Internet Protocol TV, web and television will work seamlessly together in one channel, offering advantages from both worlds. A big problem in delivering music, videos and other large files over the net is the bandwidth. Joost therefore makes use of peer-to-peer streaming technology, at the moment mainly used for downloading purposes in BitTorrent and the like. This approach is now taken to deliver streaming video directly to the user’s screen. This enables users to receive high quality pictures via the internet, as the P2P network caches content on the users hard disks in tiny fragments and thereby enables data to follow various paths when being streamed from other users. See more details on the Joost technology in the WIRED article.

Joost does not offer much content at the moment, but due to the the really deep pockets of the two founders and their current initiatives to close content deals with major media companies, this situation will definitly change in the near future.

To navigate through the content Joost is offering a virtual remote control with classic control buttons and an additional search box to start a keyword search. Futher there is the possibility to open a program guide with personalized »smart channels«.

The really intersting thing with IPTV is, that it can utilize all those handy tools we are getting more and more used to in the web, and that’s what Joost actually does. It offers widgets with all the features we know from social networks: a buddy list, instant messaging, an option to “Rate it!”, a “Share What I’m Watching!” button…

When considering the possibilities involved in terms like Web2.0, IPTV can definitly change the way we will watch TV in the near future. Just think about creating a structure based on tagging and folksonomy with all the video content available, or make it possible to recommend content to other users or moreover let the system suggest interesting movies to you based on your preferences.

It seems like there are many opportunities in this field and I am sure that the concept of IPTV will gain more and more attention in the next years. To sum up the potential of Joost and the technology behind it, a quote from the WIRED article:

Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!

After I finished reading the article some days ago I registered for the Joost beta, but I am still in the queue waiting to receive my invitation, but I am almost sure there are way too many people waiting out there… but as I recognized today, I could maybe have been one of the last beta applicants, as Joost has relaunched their website and is a closed beta from now on. This means no more applications for Joost beta, just via invitation. So, if you are one of the lucky ones who has a beta account with an invitation left… yep - let me know!

Remark
Recently I came across an other IPTV software offering a slightly different service by delivering the the current television program instead of a video on demand service. The service offers a much broader variety of TV channels including BBC World, CNN and even some Austrian channels. Moreover it is interesting that the service of Zattoo is only available in Switzerland although the company is based in the US.

There is an incredible amount of press coverage on the topic of Secondlife out there. »Web2.0« is a term no one can hear anymore, how about Secondlife, just a buzzword or worth the hype?

There have been so many controverse opinions in various articles, blog posts and forum threads out there on the topic of Secondlife in the last few months and it seems hard to find your own position in the nebulous discussions going on everywhere.

I found some interesting points in David Kirkpatrick’s article No, Secondlife is not overhyped in Fortune.

»Is it a game? No. Is it a marketing opportunity? Yes, but who cares? What matters most is that it may point to the future of the Net«

He can see some very important developments in virtual worlds like Secondlife. Most important seems that there is a way of a social life like the one we experience every day in our offline world. This is something he can’t see in the web in its current shape, even if it is 2.0. When we think of successful user-driven social networking sites like MySpace, we can definitly say Secondlife goes much further. The complete platform has been designed by users from the beginning on.

When I think back to my first attempts in Secondlife I can see myself being really disappointed. I was frustrated as the interface was way too hard to use and not at all intuitive enough for a beginner. Nevertheless I definitly liked the concept and many ideas it is based on.

Some days ago I mentioned the concept Sony presented with »Home« their virtual world for the Playstation3. After watching the full presentation of Home at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco I started to think about Virtual Worlds a bit more in detail.

Even if I would never buy a PS3 just because of this feature, Sony is definitly doing some things right. Of course graphic looks much more sophisticated than it does in Secondlife, but moreover I can see some really good points coming out of Sony’s Home.

A small feature I realized quite soon is the ability to do voice conversations as well as chatting. In the area of multimedia content, Home also offers the possibility to watch movies in a virtual cinema or share personal video or audio files on video screens or speakers in a room. In this area Sony definitely was inspired by sites that are made up of user-driven content, like YouTube and MySpace. If I think of a virtual world with access to personal videos, movies and songs and the possibility to share them in a virtual world with all my friends I can really see something going on, and this could maybe be the foundation for a new version of the web.

Of course I could also go into the internet watch a new movie trailer, send the link to my friends in an Instant Messenger and then decide if we should go and watch it in the cinema… but how about a virtual world that comprises all this functionality? Purchase a cinema ticket in the virtual world, watch the movie interactively with your friends while having the capability to voice-chat during the movie, rate it and take everything we consider as Web2.0 a step further…

… and yes, this sounds a bit scary to me as well, so let’s go and meet some REAL friends!

Sony’s Playstation 3 seems to lack good differentiation criteria for switching from a Playstation 2 or XBox360 to the all new PS 3. Nintendo’s fabulous gameplay included in the gorgeous Wii was able to find a competitive edge that Sony is looking for at the moment. Now Sony jumped on the bandwagon and came out with »Home«, a virtual world similiar to Secondlife.

This will give Playstation 3 users a social network with similiar features than the ones offered by Secondlife. Every user can explore the virtual world by navigating the very slick interface on a virtual PSP. This already seems like a big improvement compared to the poor ease of use in Secondlife. As an avatar you can talk to other users, meet at certain places or buy interior for your own appartment. Further there are some special features in Home, like the possibility to play small games together in Home or to meet and start a game in one of the multi-player online games available for the console.

At the first sight Home seems to be very promising in my opinion. It would be nice to see Sony expand the possibilities in a user-centered direction. A large scale beta will go online in April, I am looking forward to see if Sony is going to do some things right in this case…

Watch the trailer for Sony’s new »Home« to get a first impression:

Tagline Generator is a PHP script that generates chronological tagclouds based on a certain text input. Tagclouds are generated automatically by analysing word frequency. The result is a tagcloud showing trends in word usage over time with a slider to navigate in time.

See some very interesting text analysis examples of US presidential speeches or Microsoft presentations. In this case I can definitly see Tagclouds as an appealing visualisation for qualitative research methods to analyse the content of texts.

New commercial for Mc Donald’s Australia: I see things. Even if some of you may not like the company, the spot appeals really likeable to me, maybe because of the lovely music that makes the spot so much more intensive. By the way the audio was produced by Nylon.

Looking for music fitting your current mood? Try Musicovery an interactive web radio categorizing music with tags depending on moods like »calm«, »positive«, »dark« or »energetic«. My current mood is very important when choosing which music I want to listen to in certain moment, therefore I personally have playlists based on certain moods in iTunes too. The Musicovery interface links related music visually and makes discovering new music really easy.

I have been using last.fm for some time now, but while implementing the feed into the blog here I spent some time with the community features and the similarity engine suggesting musical neighbors. This feature really brought some interesting new artists into my field of view. By looking at my neighbors‘ latest played tracks and listening to their streams I came across Jamie T.

He seems to be another graduate of the MySpace school of self-promotion. Have a look at his MySpace profile or the discussion groups on his website to see how the buzz goes on.

The long awaited first album Panic Prevention remembered me quite early of some other self-made Brits like Mike Skinner or my all beloved Lily Allen. His style sounds like a mix of rap, reggae and punk, but he seems to stake a claim to his very own genre. You can really hear the roots in his rough, filthy patois, coming from a musically uncool suburb of Wimbledon. JamieT’s style is so real, scrappy and unique, and he has lot of stories to tell… so give him a try. I recommend the track »If you got the money«, find the song attached in this blog post.

… is not online yet - but they really know how to make waiting a much more amusing process. Nice approach with videocast, updates via RSS and videos you have to watch. This is not the new group94 site.

On the lookout for GoogleMaps applications I found wayfaring a service where users can create, share and explore maps on various topics. Nice interface and some interesting features.