blogs « John Caddell's blog

‘Presentation Zen had another great, novelistic post stating that complaining about constraints in product design is completely misguided—in fact, dealing creatively with severe constraints is the essence of good design.

Then, the New York Times profiled 19-year-old basketball player Greg Oden, variously called the next Bill Russell or Tim Duncan (either is a great compliment, but I’d take Russell), and his switch to shooting left-handed after a serious injury and surgery to his right wrist. As a result, now that his right wrist is healed, he’s a much more valuable player than he would have been if he hadn’t been required to learn to use his left hand.

I’m working to create something within significant constraints. I’ve been playing with the Spin-my-Blog service (which allows me to talk for up to a minute and then send the transcription directly to my blog) for some weeks, and I’ve created a new form that will use the capabilities of the system.

Postlets: very short, conversational posts with limited (preferably no) editing, focusing on a brief business-related anecdote, hopefully funny. I’ll load them up whenever they pop into my head.

Saturday’s post is an example of the postlet form. Perhaps it adds a bit of freshness or change of pace to the normal blogging stuff. Let me know what you think.

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging

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Here’s how I’m using Spin-my-Blog

Friday, March 16th, 2007

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing occasional posts using the Spin-my-Blog voice blogging service. What I’ve found to be the best approach is to use it as a place to post ideas. Things that I would otherwise write on a sticky note, instead, I speak into the phone. The system translates them to text and sends them directly to my blog listing as draft posts, where I can then edit them, expand them, add photos and tags and prepare them for publication.

It’s highly convenient, saves typing time, and I don’t lose any ideas (which, I suppose, is not always a good thing).

Voice-to-Screen messaging – powered by SpinVox

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken post, spoken blogging

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Favorite non-business business blogs

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Can blogs that aren’t about business shed light on problems we businesspeople face every day? James March, the professor who taught us about foolishness, might say yes. Here are my favorites:

Hobby Princess – all about handicrafts, yet sprinkling in lessons for those of us in business. Check out this post about how small can be better than big. Or this one about the conflicts between copyrights and open source.
Greg Mankiw’s Blog – economics brought to ground level by a Harvard professor. Ostensibly a tool for his introductory econ students, the blog takes on questions of government policies and looks at them with an economist’s eye. Want to learn what Pigovian taxes are? Check here.
David Report blog – on design of architecture, furniture, clothing. Beautiful pictures and some thought-provoking commentary about how design can improve or degrade our lives.
Bill Walsh’s Blogslot – the author, a copy editor for the Washington Post, regularly points out poor grammar and word choice in the nation’s newspapers. The lessons for anyone who writes (i.e., all of us) are invaluable. Here’s a simple take on an emerging problem in blog grammar.

design, crafts, economics, writing, blogs

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Spoken blogging in action

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

Last month, I wrote about a new speech-to-text service that allows you to speak your blog posts into an ordinary telephone. Now I’ve got the service, SpinVox Speak-a-Blog, set up with my own blog, and I used it to create today’s earlier post.

Some results:

The translation service worked very well. I had to make a handful of very minor corrections–the spelling of a name, a couple of capitalizations, one verb tense problem. But these took all of a minute to do.

I retitled the post, did some slight line editing, and added Blogger labels and Technorati tags. (Note to product management: it would really be something to speak your tags and have the code appear magically in the post.)

I’m going to try to do one spoken post a week to see how they evolve and compare to the written posts. There’s enough time to speak about 75 words. Most readers would say that’s plenty!

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging

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