Take a look at the video below flaunting what is supposedly Wired’s iPad app. Well, actually, it’s a digital version of the magazine that Wired created with Adobe. But hey, we all know where this is going. The magazine app seems slick and the experience is out-of-the-world rich. It may make me walk down to the Apple store and get my third and most expensive Apple product.
My essential question to this is, why couldn’t Amazon do this with Kindle? They came out with a product that was just a (first) step in the ladder to where we want to be with digital media consumption. And their revisions to the Kindle have landed utterly short of the vision.
Now, what’s so special about that? We have seen live-blogging before. How different can live-Buzzing be? And Buzz is somewhat just like Facebook Wall posts. Isn’t it?
I don’t think so. I think this use of Buzz is pretty unique and the Facebook* pony can’t do that trick.
There are a number of Buzz features that make it possible:
With Buzz, you can share a permalink to a single post. This makes it possible to link to a particular post. This isn’t possible with FB Wall posts. Sharing a permalink is exactly what I did above. Here it is again.
Although the person above didn’t do this, you can edit your original post as you live-blog.+
Any comments people make will be available to the author immediately. He can reply to them completely.
People can pull in their friends into the live-blog by @tagging them. Powerful stuff. FB Wall posts can’t be shared at all. FB Wall post containing media can be shared, but those create copies of original post, so any changes won’t propagate.
Now this is not perfect, but it definitely is a good-enough live-blogging platform. Here is my wish list to improve upon what Buzz already has:
Allow people to add pictures/videos etc. as comments. This way the author as well as other people can collaborate better. Google has already demonstrated the ability to do this using Google Wave.
Fix the problem where any updates to the original post don’t show up in readers’ Buzz window instantly. Right now any reader will have to refresh their browser window for this to happen.
Related to #2 above: Any updates to comments by readers also don’t show up in author’s/other readers’ window instantly either.
* Twitter doesn’t compare because of its 160 char limit. Even if we disregard that limit, it still falls short.
+ He probably didn’t do this because it’s easier to add comments than to edit the original post. But, there’s an unknown caveat: If you edit your orignal post while live-Buzzing, it won’t appear automatically and instantly to the people watching your Buzz. OTOH, any comments you make appear near-instantly to all the readers.
I’d like to say I’m a heavy user of Wikipedia. I don’t have any stats to prove that. But, I’ll still try. How about the fact that a lot of times I hit Wikipedia before Google to do my research. How about, I even have a Firefox smart keyword for Wikipedia search? How about that I quoted Wikipedia extensively in my PhD thesis! OK, just kidding on the last one.
Wikis are fun. I, for one, am a wiki fan. Not long after I started using Wikipedia, I wanted to have one of my own. Wiki that is. What came next surprised me! It’s quite easy to start your own wiki. Easier than adding your own page to Wikipedia only to see it deleted almost instantaneously by a Beowulf cluster of Wikipedia editors. There are websites that provide you hosting for your very own wiki. They are called wiki farms. I confess I started with a Google search on this, and, ended up signing up at Wikidot.com. A Wikipedia search would have sufficed just fine, leading me up to this.
If you have tried out any of these and have anything specific to say, holler@me using comments below. As far as I am concerned, I have tried Wikidot and Wikia. I like Wikia more because it’s MediaWiki based, which means you don’t have to learn a new markup language. The biggest advantage I saw was that they allow you to download a database backup of your wiki (any wiki for that matter). That’s more than I need for now. Wikidot’s only feature that attracted some attention was its tag feature. You can attach text tags to any page you edit. This is a little step towards helping people find what they are looking for.
Having said that, there’s nothing like your own own wiki. Sometime ago, I installed my own copy of Mediawiki here. I do feel that wikis are a powerful way to make knowledge accessible. Wikipedia has already demonstrated that. It’s time for you to get your knowledge out there; planted as a wiki in a wiki farm.
I ran into an interesting, never-before-seen use of 