Summize, the Twitter search engine, has just been bought by Twitter and rebranded search.twitter.com. Read all about it.
Exhausted by the Future of Media
Whew! The Future of Media Summit 2008 was exhausting yesterday! I’ll be writing something this morning, but I’m not sure what yet. Stand by. Meanwhile you can get a taste of the action by reading Mark Pesce’s thoughts on the Future of Live Television (Part 1, Part 2), and Erin Moss’ notes on the Sydney Future of Journalism session and plenty more linked from the Future of Media Blog. Plus of course there’s the Summize feed of everyone’s Twitter traffic.
Future of Media Summit 2008: live blogging etc
OK, I haven’t even regurgitated all the information I devoured at PubCamp Sydney and the Politics & Technology Forum, and now I’ll be spending all day tomorrow at the Future of Media Summit 2008. Get ready for the overload!
I’m not quite sure exactly where I fit into this. However I do know that I’ll be one of several people providing a Twitter feed tagged #fom08, and Mark Pesce wanted to make sure I had a live videophone feed via Qik, which I do now.
The attendee list is a veritable Who’s Who of New Media Cleverness, plus me. So something interesting is bound to happen… stay tuned!
Oh, and for some bedtime reading, try the Future of Media Report 2008 [PDF].Update 22 March 2014: Technologies come, and technologies go. Qik is no more. Its video messaging functions have been absorbed into Skype, and Qik will cease to exist on 30 April 2014 — although videos embedded in websites are replaced with the message “video unavailable”. The future of the media doesn’t last very long at all.]
What’s with the avatars?
If you’ve been wondering why some people now have avatars (personal images) next to their comments, it’s because they have an account at Gravatar.com. Create an account, associate image(s) with your email address(es), and the appropriate image will be used by every blog which uses the Gravatar standard.
Actually, what DO Vodafone’s plans mean?
There was plenty of discussion on Twitter last night about Vodafone’s iPhone plans. Yesterday we thought that data outside the “included” amount was still billed within the cap. But then people started reading Vodafone’s confusing and legalistic Terms & Conditions and got confused. I contend that failing to clearly state the price of your services is in breach of the Trade Practices Act — and if a dozen smart people can’t answer the simple question, “What will I be charged for 5GB of data?” then the T&Cs are misleading, I say. Stay tuned.
Vodafone’s iPhone plans better?
Is Vodafone Australia so stupid that they didn’t promote the most attractive part of their iPhone plans? Mark Pesce went a-hunting today and found that on the business plans, yes, the “included data” is a small 250MB or 500MB or whatever — but data usage after that point is billed at 12c/megabyte inside the monthly cap. He Twittered this news [1, 2, 3, 4] earlier today, but you should check the Terms & Conditions yourself before signing up. [Update: You should definitely read the follow-up post before proceeding.]
[Update 19 December 2012: The link to Vodafone’s July 2008 iPhone plans has been edited to point to the Internet Archive’s copy of the page. Why? There’s a reason for this.]