Marvin Lee Dot Net

This is the second part of my personal evaluation on the past one year long of blogging.

I have previously revealed some statistics of this blog which was never before seen by anyone except me.

In this post, I am going to highlight some social activities which had happened due to the existence of this blog.

1) New acquaintances
Many bloggers say they get to know people via blogging and I half-heartedly believed it, and now I truly believe in it myself.
People go online to search for stuff and sometimes they drop by your blog and if it’s something good enough for them, they leave a comment and come back again.
Or they leave a link so that you know their blog and that’s where the relationship begins.
Although it’s in the online world, but we are still humans.
There are some people that I communicate with online (and only online) as we have never met before, but the things that worked out are more than leaving a comment, hi, bye and thank you.

2) New opportunities
Blogging presents new opportunities.
What are those that will interest you? Girls? Guys? Those fall into New Acquintances.. oh.. so i forgot to mention…
Other opportunities includes contest that requires you to blog about something, and they have cool prizes. Like DSLR and iPod.
Some opportunities include making money, like putting a link to some websites and receive cash. I had such once but I happily rejected it as it’s just a way to increase the rank of that targetted website for search engine and I rather keep my blog clean.
Some events or activities that are indirectly linked and I appreciated it much was the LG event, GTUG KL and Code Android Malaysia that I took part this year.
Well, just in case you don’t know, some bloggers get invites to super cool events and recently there’s a few selected to test drive BMWs with the company of police. How cool is that huh?
But I’m not aiming for that la, at least for the very moment…

3) Existing friends
This blog serves in a way for me to update some of my friends about technology stuff, and I try to put in in a way that is as simple as possible so that the most of my non-IT friends would understand. I received comment that it’s still kinda geeky from some, so I will try to improve on this, to make it as lay-man as possible but also not too boring for IT people.

By the way, I do not consider myself a blogger yet just because of my blogging, just like we do not say we are facebooker because we use facebook. It’s probably due to the frequency I’m coming out with my blogpost. I’d consider a blogger if they come out with blog post every 1 or 2 days and they make a lot of money out of it.
I’m still far from that and I have not decided to be a problogger. Don’t call me a blogger.

The third and last part of the first year review: Blogging One Year After – The Unseen Blogging Knowledge

Internet, Internet Marketing, blogging blogger, CodeAndroid, EOE, Exabytes, GTUG KL, iPod, LG, slr

During the last GTUG KL Wave hackathon, I have made (hacked) a quick and dirty (yes, dirty) Google Wave robot.
I have subsequently posted about how to use the Google Wave Java API and some of the sample code from my Wave robot.

I have recorded the function of the Wave robot. Watch the demonstration video below, to see how the Wave robot functions.

Below is a screenshot of my very new Google Wave control center

Oh, by the way, I found out I have 13 more Wave invites!

If you want one, just leave a comment below telling me any one of the following:
1) What do you think of my sample Wave Robot
2) What Wave gadgets or robots idea you think would be nice
3) Why would you want a wave invite

Simple isn’t it. Let’s wave!

Add me :

Good To Know, Google, Internet, Software, Technology Google Wave beta, GTUG, GTUG KL, Technology Google Wave, Wave Developer Preview

What’s Google Wave?

Hmm.. looks like I have been covering a lot on Google stuff lately and ‘Google’ is the largest word in my tag cloud now.

But with the rate of cool stuff coming out from Google, I couldn’t stop myself.

Google Wave, as defined by Google, is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. What the heck does that means anyway?

It is still in developer preview stage, and not open for public use yet, just like the initial stages of GMail.

Lucky for me though, this time I get to have a developer preview access, thanks to my participation in Google Technology User Group, KL. More on GTUG later.

I have attached a lengthy video of the initial wave announcement + demonstration at the bottom of this post. It takes more than an hour to finish, but if you’re into innovation, it’s well worth it.

To me, I see that Google Wave addresses some problems in our current email usage. This includes an email thread which started with the first email of questions that goes back and forth between a few people, adding more and more colours to highlight the part of new reply and also trying to figure out the sequence of replies. Familiar?

Google Wave has a client or a browser based interface like your email software that lists conversations. Each topic is a wave and every reply is a blip.

Users can playback the wave in sequence or by frame to see how the conversation started up to the current point and also easily embed photos or videos.

It supports programs named Wave Robots, Gadgets and Embed API. Don’t let those names intimidate you, they are just programs for the conversational tool.

Robots are programs that can be added into a wave and become a tool in the wave. It is an automated participant, programmed to do things that can be done by participant, only that it is a Robot.

Gadgets are programs that can be added into the wave, something like miniature objects that can provide cool and dynamic contents. At this point of time, I would like to say it’s something like OpenSocial gadgets but ironically it doesn’t support OpenSocial API yet. Most of the gadgets are games.

Embed API is working the other way, where developers can put Google Wave into their website instead of putting their program into Wave. An example for this is extension to blog commenting system, where wave users can comment with their Google Wave accounts.

I don’t think it as a super duper cool technology that will change our lives as much as Google Search does, but gradually it might change how people communicate more than just plain email and instant messaging.

The video of the Google Wave keynote presentation in Google IO:

Google Wave will progress from developer preview to beta version starting September 30th. Another 100,000 wave accounts will be given on top of those having developer preview access.

If you’re interested with Google Wave technology, request for your access here. I heard those who will report bugs and submit feedback will get their accounts sooner.

I joined the GTUG KL 2nd Wave hackathon session last weekend and created a simple Wave Robot with Java. I’ll be posting about my experience of that soon, so stay tuned. GTUGs are user groups for people who are interested in Google’s developer technology. GTUG KL is the group in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Follow GTUG KL on facebook, and join the upcoming events. There might be cool lightning talks about cool Google stuff or even hackathon sessions for developers.

Google, Internet, Technology Google Wave, Google Wave beta, GTUG, GTUG KL, Wave Developer Preview