Archive for April, 2008

I’ve been exploring the mobilesphere recently - partly for my own interest (since I got a new mobile phone with internet browsing, email and a camera all-in-one) and partly for a section on mobile phone marketing in my book New Trends in International Public Relations.

Websites are currently optimized for a browsing experience from your desktop or laptop, both of which these days have speedy and powerful processors so that the website loads very quickly on your screen. The consequence is that many websites - as well as blogs and other social media spaces - have been designed with a lot of features, including multi-media, so that a visitor has a top-notch experience on the site. All means that a lot of data (measured in bytes - as in byte, Kilobyte (Kb) and Megabyte (Mb)) is transferred from the website to your computer for every page that you access. Mobile phones at the moment do not have the same processing power so access to many websites can be very slow.

WiFi is often free at cafes, offices and some public spaces - and of course, if you visit someone’s house with WiFi, you can log on to their system there. So, using WiFi, you can access the web for free. But if you are someplace where you can’t access WiFi, you have to pay for data transfer to your mobile phone provider to use the 3G connection - this is charged on a per byte basis. You can usually buy a monthly package data package eg so many Mbs for £X and there are some unlimited packages (though read the small print: in the mobile world “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean that at all!).

Data rich websites and costly data connection means that surfing the web by mobile phone can be a painfully slow and expensive business. And yet, more and more people seem to be accessing the internet from their phones. You can see the appeal - the phone is the communications gadget that many people have with them all the time. And many people have a lot of time where they are hanging around in between home, office and seeing friends eg while on the train or on the bus. A good way to while away that time is to access the web - check or write emails, chat with friends online, faff around on a social network and all those other things that you would do on the computer.

To best capture this audience, there are applications that can minimise the time it takes for webpages to load as well as minimising the amount of data transferred so that the mobile browsing experience is fast and cheap - while at the same time maintaining an attractive user interface. I’ve discovered a couple of these applications so that I’ve enabled my two blogs, Fusion View and ZenGuide, to be accessed as mobile versions.

The first is via www.mippin.com. I signed up for a free account and created Fusion View Mobile at mippin.com/fusionview and ZenGuide Mobile at mippin.com/zenguide. Mippin positions itself as a mobile social network for news and blogs so that you can access such sites entirely from within the Mippin network. I like Mippin because of the attractive first page when you arrive at my blogs - there’s a list of simple headings with photos from the relevant posts. At the bottom of each post, you have the option to email the post, Twitter it or Share it on Facebook, which gives an added interactive, social media experience. The main mobile Mippin site itself offers you mobile-optimised aggregated news and blogs to read when you access it on m.mippin.com.

You can get Fusion View on your phone via Mippin by clicking on the “Make it Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

The second mobilising application is www.mofuse.com, which also offers free accounts. I created Mofuse versions of Fusion View Mobile at fusionview.mofuse.mobi and ZenGuide Mobile at zenguide.mofuse.mobi. This applicaiton has one specific function, which is to optimise your site for mobile browsing. The first page when you arrive on my blogs offers a neat list of the post headings but without images. Clicking through takes you to the whole of relevant post with the photos as well. You can access the comments to the post directly within the Mofuse interface (in Mippin, you have to leave the Mippin interface to do that) but there is no social media element whereby you can email the post etc in the way that you can within Mippin.

You can get the Mofuse version by clicking on the green “Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

Do check out both versions and let me know what you think. Do you prefer one over the other? Are you more inclined to email a post / Twitter it or Share it on Facebook - or are you more interested in interacting via the comments section?

This is a fascinating look at an early media technology that changed the course of history from pop culture Renaissance man Stephen Fry.

For the remainder of the programme, sliced into a further five YouTube sized bits go to Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press, which may only be online for so long as it’s not subject to a take-down notice from the BBC….

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with a response to my post about Doctors in the Family.

He writes:

Why do Chinese parents pressure their children to be doctors? The usual quick answer is that doctors make money and therefore that is the attraction. Looking more deeply into the question this may not be the only answer and is certainly not the most important answer. My remarks here on why parents pressure their children to be doctors are limited to my observations in Malaysia during the period starting about 1940s to the present day.

Most children who became doctors in the forties usually come from homes whose fathers were already doctors or members of the professional class like lawyers or engineers. So these children had come from reasonably comfortable homes and from their own experience these children knew that if they wanted to continue to have a comfortable life they should join one of the professions.

They would have seen and felt the respect given to their fathers as doctors and they also want to have that respect. Like most young people these children have a large dose of idealism too; they saw doctors doing good work with the sick and if the patients are poor, often, the doctors waived their fees and the cost of medication. Practising medicine had not become a business like the big private hospitals you have in the present day where you have to pay a deposit before you get to be seen by a doctor.

There are also children that come from poor homes who are idealistic and would want to serve the sick and who also want to be doctors but the medical course lasts for 6 to 7 years and their families could not wait for them for such a long time to contribute to the upkeep of the family. They could become lawyers or engineers but Malaysia in the forties did not have law or engineering schools which meant they had to go overseas and this the family could not afford; they would have to get a scholarship. A few did for engineering but there were no scholarships for a law degree.

All this is not to say that there was no father, who did not say to his son at the dinner table “Son/Daughter, you must study hard to become a doctor.” But by and large I believe a lot of people who became doctors have a large dose of idealism and humanity in them. The Chinese and their community have a great deal of respect for doctors because they know doctors have gone through a rigorous learning process and the Chinese instinctively respect learning and scholarship and also on the whole doctors have conducted themselves well in their community thereby earning its respect. Doctors, in my experience, are generally kindly, soft spoken, gentle and compassionate all qualities that appeal to the young idealistic and usually shy school boy. So there is little need for a father to exert a great deal of pressure to direct his son to read medicine if he is scholatiscally able.

Another reason for fathers wanting their children to take up medicine is this: in the history of the Chinese, the Chinese had always suffered the ravages and disasters from wars, civil wars and other local fighting from neighbouring warlords famines and floods. Any of these could occur at any time in the forties and before, especially, in China. So in the psyche of Chinese fathers their children must be able to move at short notice whenever any of these occurred, even from one part of the country to another in a vast country like China, or to move to another country and not only to move but to be able to earn a living in the new country. A doctor will often be accepted as an immigrant because he will not be a financial burden to the new country. (Actually being a scientist has this advantage too; Chinese children are also encouraged by their parents to take up science.) The recent generations are more relaxed about having to be prepared to suddenly drop everything and emigrate and then to earn a living. As a sign of this I have come across names of Chinese students from Singapore in the class lists of Greats in Oxford. It is well and good to want to do medicine as a safety net but it is also necessary to be able to pass the examinations. This requires concentration of the mind, attention to details and other intellectual abilities. The Chinese students appear to have enough of these mental requisites.

The new Chinese children now want to be rich in the quickest possible time when they grow up and being doctors do not bring in wealth quickly enough so they are going into studies in business, finance, banking, share brokering and such related subjects. Presently they can find employment in these sectors in their new country and in their own.

I have to declare my connection with the doctor profession. I am not a doctor but my Father and one of my siblings were, and my son and the wife of another sibling are. My wife’s Father was also a doctor and three of her siblings became doctors. My wife is the only one who is not and she is therefore regarded as a bit of a duffer by her family because she did not take a medical course but she did extremely well when she took up English literature instead. She is therefore not a duffer; she simply does not like to deal with blood and nasty sores and wounds and see people in pain.

Photo: thanks to laburbuja on flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya

Even the likes of Madonna has to do the hoovering - it makes me feel so much better!

(She’s obviously flogging her new CD but it’s still a fun clip!)

I got a new mobile phone a few months ago and I’ve been slowly exploring all its functions - and in the process, I’m discovering a whole new mobilesphere (I have no idea if there is such a word but it seems an apt way to describe the world of mobile media in the way that blogosphere describes the world of blogs!). My new phone is also a mobile computer, running Windows Mobile and 80% of its front face is given over to the screen - the phone part of it has a virtual keypad for me to touch-type the phone number. It runs a mobile version of Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It has WiFi so so I can surf the internet as well as send and receive emails if there’s a WiFi service available - but I also splashed out and signed up for a monthly data plan so I could be connected wherever I am. With unlimited texting and a huge number of talk minutes on top of all that, the way I relate to my mobile phone has completely changed.

I used my old mobile phone solely for voice calls - and I did not use it a great deal as I don’t like shouting out my part of the conversation in public while I’m on the bus or in the street. I hated texting as I am not very nimble on using the telephone number keys to type out words. My new phone has a Qwerty keyboard (ie like a PC keyboard) as well as letter recognition on a touch-sensitive screen. Now I can email or SMS to my heart’s content in public - an excellent way to pass the time on the bus or wherever I am in transit!

Being a writer with this new writing tool to play with, naturally, I was curious when I came across an article about mobile phone novels. These are apparently huge in Japan. According to Wired magazine: “A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each.” The novelists tend to be young twenty-somethings or even teenagers who type their novels via their own cellphones. According to the writer interviewed by Wired, she can type faster on her phone than on a standard keyboard. There’s even a first mobile phone novel award - sponsored by the premier site that hosts these novels Magic iLand: might you call it the MoBooker?

There has been one author in the West who has written a novel on his mobile phone. According to a news report, “Italian writer Robert Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.” The book has been published in traditional book form by Lulu.com.

I have to say, I admire the abilities of these two writers to master the mobile phone keypad. Even with the mini Qwerty keyboard and letter-recognition function of my new phone, I do not have the patience to write more than a few short text messages or emails on the fiddly thing!

It seems to me, in the West, there has not been any novel specially written for the mobile phone, as far as I know. I don’t think that the reason is necessarily the difficulty of writing on a mobile phone keypad - presumably, one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around. I wonder if Wester writers shouldn’t try this potential new genre. It would be a great way for a new writer starting out to write 500 words at a time. It’s great for readers as most of us have our mobile phones with us at all times - it’s a handy way to read short bite-sized chunks. Writing short, gripping prose is pretty hard, to be sure, and reading a lot of text on a tiny screen can be hard on the eyes. But I think these are excellent challenges for a writer to evolve a writing style exactly suited to this new medium - rather like writing poetry to the constraints of the sonnet form rather than just sticking a few lines together in the modern free-form style.

Would you read a novel on your mobile phone? Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel? Would you, as a writer, be tempted to try writing one? Add a comment or email me and share your views.

Photo: thanks to johnmuk on flickr.com (CCL)

ebk

As a writer, one of the most difficult tasks is keeping my notes and research in order. For my fiction novels, I had a lot of research on geology and the structure of buildings (for The Flame Tree, which involved a defective tower that collapses) and on digital technology and brain function (for Mindgame, which turned on a plot to manipulate the minds of Asians). That was just over a decade ago and most of the research was in the form of articles from journals and photocopied pages from books. There was also all my handwritten notes. I stored them all in folders and ring-binders and after awhile it got really difficult to find the particular bit of information I wanted. I also had some recorded audio interviews on cassette tape which I stored in boxes.

Aah, how I longed to go paperless and be able to find what I needed “just like that” (snap of fingers!).

Working on my current non-fiction book on New Trends in International Public Relations, there is even more research than for the two fiction books put together. Fortunately, now that we are in the age of social media there are some great tools to help me sort, file and access my notes easily. First off, I have a del.icio.us bookmarking account. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is an free online service where you can bookmark webpages that are of interest and that you want to return to again. You can “tag” them with keywords eg asia, social-networks, copyright etc so you can retrieve them again by searching that keyword. You can also add a short description and later, search the text of that short description to retrieve the item you want. It’s part of the social media world because you can share your bookmarks - all of them or only those tagged with a certain keyword, as you choose. You can share them with the world or with only the people you choose or no-one at all. People can subscribe to follow what you are publicly bookmarking.

On the wiki site I’ve created for the book, you can see the feed of my public bookmarks of the webpages that are relevant to the theme of New Trends in International Public Relations - scroll to the bottom of the page. Not only am I able to save the webpages, I can also share them so whoever comes to the book wiki can see what I am currently researching.

The only problem about del.icio.us is that it only saves webpages and I’ve had to find some other means of storing my non-webpage research eg notes of discussions, recorded audio interviews, random thoughts I’ve had while on the bus, articles scanned from or torn out of journals. They have so far all gone into the trusty paper folders again.

However, I recently found Evernote, a virtual note-taking and note-storing site that is in beta trialling. It allows you to bookmark webpages as well as add your own notes and attach photos and audio files - which means that I can keep pretty much all my research in one virtual place so that I can chuck out the paper folders. They don’t support pdf files but a workaround is to upload those into my online storage account at Box.net and link to it from Evernote. I’ve installed their mobile application on my PDA so I can take notes on the fly and upload them directly to my Evernote account. That application also optimizes the Evernote site online for viewing my stored notes from my PDA so I don’t have to clog up my PDA’s memory with old notes. I can also forward emails to the account - so if someone sends me email replies to interview questions, I can keep that email together with my other notes on the same subject. And I’ve taken to snapping a photo of any handwritten Post-Its or other notes and sending those to Evernote as well. And it’s all searchable by text or keyword.

There are some limitations in Evernote’s functionality regarding sharing, private/ public options and elements of their filing logic compared to del.icio.us but hopefully, they’ll be able to improve on those with the feedback that their beta users are giving them. The main thing I’d like to see is greater flexibility in being able to share by reference to specific tags. I’m not switching entirely to Evernote for the current book project since I’m committted to del.icio.us for that but I will certainly be using Evernote more fully for my next book project.

For all you writers, students, researchers out there, I’d say that Evernote is certainly worth a try. It’s currently in beta trialling by invitation only - I have 9 invitations left so if you’d like one, add a comment below and I’ll get back to you on a first come first served basis. Remember to leave your email address in the relevant field - I’ll be able to respond to you but it will not be visible by anyone else.

Photo: of files thanks to Stephanie Asher from flickr.com (CCL)

This film was made by Ed Saunders and a team of his friends who challenged themselves to make a short film in 48 hours from scratch, including story line, filming and editing - and all for less than £10.

Ed is one of the volunteers involved in Dulwich OnView, the online magazine that I’m co-editing, and this film was first shown on that site.

Ed says, “I organised the film weekend to give my colleagues a break from making boring corporate videos and to give my friends and family a chance to get involved in the filmmaking process.”

“To get the films started I wrote out the first lines of thirty novels and stuck them in a hat, each team then pulled out a line and had to incorporate it into their film either as dialogue, a scene, or just let it serve as a stylistic reference.”

The film was inspired by the first line: ‘Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle was staring at him intently.’

“I hope you enjoy it, it’s very silly but we had a great time making it!”

Fred Dervin, a Finnish professor in cross-cultural studies at the University of Turku in Finland has included my podcast Two Voices in a paper on Dissociation and Complex Interculturality - You can dowload* the pdf here and go to page 7.

Grace Chin of the University of Hong Kong has referred to my books in her paper on The Anxieties of Authorship in Malaysian and Singaporean Writings in English: Locating the English Language Writer and the Question of Freedom in the Postcolonial Era - you can download* her paper here

Tamara Wagner of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore gave a paper on my books at the 2005 at the international conference on the Chinese Diasporic and Exile Experience organised by the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Zurich - you can see an abstract of her paper here. Professor Wagner also delivered a paper on A Passion for Other Lovers: The Transformation of Occidentalist Stereotyping in Ooi Yang-May’s Fictionalisation of Malaysia a the international conference on Overcoming Passions: Race, Religion and the Coming Community in Malaysia organised by the Asia Research Institute, Singapore, 11-12 October 2004) - not currently available for download.

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