Jianjun's Blog

After some research and secret testing, I decided to launch a Chinese teaching podcast blog at a separate domain. The podcast will mainly focus on people who never learned any Chinese. The service teaches everyday conversations and will be absolutely free of charge.

The whole course will start with simple greetings and then extend into longer and more challenging situational modules. I plan to give a 5-10 minute class each week with accompanying text materials such as new word list, additional vocabulary and other relevant information.

Since the course will be a one-man show – at least in the beginning – to prevent listeners getting bored quickly, I will try to make each class as short, useful and interesting as possible. While I’m preparing (finding sound clips, writing syllabus, etc.) for the formal launch of the podcast, as always I appreciate any suggestions from you. Although this service is of an amateur nature, I’d like to ensure its quality.

Stay tuned!

OoVoo (what’s ooVoo? Read this post.) recently sent a survey request to users asking for feedback on its functions and possible improvements. Most of the survey questions compared ooVoo to Skype, which gave me a feeling that they were committed (and in the end ready) to grab some market share from that big brother.

However, a few days later when a new version of ooVoo came into being, it only let me down. Instead of offering more useful features, it takes away some of the coolest and charges a fee if you want them back.

The standard (free) ooVoo option now only has these:

Like Facebook, one of the charming features of Twitter is its extendability. Although standard Twitter functions are kind of limited, third-party applications make up for this perfectly. Here are some of the services I used and liked:

1. If you think text tweets are too boring and would like to share your snapshots on-site occasionally, give brightkite a try. Brightkite allows you to post your current location, notes or pictures via web, SMS (if in the US) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) – as an email.You may choose to link your brightkite and Twitter accounts so each time your update on brightkite, a new tweet appears on Twitter. Brightkite has a privacy option so you can always control how detailed your location should be shown to whom. Brightkite is currently in Beta and you need to wait for an invitation to participate. If you can’t get one from their website, leave me a message here. I’ll send one to your email on an availability basis.
2. Ever wondered who’s been following when you didn’t get follower notification? Or are you feeling frustrated when someone unfollows you after you followed them back? With Twitter Karma, in just a few clicks you will find all those information plus a couple of other functions.
3. If you are one of those twitterbuds who can’t stop tweeting even during sleep, here’s a good one for you. Tweetlater sends out pre-scheduled tweets at your own local time. You may also use it as a reminder service tweeting to yourself. But this only works when you use, again, a third-party service notifying you of such tweets. Another use of Tweetlater is auto-follow your new followers. However, since Twitter spammers are on the rise, take the risk when you use this.
4. Did you know many of the most active Twitter users don’t visit Twitter website to interact with other friends? There are many Twitter ‘enhancement’ applications, one of which is Thwirl. Thwirl is an Abode Air application that sits in your system tray. Besides all standard Twitter functions, it also gives you a sound alert when @yourusername appears in the middle of someone’s tweet body. This is a great addition. Twitter by default doesn’t send the message to your ‘reply’ tab unless @yourusername comes first in a tweet. Some other nice functions:
   • re-tweeting a useful message, spreading it far and wide;
   • keyword-searching twitterland messages;
   • shortening long URLs with snurl;
   • picture-sharing via TwitPic.

There are many other great Twitter extensions. But since I didn’t have a chance to try them out, I won’t be able to cover them until I update this post later.

Nice tweeting…