This has had as much if not more attention from the blogosphere and the mainstream media as did the launch of the first-generation iPhone last year.

I’ve installed Chrome and have had about an hour in total just taking a look at it.

So, initial and immediate thoughts captured in these two videos, recorded on my Nokia N95 8GB with seesmic mobile, the new mobile app from seesmic in private alpha testing. (Why two videos? Because the first one timed out!)

More thoughts later as I get to know Google Chrome.

Related post:

[NevilleHobson.com] The Google way of effective communication

I’m experimenting with a new theme called Thesis which is now running the look and feel of this blog. Thesis is created by Chris Pearson, a US-based web developer who has produced some pretty cool WordPress themes over the years.

Thesis is a very good example of a new breed of WordPress theme - a theme that contains some intelligence in its creation and significant added value to go along with it, all of which enables you the blogger to adapt it to your specific requirements without having to do any PHP code editing.

You can do almost all your tweaking with a combination of the Thesis Options page in your blog, which appears once you’ve installed and activated the theme, and a custom cascading style sheet (CSS).

What you’re looking at today is Thesis literally out of the box. About the only design thing I’ve done so far is add some of my own images to the rotating images feature you see at the top right of the page which automatically changes the image as you move from post to post on the site.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep that feature - it’s quite neat, though - nor what elements of the out-of-the-box theme I’ll change or adapt.

Whatever I decide to do will largely be driven by my desire and wish to have something that is a bit personal to me and this blog and not just another cookie-cutter WordPress theme (or as the default WordPress tag line says whenever you install a new blog, ‘just another WordPress weblog’), points directly address by Chris Pearson:

Just a WordPress theme? Hardly. Thesis is a search engine optimized HTML + CSS + PHP framework equipped with an innovative options panel that makes it easy for anyone to run a professional, customized blog or Website (without being a code jockey).

For some months, I’ve been thinking about re-designing my main blog as I’ve had the current design for about a year (my own adaptation of a WordPress theme created by Michael Pollock).

So part of my reason for installing Thesis here is to play around with it as a potential prelude to implementing it on the main blog. Or not.

Another theme I was considering is one of the Revolution series of themes by Brian Gardner. Like Thesis, Revolution adds intelligence to provide you with easy-to-understand controls from within your WordPress blog admin to tweak the design pretty much how you’d like without your having to dive into any coding.

Revolution is becoming quite ubiquitous, which was a downside for me. I see too many blogs using one or another of the themes in the series without much customization. A bit cookie cutter.

Of course, Thesis could end up like that. But it’s early days yet and I just like this one better.

Earlier I mentioned that Thesis has ‘added value’ to go along with its added intelligence.

That ‘added value’ comes primarily in the shape of a full-blown support forum as well as online help, tutorials and other useful content on the Thesis blog that Chris Pearson maintains.

All of this represents quite a commitment and so if you want Thesis and all the extras that come with it, you’ll have to pay for it to the tune of $89 for a single-blog license. I’m more than happy to do that.

Thesis and Revolution (which also provides a forum, tutorials, etc) are leaders in the pack of so-called premium WordPress themes - themes that you pay for and get additional value beyond the collection of PHP files, CSS, JavaScript and images you upload to your server.

You do have a number of alternatives that range the scale between free themes and hiring a theme designer to develop your own exclusive theme.

But for me, Thesis seems to be nice middle ground.

After some Twitter exchanges today, fellow blogger-tester Sarah Blow posted a video in response to mine at the weekend re the difficulties I’m having in getting the phone cradle to fit with the pole thingy.

A brilliant video, Sarah, showing how easy it should be!

Yet no matter what I do, I cannot get this thing together. Here’s another walk-though (embedded below) of the non-result I keep having. Plus a view on what it’s like fitting it in the car.

The phone itself is great; some comments on that here soon. Yet my experience with this accessory kit, something that should be so simple, is not good at all.

Either the accessory is just badly made or I’m just too dumb to figure it out, I’m really not sure which.

Helpful suggestions more than welcome.

So I’ve been playing with this gadget all week, trying it out mostly with wifi. It’s very nice indeed.

As a phone, it does what all phones do (let you make and receive calls) and it does that job pretty well in the few calls I’ve made, probably testament to O2’s good cellular network coverage.

Not received any calls yet as I haven’t widely advertised the number

As I mentioned in my initial post on my main blog, I’ll be posting thoughts about the Xda Orbit 2 here as and when I have some.

Today I do and it’s to do with an accessory for the phone that I found pretty useless, never mind extremely irritating.

Yesterday I drove into London and decided to try out CoPilot Live 7, the satellite navigation application that comes with the phone.

It’s good and I’ll have a post soon with thoughts on that. This post, though, is to do with the fixing kit you put in your car where you put the phone in a cradle so you can see it and interact with it from your driving position.

Assembling this car kit is impossible. Two of the parts just will not mate. I must have had a dozen attempts to try and do it, all to no avail.

This is one of those situations where you wonder if you’re just an idiot in not being able to figure it out or if the product is badly designed and/or made.

I think the product is badly designed as surely it should be simpler than this.

What exactly is this about? Take a look at this little video I made and posted to YouTube.

If I’m not doing it right, please let me know!

Similar indeed as both services use the internet for their connection and a webcam to communicate. Both also offer additional features, notably phone calling and text messaging.

One marked difference - with ooVoo, you can connect with up to six people simultaneously in a video conversation, and record that conversation.

See ooVoo’s full feature list here.

I joined Marshall Kirkpatrick in a group ooVoo video call as part of My OoVoo Day, a series of online events with bloggers that takes place during the coming ten days, all using ooVoo for video conversations.

This screenshot is what I saw on my screen when everyone in today’s video call was connected:

The experiment shows it does a pretty good job, albeit with some caveats. The ooVoo service, incidentally, is in beta.

Some initial thoughts about ooVoo based on today’s experience:

• The ooVoo software is nicely designed. Good attention to detail, well organized and laid out, not too difficult to quickly find your way around.
• Adding Marshall to my contact list proved a challenge. I knew his ooVoo ID yet when I searched for his details, ooVoo said there was no such user. In the end, Marshall added me as his contact so we were able to connect.
• I couldn’t get my webcam to start so at the beginning of the call, everyone just saw a static photo. Then I discovered a tiny button on my image which I clicked and the video started. It should be easier than that.
• During the call, I observed that my computer’s CPU usage was at near-100% all the time, making the machine extremely sluggish for any other use. This became an irritation when, for instance, other ooVoo windows popped up in response to other events (eg, someone requesting to make content) and which took an age to respond to clicks. I’d certainly hope this behaviour doesn’t continue as the product develops, otherwise it’s a show stopper.
• Recording a video call is a breeze - just click on an obvious button in the record window. The resulting file is saved in FLV (Flash) format. Recording quality, video and audio, is very good.

I have at least one more ooVoo call to participate in this week and may add some further thoughts here based on those experiences.

Marshall has written a review on ReadWriteWeb.Worth reading for additional views and conclusions.

I have some thoughts about the overall My OoVoo Day experiment, primarily from the communication point of which, which I’ll write about at some point on my main blog.

All things blogging in one application, is how the service describes itself with services that include a blog, RSS reader, and social network tools like messaging, all managed from a central dashboard.

I’ve done only a few things so far such as set up a blog there.

I can’t say much more at the moment, though, as the email confirming my registration included this:

[...] Currently, Profy testers are not allowed to share information about the product by any means, including posting information and screenshots on blogs, sharing Profy pages on social bookmarking services, or share your login and/or password information with other people.

You’ll have to make do with the TechCrunch review for the time being.

[Later] Situation clarified. In a comment to this post, Profy.com founder Svetlana Gladkova says sharing info about the product is now permitted.

The software is not yet even beta - it’s sort of in-between alpha and beta - so you need to be prepared for some flakiness. Nothing so far gives any indication that this tool is less than polished and complete. But I’ve been using it for less than 30 minutes

The blog editing functionality is very good. Configuring it to access this blog was very easy. Writing a draft post with the WYSIWIG editor and then publishing it was equally easy. The editor even includes a spell checker. Well, maybe that’s planned as clicking the spell button produced no action.

So, impressive. More later as I play with this.

So with that in mind, I just started a new blog on WordPress.com, the new free blog hosting service launched in August by WordPress.

Very easy to set up and the admin interface is very similar indeed to that of WordPress itself, ie, what I see with this blog when I log in to it.

I received the invitation - you have to be invited - from Rob Safuto. Rob’s also a multiple blogger - in addition to his excellent PodcastNYC, he also writes the highly-readable The New York Minute Show, an insider’s podcast about the Big Apple, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog about Marriott Hotels.

I’d actually received an invite from WordPress in September. But I didn’t get around to activating it until last weekend - which is when I discovered that the invite expired after seven days.

Anyway, I have the new blog, just called Neville on WordPress.com. Not sure yet what I’ll do with it nor how frequently I’ll post to it.

Have to see how much of that copious spare time I can use.

(Cross-posted from NevOn 2.0, my WordPress experiment.)

Among its many features are 8-channel mixing, 4 microphone/line inputs, a load of special effects as well as phantom power for a condenser microphone. Full specs here. Bundled with it is Cubase LE recording software. That’s primarily intended for music mixing and I’ll probably stick with Audacity for podcast voice recording.

I bought the Alesis at Maplin Electronics in Bayswater for just under 130 quid, along with a Shure C606 dynamic cardioid microphone. It all looks to be more than ample for what I want to do with audio recording for podcasting, at least at this point - an affordable hardware-based recording and mixing system that’s easy to install and set up and isn’t too complicated to figure out and use.

Installation was very easy - turn it on, plug the USB cable into the PC, turn on the PC and that was basically it. Windows XP saw it immediately and, after changing the default recording/playback settings in the control panel audio setup, I was good to go.

So I’ve been experimenting a bit today, and learning (or trying to at least) some new things. I’m sure I don’t yet have the optimum settings for standard voice recording - this 5-minute test recording (MP3, 2Mb) might indicate that - so more trial-and-error testing ahead. I plan to use it when Shel and I record Monday’s edition of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

One issue I may encounter - echo when recording over Skype. Shel and I have had this problem for a while in our twice-weekly shows. The echo doesn’t record but I certainly hear it. We think it’s a mixer issue. So I wonder what will happen on Monday when I’m using this mixer and Shel’s using his and we’re recording over Skype…

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I’ve commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - “NevOn 2.0″ - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I’ve not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what’s in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you’d want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it’s important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I’m going to hedge my bets.

What I’m thinking is that I’ll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I’ve got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn’t a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That’s currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who’s bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can’t see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it…