The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

Happy (Gregorian) New Year!

I usually like to post something about how major holidays are celebrated around the world on the occasion of each holiday... and so here I am again.

Today is New Year's Eve according to the Gregorian calendar, used most widely around the world. If you live in Portugal, you'll probably eat 12 grapes at midnight and, if you're Danish, you may break some dishes at the front door of your friends' houses. Read about other New Year's traditions here. And here's a link to read an overview of other New Years holidays celebrated at different times of the year. Many people in the South Pacific celebrate New Year's in mid-October at the appearance of the group of stars called the Pleiades. This marks the end of the harvesting season and the end of the year. Their festival of Makahki is a time for feasting, sports and truce-making.

May you find broken dishes at your doors, feast, play sports and make truce!  I also send out wishes and prayers for peace and prosperity for those who find themselves in dangerous places and without the means to feast or make merry in troubled times.

posted by: howard at 12:21 | link | comments (3) |
international, news

The future...

...not in the crystal ball sense, in the planning sense.

Up until now mo'time has been financially supported by our other blogging and instant messaging businesses and will continue to enjoy that funding.  But in order to insure the future growth of mo'time, as we add new features and increase the disk space and bandwidth that we can give you for free, we have come to the point where we need to earn some money from the site.  I want to emphasize that mo'time is not in danger of closing, but we do need a long term plan to grow, nay, flourish!

We are planning on implementing the 2 most obvious models: advertising and subscriptions. We would like to hear from you about what you think of these plans.

Advertising model

From the start all mo'time blogs have had a small bar on the top of the page with the mo'time logo, some links and a text ad space that we use to place self-promotional messages. After a short while we found that the space was too small to be of much advertising value, but we decided to keep the bar small and unobstrusive.

We would like to expand the bar to a height of about 70 pixels (roughly double the present height) to allow for classic advertising banners (468 x 60 pixels) to be displayed. Many big sites now use banners that are 728 x 90 pixels, but that seems over the top, at least at this stage.

Another idea we had was to provide an option for you to choose to place some Google ads on your blog's sidebars, or between posts, in exchange for more disk space and other extra features at no additional cost to you. This would be something that you would actively choose, and would not be placed on your blog by default.

If these ideas work, we can offer you even more free disk space for your photos, videos and other multimedia files. But if the ad space options really bug you, we'll offer a subsciption plan so that you can get rid of them. Either/or. You should be able to decide which way to go.

Subscription model

For a monthly price of $5.99 USD (OK, it's basically 6 bucks, but you can't blame a guy for trying), you can make the ad bar go away, you get 200MB of disk space, if you have your own domain your blog's address can be "www.my-domain.com", you get full RSS and Atom feeds and an elevated position for your blog in the "latest blogs" section of the new mo'time magazine, soon to be released.

Feedback, please!

So, that's what we're thinking. What's your opinion?

posted by: howard at 23:11 | link | comments (55) |
updates, features, advisory

Audio & "files" uploading added!

Step by step, slowly I turn... ooops wrong show.

It is now possible to upload photos and images, audio clips, videos and any other kind of file that you wish to share with others on your blog. If you look at your logged-in home page, under the Blogs heading, you will see the new Multimedia heading. You will see little icons indicating the kind of file that you would like to add to your blog:

   

There is also a new tab Multimedia up on top alongside Blogs, Community and Account. Clicking on that will bring you to your control panels for managing all your media files and your automatically created "Mediablog".

Adding multimedia is now as simple as pointing and clicking on the icons and following the instructions. These files can then be posted directly to your blog or just kept in your albums and mediablog for  browsing. You can keep your albums public or choose to hide ones that you wish to remain private.

You will also notice all the multimedia icons also in your blog editor, making it easy to add new media files or post ones that you have already uploaded to your blog posts. You have 5MB's of space to start out with. We hope to be able to double that very soon and to then offer premium plans for those who want to to upload even larger files.

Don't forget to update you profile picture, aka avatar, right now...

Remember, you must be using one of these browsers for these functions to work: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla or Camino.

posted by: howard at 01:10 | link | comments (10) |
updates, features

Post photos and video...

Hey everybody... take a look in your blog editors. Notice the Add Photo or Video icons? Or else take a look at the new tab "Multimedia" and explore your albums and the new MediaBlog. I'll try to update the manual soon and explain everything in more detail but, in the meanwhile, take it for a spin. It should be fairly easy to understand just clicking around. In the next few days, you will be able to add audio files too... NOTE: Macintosh users, you must use Firefox or Camino in order to upload pictures and videos. We're trying to figure out how to make it work in Safari, too. You've each got 5MB's of disk space for now, which will be fine for starting to post some jpg's and such, but videos take up a lot more space.

posted by: howard at 02:03 | link | comments (9) |
features, updates

Upload your profile photo!

The profile photos have a new format and in a few minutes you can now upload them directly to Mo'time by just pointing and clicking.

Just choose a digital photo from your computer (it's best if you can resize it to 48 x 48 pixels, but if not, the system will automatically resize it for you).

Click here to visit your profile page to upload your photo now!

(If you try now and it doesn't work, please try again in about an hour...)

posted by: howard at 16:12 | link | comments (4) |
updates, features, advisory

Multimedia features on the way

In the next few days we hope to be able to activate some new features to make Mo'time easier and more useful for those of you who would like to post photos, audio files or videos to your blogs. The work will be done in stages, so I would ask for your patience as you see links appear and disappear, new icons here and there and links that lead to nowhere. Fun! Trust me, you'll like the results when we're done.

There will be a "Pro" service offered as well. Not only will your basic blogging services always remain free, we will continue to add features to the basic service. A case in point is this multimedia update. You'll get 5MB's of space to park your pictures, sound files or videos and we'll expand that to 10MB if our bandwidth holds up. For those wanting more space, we'll ask for a small fee to increase your storage space and give you other features, too.

In the meantime, normal blog functions should be undisturbed... so just go about your normal blogging business and I'll announce when it's ready to try out, ok? ;-)

posted by: howard at 00:19 | link | comments (4) |
updates, features, advisory

Winter solstice time, kids

Today, at 18:35 GMT, the Sun will be directly above the Tropic of Capricorn. Depending on whether you are in the southern or northern hemisphere, you will call this the summer or winter solstice, a day widely recognized as the first day of the new season. There are lots of holidays and traditions associated with this day. The solstice (from the Latin solstitium, standing still sun) is the day of the Earth's maximum tilt either to or away from the sun, depending on the hemisphere.

I have collected some links:

• The wikipedia entry on solstice, essentially a page of other links to follow.
• Interesting overview of comparitive cultural traditions and some science links. I liked this one about the analemma.
• A quicktime movie showing the earth's tilt throughout the year.
• A winter soltisce site with pretty complete explanations about different seasonal celebrations.
• An astronomical calendar.

posted by: howard at 23:40 | link | comments (1) |
news