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Bored with Twitter? Fed up with Twinkle? Step it up a level and stream video direct from your mobile phone to the web using Qik!

The core idea is that you download a small application onto your phone, sign up to qik.com and then simply stream whatever you fancy direct to the Internet. Videos can be watched live or at a later date via qik.com.

To make it happen you’ll need a pretty modern phone though. Windows Mobile and iPhone support has just been added to Symbian OS, covering many modern handsets, but still leaving many needing an upgrade (like myself).  Qik also advise that you get yourself an unlimited data plan.  I imagine this is a wise step.  Qik is probably the sort of app that would ruin someone on pay-as-you-go fairly swiftly.

Right now it all seems pretty fresh.  The website looks sparkly and web 2.0 enough, but the videos seem to show people dipping their toes into the service.  There are lots of short clips of people videoing their computers / desks / the ceiling etc..!

The functionality is all there, however, and well layered. There isn’t that feeling of being overwhelmed that you sometimes get when confronted with just too much functionality. Most of this is through the clever use of tabs and a well laid out, crisp design.

It has all the syndication features you’d expect from a descent app. You can access user’s video feeds via RSS.  You can even make Qik update your Twitter feed every time you post a video!

Fresh from securing $3 million in funding, Qik seems to be securing it’s status as the market leader in live video streaming direct from mobile phones.  It will be interesting to see how the service grows and blossoms as it moves beyond the early-adopter phase.

PS: Benn can I have an iPhone please so I can play with Qik?

Quick heads up for those heading over to Media 360 (May 14th - 16th). Benn will be there trying to shout about the power of digital to the ‘hard of hearing’ incumbents. If you are going to be there then why not Twitter!

This article was flagged up by Jim Sterne’s twitter: http://www.wdfm.com/marketing-tips/jim-sterne.php

It’s a really nice and simple ‘top 10′ list of things that you must measure on your website.

The key advice from the article is that investing more in your website without measuring how well it’s working is simply gambling’. You should ‘Set goals. Make changes. Track results. Repeat. Those are the instructions for a bigger, better, faster, stronger website’.

Why not do a health check yourself?

We’ve just come across a really nice article, explaining how the web has impacted  journalism. The article, written by independent journalist, Bill Thompson, outlines some of the key changes relating to news online, and how they have affected journalism. These include:

• Blogging turning from a ‘curious habit of the self-obsessed into a defining use of the internet for all forms of communication’
• News feeds, aggregators and personal recommendations on social network sites replacing the front pages of major news providers, as the way that people find out about breaking news
• The Guardian moving from a newspaper with a nice website, to an online information source that also publishes a dead tree edition
• New services like Twitter offering alternative ways of getting the news, in the form of short updates about breaking news or links to longer pieces

In terms of the future of journalism, a key thinking point from the article came from a comment made by Solana Larsen, one of the managing editors of Global Voices (a site that offers easy access to many of the world’s bloggers and tries to “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online”). She believes that in 5 years time, the “foreign correspondent” - sent off to a strange land to report on the activities of the “natives” - will no longer be needed. The main reason being that there are becoming more and more places online where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them, and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.

Whether you agree with this or not, the full article is definitely worth a look: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7338238.stm

TwitPic is a really cool service that lets you easily add photos to your Twitter stream. In its latest release it has added mobile support, a new interface design, a real-time Google map mashup, plus a couple of features that bring additional utility to Twitter and the TwitPic service, including tagging, geotagging, and RSS feeds. These help with the self-broadcasting end of the life streaming spectrum, and they also help to better organize the huge amount of content on Twitter. If only pulling an RSS feed directly from Twitter was so easy.

Tagging and geotagging are not currently available on TwitPic yet, but they will soon become an integral part of the TwitPic service. These new features, along with the TwitPic API, show the ways in which TwitPic is aiding the Twitter economy.

One thought is how will this integrate with the Facebook Twitter API?

The New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Botanicalls group have been working on a project that allows your plants to talk to you over Twitter. Botanicall’s Twitter hack answers the question: “How is your plant doing?”. The main pieces of technology used are a Blackberry and assorted bits of Arduino boards - the wires detect the moisture levels in the plant’s soil, and when it drops to a pre-determined level, it will fire off a tweet and let you know what’s going on. So in theory you should always know when to water your plants - can’t really get any easier for you than that!

The great thing about this project is that the general principals involved could be applied in loads of ways. Whenever someone gets too close to my car, I could have it tweet my friends list. I could create a contraption that hangs from my cat’s collar and tweets me when it detects that there’s no more water left in the dish. Leave a comment and let us know what Twitter contraption you would find useful…