I was thinking of writing this post about the 3G Iphone anyway, as I had discovered some things that are helping me have a better experience with it – and just as I was about to begin – Deep Jive Interests – when ahead and did his own critique of the 3G Iphone (though I missed meeting Tony Hung when I was Tornoto last May for the Social Media RoundTable and Third Tuesday – we did try to hook up).

Tony Hung’s post on Some (Late) Thoughts on the iPhone 3G: Its Good, Bad and sometimes Ugly was just published – and he noted the bad battery life – well ….. there’s actually a work around for that one as mentioned earlier this month in Gizmodo – Apple’s iPhone 3G Fix: Turn Airplane Mode On and Off – I’ve been doing that when I’m not home or somewhere that I know I can access the wireless network without a password (not that many places) and it’s doubled the battery life!

Of course, if I’m on the phone much – I’d say, more than an hour – that will eat away about half of the battery right there – but the ATT 3G Network works OK, most of the time, if you run into trouble, just Turn Airplance Mode On and Off - as mentioned in the Gizmodo article and that seems to trigger a reconnect to ATT which restores my connection, 9 out of 10 times.

The last firmware update helped as well (don’t keep track of the exact release number) and another coming in September will help even more, so I’m told.  And a post just published by Gizmodo on August 28th gives the reason why the latest firmware patch helped with the 3G Network – Power Consumption (but it had to be more than this, I feel) -The iPhone 3G’s Problem May Have Been Found and Fixed:

Essentially, the 2.0.2 updated the iPhone to ask for less power from AT&T’s towers for UMTS voice and data transmission.

Essentially, the 2.0.2 updated the iPhone to ask for less power from AT&T’s towers for UMTS voice and data transmission. Apparently iPhones were simply asking for too much power—more than the handsets actually required—and when many iPhone users were stacked on one base transceiver station tower, the tower simply ran out of power. No/low tower power equals dropped calls and poor 3G connections.

However, since it’s a power problem, most of the 3G Iphones need to get the update so that all benefit – as it’s also the cellular towers that are losing power (did I get that right?).

About the rest of what Tony has to say in his post on Some (Late) Thoughts on the iPhone 3G: Its Good, Bad and sometimes Ugly I agree with most of it – except that I was not even expecting to use the iPhone camera for much, to be honest with you – and have lately, in the WordPress Application – where I have been able to take a picture and post it along with my thoughts.

Darren Rowse wrote a post about blogging on the 3G Iphone – The iPhone 3G as a Blogging Tool – My Review

“…. as a blogging tool, the iPhone meets the expectations that I had when I bought it.

I didn’t expect it to be ever be a primary blogging device – and it isn’t – however it will be a very useful device to use as a secondary and supporting blogging device. It will save me time, allow me to be aware of important events that are relevant to my blogs and help me to connect better with readers and other bloggers.

I’m certain that other mobile devices can do similar things (in fact some like the Nokia 95 have a number of the things in my wishlist below) but for me, at least for the next little while, it’s the iPhone that I’ll be carrying in my pocket.”

My thoughts are that I’m happy to have a way to finally blog to my WordPress blogs, for a change, even if buggy, and even if I can’t spell check what I write very well – it’s much appreciated.

I’d say, in a year from now, with an external pluggable Keyboard and some more improvements in Battery Life, the 3G Iphone released then (next year) will become a viable laptop replacement.

And one more thing Tony, you say the battery life of a 3G Iphone is awful – and it is – but have you been carrying around the outlet plug so you can change it up from a normal power outlet?

I carry mine everywhere I go now.

This is pretty scary – and funny – at the same time, as covered by the New York Times in an article today titled Sarah Heath Palin, an Outsider Who Charms.

I suppose what’s really interesting here - Sarah Palin was choosen – to drive a wedge between Hillary Clinton supporters and Barack Obama’s campaign. Somewhere, Hillary must be Smiling, according to Monica Crowley, Ph.D

According to Crowley:

“… A few months ago, Obama put down people like her, saying they “cling to their guns and their religion.”

Something tells me Governor Palin is going to be a rock star in the states that really matter — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. They like their guns and religion, too.”

I really hope that’s not what happens; we’ll see.  I think people are smarter than just voting for Palin because she’s a woman – her values are directly opposite what Hillary Clinton’s views are.

According to the New York Times:

“…She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her,” said Andrew Halcro, a Republican turned independent, who along with Tony Knowles, a Democrat, ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006. “Tony and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.’ ”

“You know,” said Mr. Halcro, invoking the Democratic presidential nominee, “that’s kind of like Obama.””

It’s not like Obama – except that McCain is fighting one type of persona with another and attempting to divert and confuse voters, hoping they’ll fall for it.

Clearly, John McCain is desperate – and willing to roll the dice  – he figures he has nothing much to lose, but we have alot to lose.

Radian6 – Top 10 Posts on Gov. Sarah Palin – 8/28/08

Whoopi Weighs in on Sarah Palin and Reader Comments on Her Obama Post!

Radian 6 targeted the Woopi Goldberg post as being the most important in the last 24 hours, for Sarah Palin profile I’ve set up.  Here’s the main part of what Woopi said – which Radian6 targeted on:

Well, as I’m watching television this morning, it appears that John McCain may pick Gov. Sarah Palin, of Alaska, to appease all of those angry women — the ones who were going to vote for Hillary and then threatened to vote for John McCain — by just picking a woman. It’s expedient, and should make everybody feel better. After all, what do women actually know? They’ll pick any female, as long it’s not a guy. That kind of thinking is so insulting I don’t know what to say.

I’m sure Sarah Palin (we’ll find out more information on her) is a wonderful woman, but if you’re a Democrat why would you go for a Republican female that you don’t know much about just because she’s female? Has John McCain missed the point? Or is that the point? That these angry women are angry because a woman was not picked … not Hillary Clinton … but a woman.

I looked at some of the comments to my Barack Obama post this morning and I thought they were fantastic. There was one lady who was irritated with me, I guess because I called Barack Obama an African American.

Governor Palin is attractive, I’ll give her that – but that’s not a qualifer to hold elected office.

I’ve been using Radian6 quite a lot thanks to meeting with Marcel LeBurn and working with the great people at Radian6 to funnel web analytics ideas of how to make it more of a tool that can be used for Data Analysis beyond what PR or Marketing departments might employ it for (ie: reputation monitoring is fine, but identifying influentials and then setting up the analytics to segment on that traffic can yield very deep insights – but no one thought of Radian6 as something to use that way – till I bought it up).

Another capability of Radian6, and packages like it, is to come up with keyword phrases that are connected to conversations around major topics – this is a capability totally absent from the current set of Keyword Research tools, that were never built for that purpose – never really built with Social Media in mind, and don’t have a concept of a “conversation” – while in Social Media, Conversations are the “brick and mortar” of communication – you can’t have Social Media without a Conversation – 2 way or peer to peer.

With that in mind, Radian6 is making improvements to their core product this weekend - here’s the notice that went out today to current users of Radian6:

Advanced Data Drill-Down Capabilities
Now from within your widgets when you want to drill-down into the data in addition to being able to open the data in a River of News widget, you can also launch it into a Times Series widget or a Topic Cloud widget.  For example, if you are clicking on a spike in activity in a Time Series graph, you now have the option of opening the content in a River of News widget or in a Topic Cloud widget so you can see the top words being mentioned during that spike.  To access this feature, when you click on a widget (i.e. A word in a topic cloud, a bar in a chart or a line on a time series graph) simply click and hold your left mouse button down and a new menu will open providing the advanced drill-down capabilities.

All of the widgets now have this capability and you can keep drilling down multiple times to get more and more specific in your research.  As an example, you could open a time series graph from a topic cloud, then drill into the time series graph and open another topic cloud then click on a word in that cloud and open the content in River of News.

New Social CIM (customer interaction management) Module
This optional add-on to the core R6 dashboard enables you to effectively management and track your team’s online engagement efforts.  Seamlessly integrated into your River of News widget and into your browser through an integrated toolbar, you can now easily assign/manage engagement tasks, categorize posts, set priorities on posts, track notes and your online responses, and run reports including detailed audit trails of your team’s engagement activities.

This new module also introduces the flexibility to have users accessing Radian6 directly through their browser, without needing to configure the entire dashboard.  The browser plug-in gives you quick and easy access to the information you need, with the Social CIM capabilities you need to get engaged in your brand’s conversation with a quick and easy workflow.

New Training Videos and New Feature Overview Videos
In the Help section of the dashboard you can now access training videos if you need a refresher on building Topic Profiles or configuring widgets.  You can now also access short demonstration videos of new features that have recently been added to the system.

Check out the video section to see quick demo’s of all of the new features in this release!

Enhanced Vote Count Dynamic – Digg.com support
In addition to tracking de.licio.us bookmarks, our Vote Count dynamics (listed in River of News widget and in Influencer model) now includes support for Digg.com.

Enhanced API Feed
The programmatic interface into the Radian6 content now include three new data elements for each post: language of post, country of post, and author of post.
In order to deploy these new changes, the Radian6 dashboard will be offline Friday August 29th from 9pm EDT to 10pm EDT.

Which reminds me – Radian6 will be attending BlogWorld.com and so will Buzzlogic.com – and that sorta suggests that BlogSpeedway.com, aka, me and Sebastian Wenzel, or just me, should attend as well.

I’m still making my mind up about this as if I do attend, it’ll be a last minute thing – but many of my friends will be there and we’re looking for a lot of new bloggers to join our Blog Network – BlogSpeedway.com