Thomas Stenumgård

(Social) Media Strategy

Create something awesome

BlackBerry in London

I’ve been almost obsessively watching mobile phone usage while I’ve been in London the last few days. Seems like “everyone” has a Blackberry here, while in Oslo/Berlin the same is the case with the iPhone. Just saw a couple of teen girls in a mobile store having an informed discussion about Blackberry models. Guess it has to do with everyone using email rather than sms. Sounds like a good thing.

(iPhone) Kindle App - What Would Be Cool

I’ve made it almost halfway through Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky using the Kindle iPhone app. Reading books on the iPhone works as smoothly as expected and I love how easy it is to highlight stuff and take notes while reading (I do this a lot). It’s indeed a game changer for me.

However, the Kindle app could benefit from a few more features, even though I like the simplicity. These would be:

Possible to quote/comment and post directly to blog. Ideas I would like to share often pop up while I’m reading and it would be great to be able to share these frictionlessly on the go. An optional automatic link to the particular part of the book and page numbers would be helpful. This feature would also be useful for spreading ideas, and an interesting way to do marketing (for publishers/authors).

Hit a button and all highlights and comments are automatically organized under the corresponding headings and sub-headings (complete headings for better context), with links to particular pages and page numbers. This way it would be easy to go back and read my own summary of the book. At school I used to write summaries like this, but this would save a ton of time.

An option to share comments, highlights (and references) with other people who also bought the book. Useful for complementing own reading, and might create an incentive to write better notes.

Add reference to other literature feature in addition to highlights and comments. Nice way to create own patterns and to discover new stuff about particularly interesting material. For example, transaction costs seems to be an important concept when thinking about the effects of social media on organizations (organisation of work/ getting things done in general). Brad, who also read this book, thinks Transaction Cost Economics by Oliver E. Williamson is useful reading on this topic, in addition to The Nature of the Firm By Coase, mentioned by the author.

I realize there are probably a ton of copyright issues, but it would be nice to see some of this in a desktop/web version of the app.