Man, it’s hard to be a blogger.
Well, OK, it’s not that difficult if you’re someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don’t know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don’t read it, but Karen does.)
But I’m not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I’m not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.
So anyway, I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There’s no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I’d give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We’ve mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I’m sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.
Wait, didn’t I say that I wasn’t in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.
Since I’m on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I’ve downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I’m taking that trade-off.
- Twitterific (For following twitter updates)
- Stanza (eBook reader with several libraries of free books)
- USA Today
- Lose It! (A food/exercise counter similar to NutriMirror)
- AT&T myWireless (account manager and bill pay)
- e*Trades Mobile Pro
- Shazam
- Remote (iTunes remote control)
- Yelp
- Restaurants Nutrition
- 8 (a “glasses of water” counter)
- iFitness (the only paid app, has 100’s of exercises demonstrated, plus user workouts)
- Instapaper (Downloads Web pages you don’t have time to read so you can come back to them later)
- Bible
- Barnes & Noble Bookstore
- Flixter (movie times, trailers)
- Amazon.com
- WebMD
- Free German Essentials (a trial version with only 130 or so vocabulary words; the full version has 1000’s of vocab to learn)
- Currency converter
- Wikipanion (Wikipedia search)
- AP Mobile (though I’m liking USA Today better, might get rid of this one)
- Wi-Fi Finder
- Mancala
- myLite (flashlight plus some other cool things like strobe light)
- Harry Potter 6 (interactive game, haven’t looked at it yet)
- iSniper lite (Free trial game, kinda boring)
- iHandgun (Sound emulator)
- Lightsaber (Sound emulator)
See what fun can be had! Why do I get the feeling that some of you are criticizing my productivity…
Map This! 
I can recommend some really good apps. They're not free, but are totally worth the small price.Shazam: You can tag music you hear on the radio, TV, movies, then it will upload the clip, tell you what artist it is, song title, album, etc. and even gives you a link to download it in the itunes store on the phone.1password: allows you to store all your usernames and passwords(pin protected). I have a ton, so if I ever forget, it's right there in ma phone.Cha-Ching: THE best budget app out there. Great interface, and tons of features. Really helps.ToDo: Great for organization, obviously it does to do lists, but you can also setup projects, and do other stuff. I use it all the time.Pandora: just awesome.White Pages: Look up phone numbers, addresses, names, you can even do a reverse phone lookup if you get a call from someone, and you don't recognize the number.Now, for the not so productive apps, I.E. games -Peggle – so awesome, so adictive. It's like crack for your iphone.Rolando and Rolando 2 – really cool art direction and gameplay.Knights Onrush – Tower Defense game, really fun.Sway – Cool art direction and inventive gameplay mechanics.Honorable Mentions:Zen BoundHarbor MasterStar DefenseTap Tap RevengeTowerBloxx
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I'm jealous. We should talk iPhone sometime…
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Thanks for the kind words, Matt.Monetization is a killer right now for bloggers, but we are talking about it over at http://www.newtechzilla.com about journalism and moving toward alternative methods of business plans.I have the Blackberry Storm. How is the iPhone for you?
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Karen reads a mommy blog??
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