i.ph – outside looking in

Now, let’s try to verify my knowledge of i.ph . Let’s check which of the perceptions I wrote about are approximately accurate, and which aren’t. ...

i.ph = spiffy layouts

Yup yup yup. Things are spiffy in here. I took a tour of the featured blogs. Well designed interfaces, I might say. You’ll see very well that the templates bloggers started out with were very pretty right from the start. I did notice a lot of material customized by the individual bloggers. I found out from i.ph’s knowledge base that Calliope has a control panel where bloggers can change a handful of properties of their blog such as header style, watermark, header image etc. I’m sure advanced bloggers can do so much more if they get their hands dirty.

Calliope – not foreign, but locally developed

The dictionary meaning of Calliope is "a musical instrument" pala. It has Greek origins. As for Calliope of Dot.ph, it is a locally developed content management software. It has such a cosmopolitan name because it’s being marketed not just here in the Philippines but also in other countries. Goodluck to the marketing team! You have a good product here, from what I’ve seen so far. (But a lot of competition too!)

i.ph for free?

Yes. You can get an i.ph blog for free. What I tried to do was to find out the limitations of a free account. For example, something to the tune of 200Mb blogspace, or some blogging features available only for paid accounts. I couldn’t find that information yet.

What I did find was that i.ph’s FAQs seem to be outdated. Whereas the first half of the FAQs speak of setting up a free account, the second half of the FAQs reverberates with echoes of paid accounts:

How long will it take to register and activate an i.ph domain?
Upon payment, the i.ph domain can take up 8 to 24 hours before it is fully visible across the Internet.

multi-media blogging?

photo blogging? – Check
video blogging? – Check
audio blogging? – Not really.
Theoretically though, you can upload your audio files anywhere on the net and link to those files from i.ph. But I didn’t find anything on i.ph that integrates audio blogging into calliope.

My total score: 3 2/3 out of 4.

What else shall we investigate about i.ph?

What features did I miss?

· Blog integration with other online services such as “Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, FWD, Friendster, Tagboard, Links, and MORE...”. I wonder how well Calliope will keep up with the ever emerging and evolving IM’s. For example, will Calliope integrate with Google Talk, too?
· Online tagboard to SMS (a text message to the owner of the blog) – the sender needs to be a registered user of Chikka.com .
· E-mail to blog! Ah, this is something for people like me! I like writing articles on the fly using Brosia, my SmartPhone. I am able to send articles via mobile e-mail. This will work perfectly with i.ph . What’s more, i.ph allows gallery upload via e-mail. I’ll be able to upload mobilephone photos via MMS e-mail to i.ph ! Worth a try. Will write about that in the future.
· There is an announcement about earning through your blog. But it isn’t up and running yet.
· I’ve visited the i.ph forums. I don’t see much activity there.

So how much of i.ph did I know of? Well enough.

That’s me from the outside looking in. After i.ph came out with free accounts, I get the impression that more people started looking into i.ph. Well, at least that’s the attitude I am personally taking.

What’s next?

I’m on the hunt for user feedback. After checking out i.ph from the outside, I’d like to hear what other people have to say about i.ph . Consider this as getting a second opinion. So I’ll be going around, searching for i.ph and non-i.ph blogs, checking out what people think of i.ph . Tignan natin what I find.

Until the next article!

ka edong
i.ph think therefore i.ph am.