Nový Mlýn - green tech south bohemia

All day the widget has been dipping in and out of operation. Is it a local issue, or is it something with Mosso, who currently host Learnit lists? Here’s an example of where the rest of a page is showing up fine, but not our widget:

Luckily, we have signed up for a service called browsershots.org - this will give us screenshots of Learnitlists.com in 42 different browsers from different locations. If the site appears without problems on that, then we’re okay. If not, at least we’ll know.

Learnit is all one word. It is not Learn it, it isn’t LearnIt and it certainly isn’t learnIT. This is an important differentiation, not only to preserve us from stepping on the toes of other educational brands, but also to give us a standing start when we search on Google. Combine Learnit with the word lists and we have an original brand. An invented word means that you can track your web penetration easily. Now we’re up to 526 mentions on a Google search.

In the last 48 hours we’ve had 6500 unique hits on the widget and 1400 visits to learnitlists.com. Visitors have come from 82 different countries, speaking 42 languages and 350 people have signed up for the service. If you search for “learnit lists” on Google, it now brings up 298 pages.

Not bad for a project with a standing start 24 days ago.

We will soon have water, which means that we’ll soon be able to set up our Water Works UK reed bed. This will be our first innovative sustainable technology at Nový Mlýn. Currently we have wood burning stoves for heat, a composting toilet (now that’s been fun at minus 10)  and low energy lighting throughout the house (of course). Over the next few months we’re going to be adding a Larch roof (a type of wood which is locally grown and bug resistant) and I’m designing the water system with separate flows for separate purposes.

We’ve been looking into a range of eco technology. A heat pump and solar electricity generation would be nice, though they seem to be ridiculously expensive currently. A wind turbine and water powered turbine will be added at some point in the future. Living here for a year has given me a better perspective on what we need now, and what we can realistically achieve at a later date.  For example, we’re planning in the solar hot water system, though we’re not buying the panels just yet.

You have to be really careful as people will now try to sell you anything as being eco - such as nasty cleaning chemicals (because they use less water) or dishwashers. Marketing can be such a black art sometimes.

Anyway, I’m aching from a weekend of hard labour - breaking up wood for the fire & chipping the bathroom tiles from the entrance hall. It’s been an unseasonably warm sunny day, and I’ve heard that it will stay like this for the next month. We’ve been so busy with Nový Mlýn and Learnit lists that we’ve completely forgotten to eat today (it’s now 6.30 pm), I’d say we’re definitely in a state of flow… the web 2.0 startup diet.

Learnit has been written about by a journalist on a respected Social Networking News website: Mashable.com.

With a sudden rush of new members registering for learnit lists we realised we have been included on the official Apple Iphone webapp directory. This is amazing news. I’m absolutely made up. Now I need to put a press release together to give an exclusive to Mashable, the social networking news site.

Searching on Google “learnit lists” now gives 143 entries, it was 88 when I finished on the computer last night (after spending a very interesting couple of hours exploring the web with stumbleup - we’d had traffic from it so I wanted to see what it was about… you install a toolbar and if you click the stumble button it’ll take you to a page that other people with similar interests rated). It’s a nerve racking time, and some mindless yet productive web meandering was just what I needed to slow my brain down for the night.

I’ve just gone down to the kitchen. My hands are stinging from the cold. The rest of the house is about 2 degrees c at the moment, but it’s worth venturing out of the lounge (where the wood burning stove lives) for a celebratory cup of tea. We’ve just submitted learnit to the Apple Iphone webapps directory. We’ve had some positive confirmation that the learnit widget works on the Iphone (from the only person I know who has one).

So, things are moving. The house is being torn apart by a friend with an angle grinder and I am beginning to be able to talk confidently about consumer units and 3 phase cabling; so the rewiring is actually happening… about a year later than we thought it would. Now we just need to make the learnit widget a success, so we can pay for the new roof & the other more costly eco technologies we want to bring to Nový Mlýn. Read the rest of this entry »

How is Web 2.0 advertising different from before? So far, advertisers are simply increasing the amount of bandwidth used by their ads, rather than increasing their sophistication . People using advertising intelligently will not believe that Web 2.0 just means more. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night M got learnit up and running on Google Gadgets. This is great because the Orkut launch is in the last week of February, and seeing as the two systems share the same code, if it works on Google Gadgets, it’ll work on Orkut. Likewise it should be a relatively simple move to put it out as a desktop application.

On Monday I’m meeting with a telecommunications company who have a bespoke, secure VOIP system. They work with companies such as Siemens on a broad range of products, and are very interested in learnit. We would like to set up the text message part of the system with them - where users can choose to have their learnit list sent to them by text message once (or however many times they like) a day. This will create revenue for both of us. I need to find out if they can also organise the sound file to be sent to user’s phones, but this would be a later stage project. Currently users will need to come to our web site to hear sound to go with their list. Read the rest of this entry »

We had visitors at Nový Mlýn yesterday, a family firm of wooden roofers. I’m made up. They’re friendly, and professional and have provided a value for money quote. This is a complete contrast to last week: an installer arrived, swore in Czech when he came into the house (thinking I didn’t understand), assumed he didn’t understand what I said, grumpily shook hands with me while staring in a different direction and gave us a quote for a simple one week job which would cost me 4 months of my teacher salary.  Read the rest of this entry »