For Bloggers: How to Distribute Your Blog through Amazon Kindle Store

This may come as a surprise but people do to read blogs on the go via Amazon Kindle.

Amazon charges a monthly fee (around $1) per blog subscription but does offer some benefits in return. For example, Kindle subscribers are always provided with full blog articles (not excerpts) and second, Kindle will always download the entire blog content (similar to prefetching in FeedDemon) so subscribers can read blogs even while offline.

How to Get Your Blog on Amazon Kindle

Almost all famous blogs are available for subscription through Amazon Kindle but if you are just a small publisher and like to get your own blog listed on the Kindle store, here’s what you may do:

Step 1: If your current RSS feed includes advertising (like AdSense for Feeds) or you offer only partial feeds, create a new feed for your blog that is both full-text and ad-free.

Step 2: Go to Amazon.com and fill their interest form. This is the official approach but Amazon says they have a huge backlog so you never know how long will it take for Amazon to approve your blog for the Kindle store.

Step 3: Other than the official Amazon channel, you may also want to partner with Newstex. Become a content provider at Newstex by filling this form and they’ll directly work with Amazon to get your blog listed on the Kindle store.

That’s how iphoneunlocks got into the Kindle store. There’s no listing fees and Amazon will pay you 30% of the revenue per Kindle user who subscribes to your blog.

What Can Nokia do to trump Apple’s iPhone

I have been an iPhone user for almost 10 months now and have been thinking about getting a new phone. So when I started looking around for new models, I was amazed to see how none of the available phones would satisfy my requirements. Not even the super Nokia N97.

I am not sure if my usage pattern is unique but I tend to use my iPhone as a music player (podcasts mostly) more than as a communication device. My other iPhone activities would include checking emails, using Google Reader and Twitter (Oh yeah, follow me @acmhatre).

Back in 2005, Sony was the first company to introduce the concept of a walkman phone. Nokia soon followed Sony but both these companies faltered on the software and that’s the secret of iPhone’s success. What makes the iPhone so unique and loveable is not the highly responsive touch screen interface or the good looks - it’s the backbone - the iTunes software.

Unlike the half-baked software developed by Nokia and Sony, iTunes can hold its ground to be used a primary music management software so anything one does in iTunes gets synced to their iPhone. Similarly, iPhoto a great photo management tool and synching with an iPhone is a breeze. Before iPhone was introduced, nobody even talked about updating the firmware on a cell phone because it was just too difficult to be done by an average user.

I am not sure if Sony has the energy to stage a come back but I can see Nokia competing with Apple/ I am not taking about the revenue numbers or number of handsets sold. We all know that Apple is far from even competing on those grounds. I am talking about mindshare and perception based competition.

So what should Nokia do? How about Nokia using SongBird, a free and open source music management software from the Mozilla foundation to do everything that iTunes does for iPhone. It’s being positioned as an iTunes killer anyway.

Nokia, at least for its high end phones, should look into developing plug-ins that’ll allow people to manage and synchronize not only music but videos, photos and as a platform to provide firmware updates to Nokia users. Nokia needs to give its users a single point of interaction with their devices. Nokia should do negative of iPhone and do just exactly opposite. The iPhone App store is a closed environment; Nokia should open up a Symbian Appstore on SongBird and integrate it with Ovi. The solution just seems so obvious but sometimes it just is that obvious!

The writer, Aditya Mhatre, is based in Mumbai and hosts Indicast, a popular audio-video podcast show from India.

IBM Lotus Symphony - Request Free CDs in India

IBM Lotus Symphony is free Office productivity suite based on OpenOffice.org and supports the ODF file formats. It includes a Word Processor, Spreadsheet and a Presentation program much like Google Docs or a starter edition of Microsoft Office - see screenshots.

Symphony software is available as a free download for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X systems but if you are using a slow internet connection, you can ask IBM to send you the Lotus Symphony installer CD for free.

Just fill in this request form and an IBM Lotus Symphony CD will delivered to your place free of cost. Valid in India only.