Recently, Nokia and Flickr joined forces, pre-installing a flickr client on Nokias Nseries phones. While this is good news, there is still a whole lot to be said for sticking with ShoZu – especially since the service has improved immensely since the early days.

Here are a few of the best features in ShoZu:

• Add tags and descriptions to your photos and videos
• Upload photos directly to your blog or your favourite photo sharing service (the list of supported services is long, spanning from Flickr thorugh Buzznet and Picasa web to Facebook, WordPress and Blogger)
• Upload videos to your blog or to YouTube and other video sharing services (Flickr in at little while?)
• Multiple destinations for uploads – Easy upload even if you want to add an image to both Flickr and Facebook (new in 3.2)
• Get comments on your phone and reply to them from your phone – a very handy addition to the service
• A whopping 10mb upload limit per pic/vid (new in 3.2)

Apart from these, there are tons of other nice features, and to top it off ShoZu now supports over 200 of the most popular phones available.

So, if you have a camera phone and share your pics/vids online, ShoZu may very well improve your experience. Provided that you don’t mind a 2-minute installation of the app on your phone – and believe me – it’s that easy.

BTW: I am in no way affiliated with ShoZu. I am just an enthusiastic user

1. I used to post a lot of pictures on my blog
2. I somtimes even posted videos
3. A post would often just consist of a few good links that I’d stumbled upon
4. Or maybe just a brief update on what I was doing or where I was
5. Or maybe a recap of a few news items

Now

1. I post my pictures on Flickr
2. For vid’s I point to youtube
3. My links are on de.licio.us
4. Precense update and tiny posts (less than 140 characters) are done via Jaiku
5. And interesting news items are aggregated in my Google Reader shared items

So what’s left for the blog?

Well – writing, I guess. Posts that are lengthy enough that they couldn’t just as well be written on my mobile phone.

The people who read my blog know where my pictures are, they know my Jaiku page and through there they’ll be updated on everything I post on Flickr, de.licio.us, Google Reader etc., so there’s really no point in repeating that stuff here, right?

This place is for writing. Well that and reading of course… heavy…

In short Jaiku is a lot like Twitter. But whereas Twitter is an sms-based service, Jaiku is an app that lets you post tiny (140 characters) status messages called Jaikus from your mobile phone or from your personal Jaiku page online – these messages are then visible to your friends on their phones and online. See my Jaiku page for an example. You can also subscribe to feeds from within Jaiku. Updates to these are then posted as ‘Jaikus’. Oh, and that tiny little box in the right column of my blog – that’s a ‘presence badge’ from Jaiku. It displays my latest posts in the sidebar of my blog.

But what’s the point of all this, then?

Well, services like Twitter and Jaiku kinda split the crowd down the middle. Some people – like my colleague Mads, for instance, think they’re excellent, some think they’re horrible and others – and this I think is the largest group – don’t get them. I tended to agree with Stephen Davies over at PRblogger, who basically thinks they’re pointless, but then I tried Jaiku on for size.

Now, at the touch of a few buttons on my celly, I’ve updated my blog and given my Jaiku contacts an update on what I’m up to (I have way too few Jaiku contacts as of now, so feel free to add me if you’re already on Jaiku). It’s good fun, and it allows me to spew tiny thoughts even when I’m not on my laptop. I thoroughly enjoy that.

Jaiku’s self-proclaimed mission is to: ‘bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence’ – it works! So my advice would be to try it before you knock it. It may not be for everyone, but you may just like it.

Man, this post ended up kind of a mess… Maybe I should’ve written a Jaiku instead – it would have been something along the lines of: ‘liking Jaiku – do try it’ – short and sweet.

Actor Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute will commission independent filmmakers to make short films for mobile phones, Redford said on Wednesday.

Robert Redford backs short films for cell phones – washingtonpost.com

Read the rest of the story at WP for details.

Personally I am thrilled to see serious and influentioal film makers do their bit to further the development of quality content for mobile phones. Good one. I can’t wait to see the results – in addition, the films, once downloaded (which can end up costing quite a bit due to ridiculous data prices) can apparently be shared and distributed as each user sees fit. That’s cool, but hey, so’s Mr. Sundance, so…