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All posts for “cooltools”
Tracking Reactions on the Web
I must admit that each time we post a new video, we go into buzz mode - What are people saying/linking/doing? Where are they doing it? How many said something? What do we need to say in response? Watching the reaction is something I anticipate and love about the process. At the same time, I wonder if I'm doing it right. I'm always looking for new ways to scan the web. Here are some tools we use - please suggest ideas/sites/tools that you think would help.Blog Comments - Of course, our... Continue Reading
Even though the Web makes us all feel like citizens of the world, what matters is often local. Our neighborhoods and neighbors have a huge impact. There is a brand-new platform, created by Instivate, a company run by one of our long-time friends and neighbors, that aims to give every neighborhood a site for sharing local news. It's called Instant Journalist.
Here's the scenario: You sign up for Instant Journalist - it has a monthly fee that's linked to the size of the site. Right off the... Continue Reading
Just after posting our first video on RSS , I learned a few valuable lessons:
1. Video is inaccessible for the hearing impaired
2. Video is not easy to translate into other languages
3. There is a new site that addresses both of these issues called DotSub .
DotSub makes it easy for me to transcribe the spoken words into text subtitles. Then, once the subtitles exist, it enables DotSub members to voluntarily translate the text into other languages and post the video to their blogs. This makes... Continue Reading
I'll be talking a lot more about this soon, but I wanted to post a quick link to 43 Places, the latest from my homies here in Seattle, the Robot Coop, of 43 Things fame.
Update: At the time of this writing (6/26/05), 43 Places is not yet public, but should be soon.
It's all about where you've been and where you want to go. I'm digging the cool mapping features and the other 43 things-style goodness. Like 43 Things, it's a blog for people who aren't necessarily "bloggers".
Instead of the... Continue Reading
I’ve never used video conferencing other than a messing around with a camera on my PC. This being said, I think multiparty video conferencing has a bright future.
An example of “multiparty�? video conferencing is a group meeting online and everyone’s live-action face appears on the screen. Robin Good, someone I consider to be very informed in such things, put together a great review of the video conferencing market right now. Robin's reviews are focused on classroom applications... Continue Reading
For the past few weeks, I’ve been involved in creating prototypes for Intranet-based learning/communication tools (I know that is ambiguous). Anyway, we’ve put the prototypes in front of about 30 folks to gather feedback. This experience has given me a deeper perspective on the challenge before us. Here are some examples of what we hear:
“If I’m going to use it, it has to fit into the way I’m working. It can’t ADD something else for me to do- I have too much to do. It has to... Continue Reading
Many-to-Many: Social link management
Clay provides a short rundown of some of the sites out there offering link management services. I recently tried one of these services "Furl" and I'm intrigued, but the jury is still out in terms of long-term adoption.
Here's why I like these services:
I often find myself reading a site and thinking- "I really want to come back to this, but I don't want to blog it, or add it to my bookmarks (which I never use anyway)." These services give you something... Continue Reading
For those of you who may not know, Technorati is a web site that tracks links between web sites (among other things). Webloggers use it to find out who is linking to their blog by putting a URL into the box on this page. The site just passed the 3 million "weblogs watched" number.
Now, I admit that I'm a habitual Technorati user- multiple times a day sometimes. It's a feedback and discovery system for me- and I really dig it. And, I admit to having some selfish pride in the number of sites... Continue Reading
As you know, I've been been pretty fed up with the comment spammers. I have now chosen not to be a pawn in their silly game any longer.
I have now closed the comments on all but the most recent posts on this site. As it is now, any post that is over 15 days old has the comments "closed". So far, I haven't seen comment spam at all since closing these comments.
I'm betting that the lecherous spam-bots focus on archived posts more than current ones. Perhaps their system looks for posts that... Continue Reading
This may be old news, but I just realized a way to use Movable Type's Bookmarklet feature and NewsGator in Outlook to post weblog entries more quickly.
First, you need to know about bookmarklets. From the MT tool: "Setting up a bookmarklet to post to Movable Type allows you to perform one-click posting and publishing without ever entering through the main Movable Type interface."
Once you create a bookmarklet (from the main MT menu), you can go to any web site and click on your bookmarklet and... Continue Reading