Archive for the 'Multimedia Blogging' Category

What if we were to hook up with old friends in real life the way we do on Facebook? What if we related to our friends in the real world as if we were on Facebook?

This video gives us a taste of what may lie ahead for our friendships…

As a writer, one of the most difficult tasks is keeping my notes and research in order. For my fiction novels, I had a lot of research on geology and the structure of buildings (for The Flame Tree, which involved a defective tower that collapses) and on digital technology and brain function (for Mindgame, which turned on a plot to manipulate the minds of Asians). That was just over a decade ago and most of the research was in the form of articles from journals and photocopied pages from books. There was also all my handwritten notes. I stored them all in folders and ring-binders and after awhile it got really difficult to find the particular bit of information I wanted. I also had some recorded audio interviews on cassette tape which I stored in boxes.

Aah, how I longed to go paperless and be able to find what I needed “just like that” (snap of fingers!).

Working on my current non-fiction book on New Trends in International Public Relations, there is even more research than for the two fiction books put together. Fortunately, now that we are in the age of social media there are some great tools to help me sort, file and access my notes easily. First off, I have a del.icio.us bookmarking account. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is an free online service where you can bookmark webpages that are of interest and that you want to return to again. You can “tag” them with keywords eg asia, social-networks, copyright etc so you can retrieve them again by searching that keyword. You can also add a short description and later, search the text of that short description to retrieve the item you want. It’s part of the social media world because you can share your bookmarks - all of them or only those tagged with a certain keyword, as you choose. You can share them with the world or with only the people you choose or no-one at all. People can subscribe to follow what you are publicly bookmarking.

On the wiki site I’ve created for the book, you can see the feed of my public bookmarks of the webpages that are relevant to the theme of New Trends in International Public Relations - scroll to the bottom of the page. Not only am I able to save the webpages, I can also share them so whoever comes to the book wiki can see what I am currently researching.

The only problem about del.icio.us is that it only saves webpages and I’ve had to find some other means of storing my non-webpage research eg notes of discussions, recorded audio interviews, random thoughts I’ve had while on the bus, articles scanned from or torn out of journals. They have so far all gone into the trusty paper folders again.

However, I recently found Evernote, a virtual note-taking and note-storing site that is in beta trialling. It allows you to bookmark webpages as well as add your own notes and attach photos and audio files - which means that I can keep pretty much all my research in one virtual place so that I can chuck out the paper folders. They don’t support pdf files but a workaround is to upload those into my online storage account at Box.net and link to it from Evernote. I’ve installed their mobile application on my PDA so I can take notes on the fly and upload them directly to my Evernote account. That application also optimizes the Evernote site online for viewing my stored notes from my PDA so I don’t have to clog up my PDA’s memory with old notes. I can also forward emails to the account - so if someone sends me email replies to interview questions, I can keep that email together with my other notes on the same subject. And I’ve taken to snapping a photo of any handwritten Post-Its or other notes and sending those to Evernote as well. And it’s all searchable by text or keyword.

There are some limitations in Evernote’s functionality regarding sharing, private/ public options and elements of their filing logic compared to del.icio.us but hopefully, they’ll be able to improve on those with the feedback that their beta users are giving them. The main thing I’d like to see is greater flexibility in being able to share by reference to specific tags. I’m not switching entirely to Evernote for the current book project since I’m committted to del.icio.us for that but I will certainly be using Evernote more fully for my next book project.

For all you writers, students, researchers out there, I’d say that Evernote is certainly worth a try. It’s currently in beta trialling by invitation only - I have 9 invitations left so if you’d like one, add a comment below and I’ll get back to you on a first come first served basis. Remember to leave your email address in the relevant field - I’ll be able to respond to you but it will not be visible by anyone else.

Photo: of files thanks to Stephanie Asher from flickr.com (CCL)

My review of Oovoo.com, a Skype-like tool that allows you to video chat with up to six people at a time:

Click to Play

NOTE: Some technical notes and further thoughts about Shozu and social media integration:

# Shozu sends the media file to your blog but your viewers have to download the file to watch it on their PCs. To get the player above to integrate automatically, I set Shozu to send the video to my blip.tv account which I set to auto-update my two blogs - and voila, the player automatically appears.

# It would be good to see video integration with Facebook, not just still photos. So, again, I am using blip.tv’s Facebook interface for that.

# You can upload to Shozu via email from your phone or your email application. For this test, I used my email application.