Archive for the 'Tools & Accessories' Category

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

My colleague Angie and I have been working with the Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London on pro-bono basis to develop a multi-media online arts magazine, Dulwich OnView, which is launching this week. The process and objectives make a useful case study for anyone looking to set up an online community project on a limited budget.

Beginnings

The Friends is a volunteer group that supports the work of the Dulwich Picture Gallery by raising funds through events like summer parties, talks, films and other charitable fund-raising activities. Ingrid Beazley, their energetic and dynamic Chair, has been keen to use social media to promote the Friends and engage more with the local South East London community for some time now. We first talked about developing an interactive online presence in mid-2006 but what was needed was a strong volunteer team to help us run the project and for awhile, this key ingredient seemed elusive.

A great volunteer team

Then during last year, along came Catherine Fraher, who has a background in marketing and has worked with eBay. Taking time out following her new baby, Catherine has been thrown into the Friends e-world, first setting up a Friends photo group on Flickr and now taking on the role of co-editor for the new online magazine. At around the same time, a number of very talented and lively people began to offer help and suddenly, we had a great volunteer team - writers Anna Sayburn, Angela Corrias, Sally-Ann Johnson and Patrick Fraher; IT specialist Stephen Hendon and photographer Rebecca Portsmouth as well as my colleague at ZenGuide, web-content writer Angie Macdonald. The volunteer team is the real key to the magazine’s success - we have to work together well, approach the project in a professional way even though it’s just something we are doing for fun in our spare time, deliver our contributions on time and give each other the help and back-up that is needed in such a big project. And we really are doing all that with such ease and enthusiasm - it’s really fantastic!

A blog-based central hub

Given that this is a community project, my brief was to use free or low-cost applications that are freely available on the web. As the central hub of the multimedia magazine, we needed a platform that would fit well aesthetically with a world class art museum. I chose Wordpress.com for its ease of use and wide range of functions. Also the platform’s own branding is minimised - unlike Blogger which makes it clear you are on a blogspot.com site with its masthead across each blog. A survey has also reported that a large proportion of Blogger sites are spam blogs.

Blogging technology is easy to use and just the right platform for an online magazine. The free service does not allow you to re-design the layout in any sophisticated way but for our purposes the basic reverse date order presentation works well enough so that the latest articles appear at the top of the front page. The volunteer team will be able to upload their own articles with some basic training. Easy intergration with the photosharing site on Flickr.com means that the magazine can be quickly brightened with a lot of great images.

Other free / low-cost applications

For audio podcasting, I chose Gabcast.com which gives you a local UK telephone number to dial into from an ordinary phone. You record your podcast by leaving a voicemail message and press 1 to publish it. It automatically uploads the mp3 file and publishes a post on the magazine. It is free up to 200 MB and then there is a small monthly fee. There’s no messing around with sound editing equipment and FTP transfer software. But you can’t edit or add music tracks/ sound effects and you have to record your podcast in one continuous take - which can be a bit nerve-wracking!

We will be adding videos via our on Dulwich OnView YouTube channel in due course, which is a free application. In the meantime, we have collected videos about or filmed at Dulwich Picture Gallery using VodPod.com, which is another freebie - you can see the collection in the sidebar on the magazine site.

The Flickr pool is free - it collects together photos submitted to the pool by any user. However, Catherine has set up a Pro account for the photos that the team themselves want to upload for the magazine and that is a premium account at around £12 a year (US $25).

Some caution

Before you rush out and sign up to any old free application for your community project, a word of caution. You need to check out each applications functions and design options. The old adage is true that you get what you pay for. There are numerous free applications but some are easier to use than others - or have more suitable functionality to your project, or have fewer ads, or have a better look for your brand, or integrate better with other applications etc etc.

Also if you are likely to be particular about look, layout and the details of design, going for something free may not be the right way forward. And if you have high demands for functionality and specific things you want your multi-media to do, the free stuff is bound to limit and restrict your vision.

Knowing how to work around some of the limitations and restrictions of free applications can help. There is obviously only so much you can do with clever work-arounds but it can contribute to a quality user experience for your visitors.

Please do come and check out the magazine at www.dulwichonview.org.uk.

I’ve brought together the blogs of friends, colleagues, associates and clients of ZenGuide in one place - The ZenGuide Network at www.zenguidenetwork.tumblr.com. I hope you’ll enjoy browsing through this eclectic range of articles and photos - and to read more from each of the contributors, you can always click through from there to the original blogs.

The contributors include:

Bridget Grenvill-Cleave, a management consultant and executive coach at 10 Consulting, who is passionate about the benefits of Positive Psychology. She blogs about the measurable impact of applying positive psychology techniques in the workplace and importance of employee wellbeing in contributing to business success.

Melanie Crowe is a massage therapist whose skills range from relaxation massage to sports and no-hands techniques. She offers tips to deal with stress as well as writing about getting the most out of massage for your wellbeing.

Steven Lee is a Malaysian-born photographer based in London. He offers commercial photography services to private clients as well as to fashion and lifestyle magazines. He is about to launch his second photography book on Malaysian faces. He writes about his photo shoots and gives tips about photography.

Silvia Cambie, a business communications expert, blogs about her cross-cultural experiences in Eastern Europe, Italy, the US and UK as well as on communications issues.

The criteria I have chosen for including these contributors is that I know them personally and they are blogging in the context of their business or profession - and they have great content that’s lively and interesting.

If you enjoy their posts and visit their original blogs, do leave them a comment to let them know that you came via the ZenGuide Network!

You might also like to know something about the application that I’ve used to create the network - Tumblr. You can sign up for a free account within minutes and choose from a selection of customisable templates. You can then aggregate feeds from different sources - eg if you have a Flickr account for your photos, and you “tweet” using Twitter, and you blog etc - as well as adding individual written posts or photos and videos direct onto your Tumblr page. It’s not a blog in that it doesn’t have useful sorting tools like Archives or Categories but it’s a fun way to bring together a range of different web presences all into one place.

According to the International Herald Tribune:

“Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer world, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of shorthand for computer-geeks, emoticons - an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation - are now ubiquitous.

“Applied appropriately, users say, emoticons can no longer be dismissed as juvenile because they offer a degree of insurance for a variety of adult social interactions, and help avoid serious miscommunications.”

I can see all the good reasons in a rushed and pressured world to use a shorthand like emoticons. But as someone who loves language - with all its variety, nuances and potential for precise and beautiful communication - I find it rather sad that we are losing our ability to use complex language and ditching the beauty of words for a few punctuation marks.

Back in the days when society was much less technologically sophisticated, the elite had stresses of their own - like assassination plots and the threat of beheadings for treason etc - yet, they managed to use language in a way that has an undoubted clarity of meaning and nuance. Here is a letter written by Queen Elizabeth I to Mary Queen of Scots on the eve of the latter’s trial for treason - which I’ve punctuated with emoticons just to make sure that Mary gets the message.

October I586.

You have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and to bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. I have never proceeded so harshly against you, but have, on the contrary, protected and maintained you like myself. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. Yet it is my will, that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I were myself present. I therefore require, charge, and command that you make answer for I have been well informed of your arrogance.
Act plainly without reserve, and you will sooner be able to obtain favour of me.

ELIZABETH.

Ah, yes, that’s so much clearer, isn’t it?

One of the great things about what they call Web 2.0 is the way that communications tools are always evolving and becoming easier and easier for ordinary people to use - and all for free.

By mashing up various free online tools you can create an dynamic Events Calendar for your speaking engagements or other activitites for your website or blog. In the old days, if you wanted to update your website with new events, you had to contact your web guy and get him to update the Events page of your website or fiddle around yourself with HTML. It all took a lot of time and effort. Now, after some initial time spent setting things up, you can easily update an online calendar with your event and it will automatically appear on your website or blog.

Take a look at the new Events page I’ve created (click on Events at the top of this ZenGuide page) and you’ll see a list of events involving me and/ or my friends. Click on any of the events listed and you will be taken to a more detailed page with a brief description of where and what it’s all about.

If you want to create a similar Events Calendar for your blog, this is what you need to do:

1. Sign up for a Google Calendar
2. Create a public calendar
3. Enter your event(s) in the calendar
4. In Settings, you will find the URL for the calendar under “Calendar Address”.

5. Sign up for a Feedburner account
6. Create a Feedburner feed for your calendar by copying and pasting the Calendar URL (item 4 above)
7. In the “Optimize” tab, go to Event Feed and create and event feed
8. In the “Publicize” tab, go to BuzzBoost and activate the event feed
9. Copy and paste the code from BuzzBoost and place it on your website or blog

10. Update your Google calendar from time to time with new events and they will automatically appear on your website/ blog where you pasted the code.

Flickr - notice the spelling (no “e”) - is a social networking site for photographs. You can sign up for a free account and upload your photos. Once you have an account, you get a dedicated webpage address for your photos eg http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourchosenflickrpagename. You can give that link to anyone so they can go to view your photos there.

Public/ private

You can display all or some only of your photos as public (for anyone and everyone to see) or private (which only your friends and family can see). In order to for friends and family to see your private photos, they will need to sign up for their own Flickr account as well - that’s a bit more cumbersome than allowing the whole world to see your pics but then if privacy is important to you, then it’s worth those extra couple of steps for your friends and family.

People viewing your pictures can leave comments for each photo. You can turn comments off if your prefer.

Groups

You can set up a group with your family and friends so you can all pool your photographs.

There are also different public groups on Flickr that you can join. eg if you have photos all about cars, you could pool your car pics into a car group which will have photos by other car enthusiasts. If there isn’t already a group for cars or whatever theme you are passionate about, you can always start one of your own.

People are also using groups in creative ways. Here are some groups to explore:

I love this one - Stick Figures in Peril: photos of those warning signs showing stick figures in all kinds of terrible situations. It makes a nervous person like me feel that the whole world is a minefield of terror…

This one is brilliantly creative - Tell a Story in Five Frames: use five photos in sequence to tell a story. I featured some good short photo stories on my arts blog, Fusion View, in the post “Micro Photo Stories”

This one is starkly hypnotic - Urban Explorers: the invitation to post your photos here says. “photos and stories about abandoned paper mills, condmened hospitals, decaying barns, etc… please do not post typical cty pictures here.”

Creative Commons Licence

For bloggers, Flickr is a great resource for free photos to illustrate your posts. In the “Search” section, choose “Advanced Search” and click on the option to Search within Creative Commons-licensed photos and type in the keyword you want.

Creative Commons Licensed photos are those that their creators have offered to the world to use for free by clicking on the relevant Creative Commons Licence option within Flickr. The only condition is that you credit the creator and link back to the Flickr page where you got the photo. Note that you should check if there are any restrictions in the Creative Commons Licence restricting commercial use or changes to the original photo.

Many ways to upload your photos

There are a number of ways to upload your photos. You can go to the Flickr upload page and upload it 6 photos at a time from there. Or you can download the Flickr Uploader onto your desktop and upload loads and loads of photos all in one go. Or you can even upload photos by email from your email account or your mobile phone - Flickr gives you a dedicated email address to email the pics to.

Tags

Tags are handy labels you can give to your photos so you can easily find them again. You can also search other people’s public photos by tags to see, say, all pics tagged with “car” or “Malaysia” etc.

Free versus Pro Accounts

The free account allows you to upload up to 200 photos. There is also a monthly upload limit (based on megabytes per month). And you can only create 3 “sets” or folders.

The Flickr Pro Account costs US$47.99 for two years (or US$24.95 for one year). There is no limit to the number of photos you can upload nor any monthly limit. You can also create as many folders as you like.

Conclusion

I like Flickr and use it now for all my private photographs. The interface is a little bit complex and takes a bit of exploration and getting into the mindset of the people who designed the site. But overall, I find it a quick and easy way to sort and store my photos and also to share photos with my internationally-based family - there’s nothing like getting an update from my cousin in Australia and being able to see her photos on Flickr within minutes of her uploading them!

Having added auto-podcasting to my other blog Fusion View, I’ve added also added a new gadget here so you can download ZenGuide posts as audio files onto your iPod or MP3 and listen to them wherever you are.

So no more being glued to the computer screen - you can enjoy my posts on the move.

All you have to do is drag and drop the Talkr badge below into your podcast tuner.

The easiest way is to minimise this screen in front of your iTunes (or other podcast catcher/ tuner screen) and drap and drop the badge into iTunes (or other podcast tuner).

The posts are read by a clever automated text reader that sounds like an American woman. It’s actually pretty realistic and natural sounding, considering she’s a bunch of bytes and digital data. Try it out and let me know what you think.

You can try it out by listening to my post on Simple Online Marketing (click here) (05min 30sec) - or by clicking on the grey audio player below.

Photo: thanks to dtechnews.com

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (261)

Blog platforms usually require you to go online, log on and write your post online. This is fine - until your broadband connection decides to let you down. On a number of occasions, I’ve written a long post online only to find that when I hit “save”, the connection cuts out or some other horror occurs - resulting in all my lovely prose vanishing into the ether. Aaargh!

To my joy, I discovered a free offline blogging tool called W.Bloggar that allows you to blog offline on your PC or laptop. Then, when you are ready to post it on your blog, all you have to do is click “Post” and it automatically connects to your blog online and shoots the post through the ether, magically posting it right into your blog.

The great thing is that you can also set your Categories offline and add image links just as you would normally do online - as well as setting the time and date of the post (eg if you only want it to be visible on the site at a future date)

To download the software, go to www.wbloggar.com and click through to the downloads page.

UPDATE: I’ve just come across a post from The Wrong Advices which lists a number of offline blogging tools in addition to Bloggar called, unsurprisingly, Offline Blog Editing Tools