Category Archives: Tools

Like WordPress? Check out WordCamp Central to find an upcoming WordCamp near you!

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WordCampCentralWould you like to learn more about WordPress and how you could use it for even more than you do today? Would you like to meet with and learn from other WordPress users? If so, checkout:

central.wordcamp.org

There you will find a great list of upcoming “WordCamp” events around the world… as well as information about how to create a WordCamp event if there isn’t one around you (and you’re interested in starting one).

I’m a huge fan of WordPress and use it both for Voxeo’s multi-blog site as well as all my newer blog projects like Code.DanYork.com. There is a fantastic community of developers around WordPress and it’s great to see events like these WordCamp events that help foster that ever-growing community.

I’ve not yet been able to attend a WordCamp event myself, but I’ve seen the content coming out of several of the events and I definitely want to attend one… (I was hoping to hit WordCamp Boston this year, but it unfortunately looks like I’m traveling those days). If you get the opportunity, they definitely look like good events to connect and learn with others using WordPress.

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KISSmetrics’ Great Infographic on The Evolution of Web Design from 1990’s to Today

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Mashable.com today published a great infographic that was created by KISSmetrics on “The Evolution of Web Design“.

For those of us who have been working with the web from its earliest days, it’s a great trip down memory lane. I remember learning of “the World-Wide Web” back in 1991 or so when all you could do was telnet into info.cern.ch. I had written and was teaching an “Introduction to the Internet” class for large companies in the Boston area… and had a section at the end about “new topics” that included a brief mention of this world-wide web thing 🙂 Shortly, thereafter, of course, I was rapidly developing courseware in how to create HTML pages and helping people learn how to set up websites.

We’ve come a l..o..n..g.. way from hand-coding all our pages using an editor like “vi” or Notepad…

Kudos to the KISSmetrics team for coming up with the cool infographic. The full graphic is huge… but worth checking out.

Webdesigninfographic

P.S. Kudos to the KISSmetrics folks for also providing a “Facts and Stats to Tweet” area below the infographic, complete with links to tweet out those stats. A well-done example of making it easy for people to tell the story you want and get people coming back to your site… 😉

Factstotweet

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Do You Flip? Cisco Says “No” And Shuts Down Flip Video

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FlipvideoI’ve always thought the Flip video cameras were among the coolest of the latest wave of consumer video gadgets out there. Pull one out, point it at someone or something, press the big red button and start recording. Flip out the USB connector to plug it into your PC or Mac and… ta da… your video was up onto YouTube or in email or whatever.

How many zillion videos have been shot with Flip cameras over the past few years? How many “person-on-the-street” video interviews have been shot at events, conferences or just anywhere? How many video podcasts have had episodes quickly created via Flip cameras?

I long desired a Flip camera but held off for the promise of some of the WiFi-enabled versions that Cisco talked about some time back. Meanwhile, many folks continued to buy them.

Not any more.

Cisco Systems announced this morning that it is shutting down the Flip video division and will “support current FlipShare customers and partners with a transition plan”.

On one level, it’s not a huge surprise… the acquisition by Cisco always seemed a bit strange. While Cisco has had a consumer presence, most notably with the Linksys product line, that consumer focus was still around Cisco’s core networking. You could stretch the Flip acquisition to fit in with all of Cisco’s other breathless talk about video, video, video… but still, it was a consumer camera and did seem odd. Obviously Cisco management held this view.

One also has to wonder if there really is a place now for a dedicated “pocket” video camera. I do record videos these days… but using my iPhone 4 that is always with me and able to just start recording. With the rise of the iPhone, Android devices and even Blackberries with cameras, the writing may have been on the proverbial wall for Flip for quite some time.

Still, it’s worth pausing for a moment and celebrating how effective Flip was at introducing so many people to creating new video content and sharing it online. Thanks, Flip, for all you did… and for your “big red button” that made it so easy for people to get started!

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Is Blogsy the iPad blog editor I’ve been seeking?

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Is Blogsy the blog editor for the iPad that I’ve been seeking? As I mentioned recently, I’m a huge fan of offline blog editors and on my Mac I use MarsEdit to write up pretty much all my blog posts (including this one). But being a huge user of the iPad, I’ve been searching for a MarsEdit-equivalent there. Primarily I just want the ability to be able to write up blog posts when I’m offline and then easily publish them when I come back online. Airplane travel is one use case… but there are other times, too. And the iPad format is a perfect one for writing for me.

My solution so far is to use Textastic to write my blog posts and then just copy/paste them over when I’m back online. I’m a bit “old skool” and seriously don’t mind writing in HTML code at all… in fact the vast majority of time I’m using MarsEdit in the HTML view. But there is a certain value in just having the blog posts all in one app that can then upload to your blog server when you’re online.

I’ve also used the WordPress app for the iPad, and it definitely has some great features, too.

Now, I don’t know yet if Blogsy can do all that I want to do. One basic issue is that while it supports WordPress and Blogger, it doesn’t support TypePad where this blog is located. And while my long-term direction is to migrate my blogs away from TypePad over to WordPress, that’s not happening for a while. So Blogsy is only a partial solution for me… but it does look pretty cool.

This demo video shows what Blogsy can do:

They have other videos as well on their How-To page (nicely done, by the way).

Given that right now Blogsy only costs $3 in the AppStore, I naturally had to buy the app… we’ll see how it goes – and you can be sure I’ll be writing more about it here.

What do you think? If you have an iPad, does Blogsy interest you for blogging? Do you already have another solution you like better? What works for you?

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What is PeerIndex all about? (Klout competitor) Listen to this podcast…

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Want to learn more about PeerIndex, another of the new companies working to help us understand the online influence someone has? Recently For Immediate Release co-host Neville Hobson interviewed Azeem Azhar, Founder of PeerIndex, to learn more.

The interview covered a good bit of ground and I found it quite interesting. While I may have some issues with what Klout, PeerIndex and others are doing, I commend them for taking on the task and experimenting to try to see what works best. If you haven't checked out what PeerIndex is doing, it is well worth a look. The interview with Neville runs about 25 minutes.

TED Video: Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 2.0 is Truly Amazing!

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This morning, by way of a tweet, I learned of this incredible video of Eric Whitacre’s recent talk at the TED conference. Given that I spent many years myself singing in choirs, I was truly moved by seeing what he and the folks involved are doing. I’m definitely looking forward to the “Virtual Choir 2.0” premiere on YouTube later this week….

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Breaking News: MediaSift (makers of TweetMeme) Licenses Twitter Firehose to Merge With Klout And Sentiment Data

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Data20conMoments ago at the Data 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, representatives of Twitter and MediaSift (the people behind Tweetmeme) stood onstage to announce that MediaSift is licensing Twitter’s “firehose” to provide a way to obtain filtered feeds from the Twitter firehose. The service, which will be branded “DataSift”, will be available at:

http://datasift.net/

Right now the service is in “Alpha” only and will be launched, per the news post, in Q3 2011.

The intriguing element here is that instead of dealing with the entire Twitter firehose through, for instance, the service that Gnip provides, with DataSift you will be able to filter the feed down based on keywords… or even Klout scores (or PeerIndex scores) and/or sentiment analysis.

This is where it could get interesting. You could then set up monitoring for tweets mentioning your brand name that had a negative sentiment and were from someone with a certain “authority” (remembering the issues with any such system). You could then act on those tweets in some fashion (sending out an alert, responding via Twitter, pinging someone via SMS). The key is that the filtering is done in MediaSift’s cloud and you get to interact with an already filtered and merged feed.

Pricing was not disclosed in the announcement, although it was said that you only have to pay for the tweets with which you interact – and could also do that on a time-driven basis (i.e. for an hour). On the DataSift web site, there is a pricing page with little detail, but a pricing calculator may give some view into the pricing (if that price there is in US dollars. I can’t tell from the symbol).

All in all it sounds like an intriguing service… now we just have to wait for it to actually be launched and publicly available.

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TED Video: The Birth Of A Word by Deb Roy (and visualizing social interactions)

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If you haven’t seen this video that has been circulating around some parts of the Twittersphere, it’s well worth a watch. As the abstract says:

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

What is also interesting is the part after his son’s word where Deb Roy looks at how they applied their techniques to analyzing social interactions online…

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Free webinar, April 7 – Social CRM and Building Apps to Monitor Social Channels

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Are you struggling with how to monitor and respond to customer interaction on social channels like Twitter? Do you have staff assigned to social monitoring but are trying to figure out how to scale your interactions? Are you looking at “Social CRM” and how you tie social channels into the rest of your customer interaction channels?

On Thursday, April 7, 2011, we at Voxeo will be hosting a free webinar called Social CRM and Building Apps to Monitor Social Channels where we will talk about how our platform and services can assist companies and organizations with scaling and supporting their customer interaction over social channels. The abstract of the session is:

Two thirds of today’s Internet users actively engage with social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. They use it mainly for personal communication, but often share feedback and thoughts about product or service experiences. Companies need to contribute to this conversation to protect their brands, enhance customer service or provide proactive customer care. They are or will soon be faced both with a staffing problem and the technical challenge of having to integrate with their more traditional customer interaction channels.

Learn how Voxeo can help you automate communication over social channels and bridge the gap between social networks and traditional channels such as IVR or direct agent interaction.

We’ll have a demo as part of the session and will leave plenty of time for Q&A. We’ll also show the analytics that are available for social channels… and how those channels can be integrated in with the other tools we have to create and manage “multi-channel” applications that interact with customers across voice, SMS, IM, mobile web and social channels like Twitter.

It should be a great session and the main presenter is my colleague Tobias Göbel who is quite excellent. Registration is free and we’d love to have you join us.

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My 2 Favorite Things about the WordPress 3.1 Admin Bar

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Having now worked with WordPress 3.1 for a good while on my personal sites (and just recently rolling it out across all Voxeo’s blogs), I have to say that one of the features I thought would be big definitely is: the Admin bar.

Here are my 2 favorite things:

Wp31adminbar

On a site like the Voxeo blog site, I literally working with 20 blogs. The ability to rapidly switch between those sites using the “My Sites” menu on the admin bar is HUGE. Further, I love that you can switch not just to the admin backend for the sites, but also to just view the site or to quickly create a new post:

Mysites

My second favorite thing is the “Edit Post” button (which becomes “Edit Page” on a WordPress “Page”). This is wonderful because if you are looking at a post or a page and see something that needs to be fixed, you are just one click away from fixing it. Sure, you could always do this in the past in most themes from a “Edit post” link in the footer… but first you had to scroll down and find it.

These two features alone have made me incredibly happy to have upgraded my sites to WordPress 3.1. The third favorite feature would be the ability to manage comments very easily from the admin bar… which is also very cool.

If you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 3.1 yet, I’d definitely encourage you to consider it. Well worth it, in my opinion.

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