Category Archives: Tools

Mashable: An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad

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ipadeffect.jpgHow are people using Apple’s iPad? What devices is it replacing for iPad users?

Back in early July, Mashable.com published an article “An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad” that made for good reading. The article reviewed data out of a study by Resolve Market Research and had a few gems. For instance, I found it fascinating that 38% of iPad owners said they would not buy a portable gaming device after owning an iPad. I’m not a big game-player, personally, and I can see the logic of this finding, given that the iPad reduces the number of devices you need to carry… it was just something I hadn’t really thought about.

Also interesting to note that for 37% of the iPad owners this would be their first Apple product – bodes well for Apple!

Now, three months have gone by since the Mashable post was published, which is in some ways an eternity in the consumer products space. It will be interesting to see whether these trends continue over time… in the meantime, it is just good to see more data out there on iPad usage.

P.S. The comments also made for interesting reading…

How to add Google Analytics tracking to Unbounce landing pages

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Lately, I’ve become quite a fan of using Unbounce.com for the creation of quick landing pages.  I’ve used the site now for various ad campaigns, email newsletter links, print ads and more.  What I like in particular is that it is so very easy to try out multiple variations of a landing page and see which one works the best.

Naturally, though, I want to track everything about Unbounce pages over in Google Analytics. Turns out this is very simple to do, as mentioned in this Unbounce FAQ page.  First, after you open an Unbounce page into the editor, you click on the “Scripts” icon:

unbouncescripts.jpg

Next, you create a new script, set the placement to “Head” (for the new asynchronous GA tracking code, which you should be using!), and copy/paste your GA tracking code into the text box:

unbouncega.jpg

After clicking “Done”, you’ll need to save the landing page and then, if the Unbounce page is already published, you’ll need to re-publish the page so that the Google Analytics tracking script goes live.

NOTE: If you already have several variants of your landing page, you’ll need to go into each variant and add the GA tracking code to the page.

One tip to Unbounce users… I created an unpublished “template” page that had the basic background elements I want to regularly use – and also had this Google Analytics tracking code. When I want to create a new landing page, I then simply go to the Unbounce dashboard, and choose “Duplicate Page” from the gear icon of the template page:

unbounceduplicate.jpg

This gives me a new page – with tracking – and then when I create any new variants they, too, have the tracking code.

Now… why do I want to do this, given that Unbounce does provide some tracking stats of its own? Primarily because: 1) the Unbounce stats are very basic – Google Analytics delivers far more information; and 2) I’m already a heavy Google Analytics user and have all my systems set up.

The end result is that you can use a platform for creating excellent landing pages and also get all the tracking analytics you want to understand how people got to that landing page.

Any of you use Unbounce? What have you thought of it so far?

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“The Traveler’s Guide to the iPad” – a great list of apps and tools

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ipadtraveler.jpgOver on the Socialized Software blog, Mark Hinkle came out today with a great post called “The Traveler’s Guide to the iPad.” He also included the great graphic I’m including here on the right. I love to see pictures like this that so aptly capture the intent of the post.

Anyway, Mark’s post contains a solid list of apps that any iPad traveler should definitely consider. I’m actually quite partial to the Apple case, but that’s just personal preference. I like his suggestion for the Verizon MiFi hotspot – I’m eligible right now to upgrade from my current Verizon data card to a MiFi and am definitely considering doing so.

I do like his app suggestions… DropBox and Evernote, in particular, are two that are now critical parts of my iPad routine. I also love the fact that an e-book reader allows me to read books on a plane that would be too bulky to carry in my already-space-optimized carryons. One addition that Alec Saunders recently turned me on to was “Rocket Taxi”, an app that uses your iPhone GPS to find the nearest taxi companies to call for a cab. It’s an iPhone app, but presumably would work great on the iPad as well.

There are a couple of other apps on his list that I’ll be checking out…

I don’t know about others of you who use an iPad while traveling, but for me the iPad has definitely become a key part of my travel routine… so it’s great to see lists like this offering suggestions for other travelers.

If you use an iPad while traveling, what apps have you found useful?

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Prezi + ScreenFlow + YouTube = Video/Screencast Awesomeness!

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What do you get when you combine a presentation done with Prezi and the screen capture tool ScreenFlow?

A pretty cool way to quickly create a video to tell a story!

This morning our Voxeo Labs team was working on launching a new application called “Tropo AGItate“. They had a blog post, but it didn’t really go far enough in telling the story of how this new service worked. So our CEO Jonathan Taylor, who has been experimenting a lot with Prezi lately, whipped up a quick Prezi to explain what happens. A group of us collectively tweaked it a small bit … and then I launched ScreenFlow on my iMac, put Prezi in full-screen mode and recorded the presentation with a voiceover.

It did take me several takes to get the timing down right… but after that I simply went to the File menu in ScreenFlow, chose “Publish to YouTube…“, filled out the video description fields… and a few minutes later the video was exported and uploaded to YouTube!

Super simple and easy! And we were pleased with the result:

(Warning to my marketing friends: This is from our Labs team and so is on the geekier side of things 🙂

P.S. A tip to anyone who my try this kind of recording themselves… Prezi lets you advance using the right arrow key, so I didn’t have to use my mouse at all.

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Ragan’s “WordPress for Business” Webinar – Oct 21

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raganwordpresswebinar.jpgWant to learn about how to set up a corporate blog using WordPress? Want to find out how you can get involved with social media on a limited budget?

I’m not usually one to promote commercial webinars on this site… in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever done it before. But I’ll make an exception for Ragan’s “WordPress blogging for business” webinar coming up October 21, 2010, from 2-3:15 US Central time.

Why? Two reasons:

  1. I’m a huge fan of WordPress, have built Voxeo’s multi-blog portal on WordPress and maintain a blog about using WordPress for business.
  2. Because I’m a heavy user of WordPress, I want more people to use WordPress for business… the more business users of WordPress there are, the more plugins will be written that are business-focused, the more tips will be shared, the more consultants will be able to specialize… etc, etc…. it’s one of those opportunities like the Apache web server where all win by the collective usage and sharing.

So I applaud Ragan for running this webinar. It’s not free, but at $99 it’s not expensive, either. The agenda also look great:

  • Use the right strategy to name the blog—using a subdomain or a separate URL
  • Install WordPress software using WordPress.com or WordPress.org
  • Customize your blog’s settings and create various user profiles
  • Find the best plugins for your blog’s needs
  • Create your keyword publishing guide through search optimization strategies for blogging
  • Design a publishing calendar to keep your blog relevant, interesting and useful
  • Establish and publish a blog comment moderation policy
  • Know how and when to participate as publisher and commenter
  • Sprinkle social media content throughout the blog
  • Use Google Analytics to measure blog traffic and activity

If I were giving this webinar that is the kind of agenda I’d choose.

Now, I’m going out on a limb here a bit as I don’t know the presenter, Pete Codella… I’ve never heard him before and so I have no idea how good he may or may not be. Ragan is NOT a non-profit, though… they need to keep their lights on, so I’m going to assume that Monsieur Codella is a good presenter.. his bio seems solid, too.

Anyway… if you are interested in potentially using WordPress for your blog site, do check out this webinar.

Disclosure: I have NO financial connection to Ragan Communications and they have no clue that I am writing this post. I should note, though, that they are one of the sponsors of the “For Immediate Release” podcast to which I contribute weekly reports. I do not, however, receive any financial compensation for my involvement with FIR. I just think this is a cool webinar that Ragan is offering.

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Open Facebook alternative Diaspora launches “Developer Release”

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diaspora.jpgToday Diaspora, the open source project aiming to build an “open” social network along the lines of Facebook, released its “Developer Release” to the public. You may recall back in May when the 4 NYU students behind Diaspora just happened to tap into a moment of anti-Facebook rage and announced their effort to build “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network“.

They provided a couple of updates over the summer (one of which I wrote about) and now they announced that their code is available for download at:

http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Now, there IS a big caution – the code is by their own acknowledgement very much “pre-alpha”… meaning “don’t expect to use this in production or even for it to work”. 🙂

The installation process is not for the non-tech-savvy, either… it involves downloading and installing various parts and pieces to get everything on your system that you need. This is primarily a release to get their software out there and let other people hack away on it and contribute back to the effort.

It’s very cool to see this milestone and I’m looking forward to see how the project evolves now that the code is out in the public sphere. Great stuff!

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Brogan is right – the “Editorial Calendar” WordPress plugin truly rocks!

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On Friday I saw Chris Brogan’s post “Use an Editorial Calendar” and immediately had to go check out the plugin’s page.  Chris is right on target… this is definitely an awesome plugin!  I now have it running on Voxeo’s blogs and on the VOIPSA blog and so far have been quite impressed.

Now, much of the time my posts across my various blogs react to current issues or to topics I’ve had brewing for a while.  But in some cases, particularly the Voxeo blogs, I’ve wanted to apply some more discipline to the writing to ensure that I am in fact getting out posts with a regular frequency.  I like the fact that with this plugin I can simply get a quick view of what is currently scheduled and know when it would be good to target some more posts:

editorialcalendarplugin.jpg

It’s also great that directly from the interface you can create new posts (or at least stubs for new posts).  If you are laying out a campaign tied to an announcement or theme, this is a very easy and graphical way to lay out your post schedule.

I also like the fact that you can go back historically and see the flow of when you posted in a nice calendar format… complete with the names of the post authors (a setting you have to enable but is well worth it in multi-author blogs).

I’m very much looking forward to working with this plugin more – and wish there were something like that for here on TypePad (where this blog and Disruptive Telephony are located).

The folks at Stresslimit also put together this video screencast introducing the plugin – good stuff!

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Screen Cast from Zack Grossbart on Vimeo.

If you use WordPress you can find more info about the Editorial Calendar on its plugin page and can install it either from there or from directly inside of WordPress if you are set up that way.

Thanks, Chris, for recommending the plugin and thanks to the Stresslimit team for making it available!

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Vox FAIL – Blogging Platform Shutting as of September 30th – But what about the SEO?

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voxlogo.jpgThere’s a fundamental challenge in using a hosted platform for any kind of service:

CAN YOU TRUST THE “CLOUD” TO BE THERE?

Not just in terms of availability (i.e. uptime versus downtime), but also that the hosting platform will be around for a long time – or that you will be able to easily move to another platform.

We’ve reached that state of trust with hosted email servers and hosted web servers – those are now “commodities” and we can choose from zillions of providers. We embrace “the Internet Way” of “distributed and decentralized” systems… the data is very portable (web pages, email messages). Yes, it’s a major pain, but it can be done.

Blog platform providers are a bit different, though. Sure, fundamentally they are just a hosted web server running a content management system (CMS)… but there are specific tools and ways that they work that you get used to and come to rely on. You build up a community of readers and other blogs you read… sure, you can move to another provider, but will they carry over all your links with all the SEO value they have? (not likely)

VOX.COM FAIL

The many users of the Vox.com blogging platform woke up yesterday to discover that their home is shutting down and going away effective September 30th:

On Thursday September 30th, your blog will no longer be available at Vox.com, and you will no longer be able to sign in to Vox.

Poof!

All the content you wrote… gone. Offline. Removed from the online world.

To the credit of SixApart, they have provided a site, closing.vox.com, that has instructions about how to move your blog to TypePad, to WordPress or to Posterous – and how to move your pictures and videos over to Flickr. However, if you read the comments on this post it would seem that all is not happy in Vox land and that the migration is not smooth and painless.

Largely because I am a paying TypePad customer and already had a blogging platform, I never used Vox beyond setting up an experimental page back in 2006 when the service came out. So the impact of the Vox closing to me personally is minimal.

SEO FAIL!

Here’s where I would be worried, though, if I did use Vox more… what is going to happen to the “search value” of all those blog posts that have been written over the years?

All of the links in search engine results to those posts will FAIL.

There was this comment left by SixApart executive Michael Sippey:

If you do move your blog to TypePad, we’ll redirect any requests for URLs on your Vox account to the home page of your new blog on TypePad.

But note the emphasis I added… your old blog posts will NOT redirect to your new blog posts! The links will instead go to the home page of your new blog, leaving visitors to somehow attempt to find the content that was previously linked to.

Way to kill search value. 🙁

Another user asked this specific question and the response was to put a link on your new home page to the specific post that gets a lot of traffic.

Not scalable – or desirable.

But it is what is is… you are not in control of your own platform. You were locked-in to the tools and systems of the vendor.

The WordPress Option?

If I were to counsel Vox.com bloggers on what to do next, my personal suggestion would be not to migrate to TypePad, or even to Posterous, but rather over to WordPress.com. Why?

BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT LOCKED IN!

With TypePad, you are back using SixApart’s hosted proprietary blogging platform. Sure, it’s essentialy hosted Movable Type, but it has evolved, and you then need to think about where you can host your site on MT. Posterous is a startup and is using whatever they are using… I’m not sure what they’re using, but it’s not clear to me that if THEY went away I’d be able to move my content. (In fairness, I don’t know.)

I do know, though, that WordPress.com uses the free and open source WordPress software – and if you don’t like hosting it at WordPress.com, you can migrate your site to any of a zillion other WordPress hosting providers – or run it on your own server. Odds are that if you use your own domain name on WordPress.com, you should be able to migrate your content from WordPress.com to another WP site with all the URLs intact!

You are in control.

Definitely something to think about when you evaluate any cloud provider – what happens if they go away? Can you move your content?

Best wishes to the folks who had accounts at Vox.com… I do not envy them the task of migration.

Did you have an account at Vox? Which provider did you choose to migrate to?

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Does the Disqus blog comment system not work with the iPad?

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Are any of you out there using the iPad running into problems with leaving comments on blogs using the Disqus blog comment system?

This morning I browsed to Scott Monty’s blog on my iPad and went to leave a comment on his “Picture This” post. (Great post, BTW!) I typed in my reply and then pressed the “Post as…” button… and… nothing:

disquslogin.jpg

Now, when I press that same button on my laptop, I see this window popup on the page:

disqusloginpopup.jpg

allowing me to then choose the identity that I want to use to post the comment.

This popup does NOT appear for me when I’m using the iPad’s browser to view Scott’s blog.  I tried another blog that also used the Disqus system and had the same result.

Looking at the HTML source of the page, I’m guessing the issue may be the JavaScript script that Disqus is using to generate the comment form… but that’s just a guess at this point.  It may also not be an issue with the Disqus system, per se, but more in the specific way that Scott’s blog embeds the connection to Disqus. I don’t know.  All I know is that when I had a comment to leave this morning, I couldn’t do so.

Anyone else seeing this kind of issue using the iPad’s browser with Disqus-powered blogs?

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The additional travel challenges for content creators (i.e. why my backpack is so heavy)

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As I got ready for my travel down to New York City this week for the SpeechTEK conference where I spoke and also helped staff Voxeo’s booth, I reflected as I packed on all the extra steps I wind up going through when planning to be a “content creator” at the show.  I’m not there only to talk and show our new services… I’m also there to write blog posts, take and upload photos, record video interviews (and maybe audio interviews), to post tweets and respond to tweets, etc., etc.  For multimedia content creation, there’s a bit of extra work and gear.

THE GEAR

My travel pack of choice these days is a Lowepro Fastpack 250. It fits the gear I need, but also has this great feature where you can unzip the side pocket and pull your DSLR out very quickly.  As you can see by the picture, I travel these days with a Nikon D90 for photos and a small JVC Everio MG-330 hard drive video recorder.  In truth, the D90 can also do video… but it’s harder to hold for video than the JVC unit is.  Perhaps I’ll eventually do more with it… but for the moment I carry both.  Both have power cords (or battery chargers), naturally.

I also carry a Blue Eyeball (which I reviewed) in case I want to do two-shot video recordings (using my MacBook Pro’s camera and the Blue) for an interview.

contentcreatorsbackpack.jpg

Add to this, of course, the laptop, and these days the iPad as well… and it’s a heavy pack.  I also naturally have my iPhone for photos and quick status updates and such as well.

THE ADDED STEPS

There are also a series of steps that all this gear adds to travel preparations:

1. Import and delete all the photos off the DSLR memory card (which in my case means importing them all into iPhoto on my Mac).

2. Import and delete all the movies off the video camera (import into iMovie for me).

3. Make sure the battery is fully charged on the DSLR.

4. Make sure the battery is fully charged on the video camera.

5. Make sure that I have all relevant cables needed to copy content off of the cameras and onto my laptop.

It’s not a huge number of steps, but it does add up, particularly if I have a lot of photos or movies on the cameras.  Yes, with memory cards being so cheap I certainly could leave the photos on the DSLR, but I’m also paranoid about losing photos… so I want to make sure they are off the camera before I go traveling.

If you are a “content creator” for your organization, what do you bring when you travel?  What steps do you wind up adding to your travel preparations?

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