Category Archives: Tools

“The Daily Shoot” gives you daily practice in becoming a better photographer…

Did you get a new DSLR camera over the holidays? (I did!) Or do you have one and want to get inspired to do more with it? Or do you not have a DSLR but just enjoy photography? Do you want to push yourself to try out more ways to make images?

If so, grab your DSLR, point-and-shoot camera, iPhone, mobile phone or whatever other camera you have and head over to “The Daily Shoot” at:

http://www.dailyshoot.com

You can naturally just browse through the pictures that other photographers have taken, but it’s also very easy to get involved yourself:

You start by following @dailyshoot on Twitter.
Each day at 9am US Eastern a new “assignment” comes out.
You take a picture and upload it to Flickr, Twitpic, yfrog, The Best Camera or a couple of other photo sharing sites.
Then… you tweet out the link in a reply to @dailyshoot with the assignment’s hashtag, like I did here:
Your picture will then be added to the pages of the Daily Shoot website.

That’s it. See the assignment, take a picture, upload it, tweet it.

There’s no time pressure… you don’t have to have it in by any certain time. You can do it today, tomorrow… or whenever. You can go back and do past assignments and post them. You can just do scattered assignments whenever your schedule permits or when you have the interest. It’s all about self-motivation and giving yourself a reason to play with your camera and push yourself to do more with photography.

It’s also about learning from other photographers. You can go to the Assignments page and browse through the photos that are contributed for each assignment. The site nicely opens each photo in a new tab so that you can easily keep going back to the assignment page to see the other photos. (In Chrome I’ll command+click each photo (I’m on a Mac) to open a bunch up in different tabs to look at them.) Here was the assignment about “yellow”… it’s fun to see the different perspectives on the assignment.

You can also view the pictures from each individual photographer, so if you find someone’s photo you really like you can then see the other photos by that photographer (hint: click on the name of the photographer underneath a thumbnail on the Daily Shoot site). Here’s my page of photos. Here’s Duncan’s much better page.

It’s fun to do… and a way to learn more about and practice the art of making images.

The Daily Shoot is the brainchild of photographer Duncan Davidson (pictured on the right) and programmer/consultant Mike Clark. I’ve been a fan of Duncan’s photography back from when I first saw the great photos he shot at eComm 2009. I’ve enjoyed his writing on his blog about photography. Here are a couple of his posts I liked:

ADVICE FOR THE $2K CAMERA BUDGET
FLASHONOMICS: BUYING FLASH MEMORY
IT TAKES A TEAM TO PHOTOGRAPH A TED (fascinating glimpse into conference photography)

I’ve also met him at a couple of events now and he’s just a really decent and great guy. He recently wrote about how the Daily Shoot site has evolved and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Meanwhile, today’s assignment is out… I’ll have to see if sometime today I can find something interesting to shoot that is circular…

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

The Single Biggest Reason Why I Can’t Yet REALLY Use Google Wave

3 Replies

I’m a big fan of Google Wave. A huge fan in fact. I’ve written about it, posted a screencast about using it in conference collaboration and have much more about it in my writing queue. I love the promise of the Wave protocol that will allow for distributed/decentralized collaboration that is in line with “The Internet Way”. I’ve been a long-time fan of the XMPP protocol that is underneath it all. There is so much great potential in Wave.

But I can’t really use it today.

Not yet, anyway.

It’s NOT because of the common sentiment I hear about not having anyone to communicate with on Wave. Between Voxeons trying it out, PR/marketing folks associated with FIR trying it out, and a whole lot of other early adopters I know, there are probably easily 150-200 people that I could use Wave with.

And I very definitely can use Google Wave for PUBLIC Waves like those I described for conferences in my screencast. For public waves, it’s great and works well.

But I can’t really use it for true collaboration with a team a people – and therefore can’t really push Wave to see what it can do.

WHY NOT?

Two simple pictures illustrate the issue:

and:

Figure it out?

Yes, indeed….

THERE IS NO WAY TO REMOVE SOMEONE FROM A WAVE!

Like I alluded to earlier, no big deal for a public wave. Public waves are by definition, well,… public… and so anyone can join in a public wave. And anyone contributing to a public wave should realize that anything they type there is potentially visible to everyone. It is an annoyance that you can’t leave a public wave… but that’s it.

(Note: the Google Wave team did hear the cries from Wave users and have allowed anyone to remove a bot from a wave. So bots can be kicked out, but not people.)

THE PROBLEM

I’ll give you two examples, though, where this is a huge problem.

First, imagine that you are trying to use Google Wave to collaborate on, say, a news release for your company. The content of the wave is confidential. You invite your team into the wave and you all work on the document. Then, because the current Wave user interface is, um, not entirely intuitive, one of your team members accidently adds someone from outside of your company into your confidential wave.

OOPS!

There is no way to boot that person out. In fact, via Playback, he/she can see everything you have ever typed into that wave… every edit… every snarky comment…

All you can do at that point is: 1) appeal to the person’s brother/sisterhood as a fellow early-adopter to excuse the problem and try to pretend they don’t see everything going on in the wave; and 2) start a brand-new wave (copying content over) that includes just your team and not this person.

Not ideal solutions.

Second, let’s say that you are working with a team of people and one of the people decides to leave the team. Maybe they quit or are fired from the company. Maybe they start a competing project. Whatever the case… you don’t want them to have access to the Wave any more.

OOPS!

Again, no way you can remove them. The best you can do is go up to the upper right corner of one of the “blips” in your wave and do the “Copy to new wave” command… and then add everyone to this new wave.

I recently had to personally do this for a wave of 25+ people. Not a fun experience, particular because the current Wave UI only seems to let you add one person at a time. So I had to create the new wave and then figure out who all was in the old one and add them one at a time to the new wave. It didn’t take a long time… it was really only a few minutes… but it was a pain. And then I had to flip between the old and new waves to be sure I had brought everyone over.

And then, since everyone would still see the old wave in their inbox, I had to change the title of the old wave so that people would not go into that one and would know they could archive it to get it out of their Inbox.

SOLUTIONS?

As The Complete Wave Guide indicates, it’s not necessarily an easy problem to solve due to Wave’s collaborative nature. Having said that, the problem has been solved in the IM space in places like Skype Group Chats, IRC channels, etc. Now, federation isn’t here yet, but Wave’s distributed and decentralized architecture could add some interesting syncing challenges to this issue – but yet it still seems to me to be solvable.

As “GeekLad” notes in “5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready, it’s an issue of lack of any real kind of “access control”. I agree with with GeekLad that something like this kind of system needs to be in place:

Allow the wave creator do add/remove any participant from a wave.
Allow the wave creator to assign/modify the following permissions that can be set at the wave and participant level:

Permission to add bots to the wave.
Permission to invite other participants to the wave.
Permission to remove participants from the wave.
Read-only or read/write access to the wave.
Permission to grant/modify each (or all) permissions for other participants and/or the entire wave.

That’s what we need.

Access control and the ability to remove participants from a wave.

Until that time, as much as I dearly want to be using Google Wave for all sorts of collaborative development… I won’t… I can’t in good conscience do so with private information.

Here’s hoping that the Wave team does give us this feature real soon now… until then… I’ll keep using it for public waves, and for non-confidential private waves… but I want to use it for so much more…

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Flip Video Cameras with WiFi Might Be Useful for Conference Videopodcasting

1 Reply

Intriguing to read today that new Flip video cameras will be coming in 2010 with WiFi support. I don’t (yet) own a Flip camera, but I’ve been watching their evolution, particularly after Cisco acquired the company. I’ve watched friends use them quite effectively to upload quick video snippets to YouTube and/or their blogs… and sooner or later I know I’ll get one. Probably wait for 2010, though, for these WiFi-equipped models…

My particular interest is in being able to shoot quick video interviews at a conference or trade show and then upload them to YouTube directly from the show floor. Sure, you can do this today with a Flip camera by simply plugging it into the USB port on your computer – but you have to open up your computer to do that. That’s one more step that gets in the way of rapid posting of videos. As the Mashable article notes, the iPhone 3GS solves this issue by letting up upload video directly over AT&T’s network. And for those with a iPhone 3GS that is true (I have a 3G and am too cheap to upgrade), assuming you have decent AT&T coverage wherever the conference is.

A Flip camera with WiFi support, though, could be quite useful at conferences with decent WiFi – which, admittedly can be a challenge. Still there are several that I go to that do have decent video, and when Voxeo has a booth at an event we have our own (secured) WiFi… so I could see it working.

I also could see it working well in an office environment, too, for quick video interviews.

What do you think? Would you buy one with WiFi? If so, where would you use it? Or will you just stick with something like the iPhone 3GS?

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

VIDEO: How to use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Note-taking

3 Replies

Over the past two weeks, I’ve both witnessed and participated in an incredibly powerful way to use Google Wave. The use case is simply this:

collaboratively taking notes at a conference

I saw this first Oct 28-30 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam. Members of the Google Wave team set up some initial waves and showed “live waving” during the actual event. Others then participated in (everyone at eComm was given a Wave account). I joined in asking some questions and participating in the dialog. Although I wasn’t there, I wound up learning a lot of what went on there and now there are some great notes people can reference about the sessions. If you have a Wave account, you can see the eComm waves yourself by going to the search box at the top of the center column (where it usually says “in:Inbox”) and entering in:

tag:ecomm with:public

Now you will see all the public waves that were created by multiple people during and after the event.

At VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 this week in San Francisco, I and a number of others did our own “live waving” and the process was quite powerful in cases where a number of us were collaborating. You can see the waves in Wave by searching on:

tag:voicecon with:public
tag:e2conf with:public

There weren’t as many Wave users at the two conferences, so we didn’t have quite as many collaborators in some of the public waves – but look at the ones relating to “Google Wave” to see some strong collaboration.

I actually used ScreenFlow on my Macbook Pro to capture one of the editing sessions, because I think you really need to see that in action to fully appreciate what it can do. I’m hoping to edit that and get it up as a screencast soon.

To show how to use Wave in this manner, I created this Emerging Tech Talk screencast based on the eComm public waves:

The Emerging Tech Talk blog post has a few more details about what I showed in the video.

If you use Google Wave in this fashion, please do leave a note letting people know how to find your waves. As we all explore this early preview of Google Wave, it’s great to learn from each other.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Heading out to Enterprise 2.0 conf next week in SF…

Leave a reply

On Sunday evening I’ll be heading out to San Francisco were I’ll be speaking at both Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon next week at the Moscone center (they are co-resident). As I outline on a page on the Voxeo Talks blog, my talks at Enterprise 2.0 will both be on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. The first is:

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging

Micro-blogging is taking hold within the Enterprise. The social aspects of real-time messaging promise to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and community-building. Organizations pursuing “Enterprise Twitter” solutions however face numerous issues: *What is the business case (including metrics and ROI)? *What are the policy, security, compliance, and discovery implications? *Are there best practices to help with employee adoption? *What application scenarios work best?

e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Brad Garland, CEO, The Garland Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Speaker – Wim Hofland, Manager, Inspiration and Innovation, Sogeti Netherlands

It should be an interesting discussion, particularly because my views on “enterprise micro-blogging” have evolved a good bit (and not necessarily in a positive direction) since I wrote my long piece a year ago about Yammer, Present.ly and Laconica.

Next up, and on the same general theme, is a “reactor panel” that is a bit of reprise of a similar panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year, although with different participants:

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise

The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more.

e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Speaker – Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Speaker – Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Speaker – David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
Speaker – Eugene Lee, CEO, Socialtext
Speaker – Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.
Speaker – Vivek Khuller, President and CEO, Divitas

Again, it should be an enjoyable session… particularly if we get to have a bit more of a discussion.

Both sessions are “slide-less” in that we as participants are not showing slides… just discussing the topic.

On Thursday morning, Irwin Lazar and I also have a “Deep Dive” on “Web 2.0 in the Enterprise”, although interestingly that is going on over on the VoiceCon agenda.

Anyway, if you are out at either Enterprise 2.0 or VoiceCon, do drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere out there. You can expect, of course, that I’ll be tweeting from the show on probably both @danyork and @voxeo.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

I’m toying with creating an email newsletter – care to sign up?

Leave a reply

For some time now, I’ve been playing with the idea of starting an e-mail newsletter. Several reasons… but primarily because I am curious about using it as an adjunct to all the writing I do online. I write across a good number of sites and yet there are common themes that are woven into all my writing – primarily this one:

to try to tell the story of all the changes that are going on all around us in both the way we communicate and also the tools we use to communicate.

That theme is here on Disruptive Conversations, over on Disruptive Telephony, in Blue Box podcasts, in my Emerging Tech Talk video podcasts and definitely also in what I write on Voxeo’s blog site. It’s also a theme in some of what I post on Facebook and Twitter, too.

I don’t know how often I’ll send out the newsletter. Knowing me, I expect it will vary in frequency. Right now I’m thinking it will probably include items such as:

Major pieces I’ve written or produced somewhere in my network of sites that I think would be interesting to a larger audience.
Updates on upcoming conferences where I’ll be speaking and where we might be able to meet.
New projects or initiatives – or other bright, shiny objects I’m chasing.
New tools I think people might find useful.
Random personal updates or other notes.

Again, it’s still very much in the formative stages (what kind of information would you like to receive?)

It also, quite frankly, gives me a chance to experiment with iContact, a service I’ve been wanting to try for a while.

Anyway, if you’d like to join me in my little experiment, you’re welcome to do so and I’d be honored to have you along for the ride. The shiny new sign-up form is here:

I’ll probably be sending out the first newsletter in the next week or so. Being the security/privacy nut that I am, you can be sure I won’t sell your name or do anything like that. That’s not my style.

If you do sign up, thanks for doing so.

P.S. And yes, because I despise the link-spam bots out there that clog up systems by filling out forms on sites, I do require you to confirm your email address. I know it’s one extra step, but really it’s better for all involved…

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Experimenting with Google Wave? Here’s a great list of keyboard shortcuts

Leave a reply

Are you experimenting with Google Wave and wish you could work quicker within the Wave windows? If you are like me and love keyboard shortcuts, I found this site that may be of help to you:

http://spreadgooglewave.com/syndication/google-wave-keyboard-shortcuts

The two shortcuts that save me the most time are:

“Shift+Enter” – ends your editing, the equivalent of pressing the “Done” button with the mouse.
“Ctrl+Space” – marks all blips in a Wave as read (important in a wave like the VUC Wave that has lots of commentary).

What Wave keyboard shortcuts do you find most useful?

P.S. If you are on Wave and want to say hello, I’m at “danyorkLPG@googlewave.com”.

P.P.S. No, I don’t have any more invites. 🙂

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Using TypePad Connect now to let you comment with your accts from Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or more

Leave a reply

Earlier this week I enabled “TypePad Connect” for this blog and my Disruptive Telephony blog so that you can now sign in when commenting using your “identity” from TypePad, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or many others. Nicely, you can also, of course, simply enter in your name, URL, etc. like you always could before on this blog. The difference is that now down above the comment field you should see this:

If you click on the “more…” link, you will be taken to a site to choose the account you want to use:

I’m particularly pleased about the ability to support OpenID, something I’ve written about both here and over on Disruptive Telephony, although that’s not particularly surprising given Six Apart’s support for OpenID in the past.

There’s a larger story to be written here about TypePad Connect and how it is part of the greater battle going on both with regard to your “identity” across blogs and also where your comments are stored. The Read/Write Web had a great article on the topic a year ago when TypePad Connect first came out. For me, since both this blog and DisTel are already hosted on TypePad, the issue about having your comments reside on TypePad’s servers is irrelevant, really, since they already are. Another time, though, I’ll write more on the larger story.

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments through being logged into those services (and saving yourself filling out the form).

For those wanting to know more about TypePad Connect, there is a video on the main page and also previous TypePad blog posts in November 2008 and January 2009 that go into more detail.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Congrats to HubSpot on $16M funding AND launch of “Inbound Marketing” book

Leave a reply

Congratulations are very definitely in order to the folks over at HubSpot today for two reasons:

They closed a $16 million Series C investment round.
They launched their new book: “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”

HubSpot has definitely been one of the companies I’ve been watching in this space. They’ve provided a great amount of content through their Internet Marketing blog on a wide range of topics. I’ve also enjoyed some of their “Grader” tools. Plus, on a purely local note, they are an interesting Boston-area company just a couple of hours south of me.

Congrats to Brian Halligan and all the HubSpot team… and best wishes to them as they aim to become “the Salesforce.com of marketing”.

P.S. Check out their “Inbound Marketing cartoon eBook“.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

What I need is the “Brain-To-Blog” interface!

2 Replies

As I see in the Twitter stream, many good friends of mine are attending and speaking at Blog World Expo right now out in Las Vegas. I’m not there, nor was I at last year’s BWE, but I was a huge fan of and attendee at the “Podcast and New Media Expos” that proceeded it. There are some REALLY great sessions going on out there right now.

The one thing I don’t see being discussed there is this:

I need a Brain -> Blog interface!

I need something that can take all the article ideas in my brain and just mystically make them appear on my various blogs. My problem is not a lack of ideas. No way! I have the opposite problem.

Every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to be told … and every night I find myself going to bed with so many of those stories left untold.

I have an article queue miles long… and I find myself thinking through stories at all sorts of times… but finding the time to actually write and post those stories is so incredibly difficult. Between crazy work hours, a family I love to be with (including an extremely cute but demanding 5-month-old) and, well, the need to sleep and eat… the time to convert those articles from thoughts in the brain to words on a blog site seems incredibly hard to get.

I want the interface that’s in many cyberpunk/sci-fi stories… where I can just think the text that I want to post and… ta da.. it magically gets created! Sadly, such things are right now only in stories and research labs… but it sure would be nice to have.

Meanwhile, back in the reality of 2009, I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to carve out some more time… 😉

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Sign up for my e-newsletter
* Email
First Name
Last Name
	* = Required Field