Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…
The release, though it includes the Windows Live Writer blogging application, carefully avoids cannibalizing two of Microsoft’s mainstays, the Word and Excel programs.
(which would seem to me to be NOT “unclear” about WLW!)
All in all, this would seem to point to an impending release. Perhaps even the “1.0” release?? We’ll see….
If you are looking to get started in “social media” – or are interested in how others survive and thrive in the world of social media – Chris Brogan’s post today, “My Social Media Toolkit“, may be of great help to you. I use most all of the tools Chris lists myself, although being on Windows versus a Mac, I use Windows Movie Maker versus iMovie. I also don’t really using Upcoming.org although I’ve been considering using it more as a way to somewhat automate the list of events that I am attending. In the comments to Chris’ entry, I also added the following sites/services/tools that I use as well:
del.icio.us – I use http://del.icio.us/ to bookmark and tag all the various sites I find in the course of daily work. My del.icio.us feed is then a sidebar on a blog, posted to a link blog, etc.
Feedburner – I use http://www.feedburner/ (now owned by Google) for all my RSS feeds, both for the stats and also to add links (“FeedFlare”) to the feeds so that people can post my items into other services.
Windows Live Writer – I’ll second the comment made (in Chris’ comments) by Connie Benson that Windows Live Writer truly ROCKS for an offline blog editor (if you are on Windows). It has *greatly* increased the ease and speed with which I can post blog entries.
Screen captures – A recent addition to my tool set has been SnagIt from TechSmith. It lets me (on Windows) very quickly grab a section of the screen and copy it to the clipboard – which I can then paste into Windows Live Writer. It has again greatly accelerated the speed with which I can make blog entries that include graphics, logos, or other parts of a screen. (Here’s an example.) There’s also a plugin for Windows Live Writer, although I found that just the copy/paste worked much better/faster for me. (I’m all about speed for posting, because blogging is something I just fit into random short moments of the day.)
Anyway, those are some of the additions I would make to Chris’ great list. Hopefully this all will help folks use social media that much more effectively.
Somewhat reluctantly, I have now joined Plaxo’s “Pulse beta”. If you are a Pulse user and I know you, please do add me as a connection. It’s precisely this last sentence that is why I have been reluctant to join Pulse, despite the many raves in the blogosphere of late – I have to rebuild my entire network in yet-another-social-network.
Now, granted, Plaxo makes it easy to find other people through importing various different lists of contacts: GMail, AOL, Yahoo… take your pick. You can even buy the Premium version (or do the 30-day free trial) and import your LinkedIn contacts.
But I don’t really want to go through the aggravation. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for now about 5 years and have a nice network there of contacts. In my daily life these days, it seems that Facebook, Twitter, and my various blogs are the communication tools/sites I use. Do I really need another one?
Not really… but over time I admit to have become curious enough based on comments from people I know (such as Robert Sanzalone) to break down and open an account. There’s a couple of reasons. First, with my interest in identity, I’m admittedly a sucker for a major site that allows OpenID use:
but that alone is of course no reason to try out the site. More, I was intrigued by Plaxo’s “PulseStream”, which seems to be a much more open and useful version of Facebook’s “Newsfeed”. With just a single glance at a page, I can see the information from the people I find interesting… what their latest blog posts are, what their tweets are if they use Twitter, new contacts they have made. All aggregated on one page. Simple and easy.
I also do like that Plaxo allows a more granular segregation of “friends” than the other sites. Right now, with Facebook, for example, people are either “friends” with full access to the site or you can make them a “friend” but give them only access to your “limited profile”. That process though is a bit klunky, in my opinion. And you have basically one “limited profile” for all your “friends” (if I understand the process clearly). However, in Plaxo, contacts are divided into three categories: Business, Family and Friends:
Note that you can put a contact into multiple groups, which is nice. As you work with the site, this segregation has a couple of benefits. On your “Pulse” page, for instance, as shown at right you can choose to only see updates from the appropriate groups (or everyone, or just yourself). It is also extremely easy to only expose certain information to one of those three categories but not the others. For instance, in the picture on the left, I am choosing to include my Flickr stream into my “Pulse Stream” and specifying that it is available to the public, but note the various choices that I have. (I am assuming that if I choose “Nobody” it will only be available to me when I view my Pulse Stream.)
I am sure there will be folks who want more than three groupings. And there will be undoubtedly some who say “I never use this site with family members, so why can’t I remove that group?” Allowing grouping like this will surely just invite people to say that they want more groups or want to create their own arbitrary groups. (Which, to a degree, are we then getting back into groups like Facebook has?)
Regardless, it is nice to be able to group contacts accordingly rather than just labeling them all with the overloaded term “friend”.
Now, it’s intriguing to think that Plaxo’s Pulse might be a tool for “lifestreaming”. It certainly allows the aggregation of feeds (like Tumblr does)… but it’s still a walled garden like Facebook. In order to see the “Pulse Stream”, one has to login to Plaxo Pulse. Does this make it any better than Facebook’s NewsFeed? Not really. Now I’ve heard rumblings that there may be an RSS feed in the works for your PulseStream, which would then let you pull it outside the Pulse Walls and do something useful with it like put it on your blog or in a widget. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m there on Pulse, at least for some period of time. If I do know you, please do feel free to add me as a connection.
Now that Ken Camp has let the cat out of the proverbial bag – and Stuart Henshall is pleased – I’ll join in on wishing Stuart and Dina Mehta all the best in their new venture: Mosoci. I’ve never had the privilege of meeting Dina (although I’ve certainly known of her as a result of the tsunami and disaster relief efforts and also the Worldchanging site), but I’ve known Stuart now for several years through the VoIP blogging world. I first learned of him back when he started writing about Skype on his Unbound Spiral blog and then went on to create the Skype Journal. I’ve subsequently met him face-to-face at a couple of different VoIP-related conferences. I’ll definitely agree with Ken that Stuart is one of the folks out there who really has a good sense of a larger vision/view of the world.
After my recent post on lifestreams, Stuart dropped me an IM to discuss that post a bit, and along the way mentioned his new venture. (My immediate comment – if he really wanted to be in the “Web 2.0”, he was already violating the cardinal rule that all Web 2.0 startups must end in an “r” and omit the final vowel (as in Flickr, Tumblr, Tanglr, etc.)!) As Stuart said in his blog post today, Mosoci is part collaboration, part research:
Mosoci is the platform of our collaboratory around the interests we love, are passionate about and to reinforce the direction and learning we need to go in.
As to exactly what they will be doing, they state this on their “About” page:
Mosoci provides the research, tools and connections that lead to more innovative communities. We help you think upstream, accelerate learning and gain unique insights that create new products, services and markets.
We help companies big and small, global and local hold effective conversations about change. We love consumer products; new media, communications (VoIP, mobile) and technology. We are deeply engaged in Web 2.0 initiatives which are creating revolutionary new best practices for relating to you and me as users, customers and brand communities.
Have you ever been in an IM or email conversation and wanted to quickly show someone a screenshot or screencast/video of something on your screen? But didn’t want to go through the hassle of saving a file and then uploading it or attaching it? Or you wanted to add something to your Twitter feed but didn’t want to put the image somewhere first?
The Jing Project is our journey to discover how we can improve everyday conversation. Think of all those IM chats, emails, blog posts and comments you’ve made over the years. Now imagine a more visual world where integrating screen captures and screencasts into those took nothing more than a matter of seconds. Can you imagine it? I can – I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it – it’s Jing.
Our goal is to explore this with all of you and together see how we can bridge the visual world and our daily conversations into a richer, more effective way to communicate.
I have to say I’d admire any company that experiments publicly (although one could argue that pretty much all of “Web 2.0” is one big “beta”) and they have been very up front about the fact that Jing is really a “proof-of-concept” more than a “product”… they aren’t sure what this will turn into, what the business model will be, etc. They are more just throwing it out there to watch what people do with it.
So what is “Jing“? Well, essentially it is a screen capture program that sits on your Windows or Mac and, when triggered, captures an image or records a video/screencast – and then uploads the image/video to screencast.com and… this is the key… gives you a URL on your clipboard that you can paste into an IM chat, email, Twitter post, whatever. So the Jing logo I have above is now also available as a screenshot at:
It’s pretty cool in that you can just make a quick screen capture or a quick video/screencast. For instance, here’s an incredibly riveting video of me updating my status on Facebook:
Now, not terribly exciting in a blog, where I can just embed a video, but could be quite useful in an IM chat, Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce post or an email. For instance, just this morning I used it to email my corporate help desk and included a pointer to a screen capture of my Task Manager while trying to diagnose some performance problems. (And being security paranoid as I am, I didn’t have an issue putting the screen cap on an external server because it didn’t really show anything about my machine other than the fact that I’m pushing my laptop way beyond what I should! 😉
Since it’s hosted on screencast.com, you can actually login there and then find other ways to share the screencast or screen capture. For instance, I can do the much more blog-appropriate thing and embed the screencast right here:
So in my limited experimentation, I can definitely see the use for it. The one “catch” that some of the others playing with the released version have latched onto is that right now it is tied to screencast.com, which actually is a commercial hosting service that you have to pay $70/year to have an account there. Right now, and according to TechSmith “for the life of the Jing project”, however long that may be, you don’t have to pay to use it. This is again an experiment and TechSmith seems to be figuring out how or if they can turn this into a business. At the moment, Jing and the associated hosting on screencast.com is free.
Now the program does show its pre-release rough edges a bit when you first download and install it. For one thing, because it uses Windows Presentation Framework on a PC you have to download Microsoft .Net 3.0 which took a while and was a separate install process. The other major issue I had was that once you do the install… it seems like nothing happens. If you are an astute observer (or have been clued in by someone) you will notice that you now have a new icon in your systray – If you click on that icon and choose “Preferences” you get the big yellowish-orangish ball that you see in the image on the right. Yes, that’s the preferences screen. (The TechSmith folks are perhaps going a bit overboard on the “experiment” angle, although it is at least interesting to see someone thinking about a different UI for dialog boxes.) The middle button gets you into the preferences where you can create a screencast.com account and set up a hot key to trigger the Jing capture. (And yes, I submitted feedback with my concerns about some of the UI roughness.) When you are done, you press the checkmark icon and you’re set to go.
After that, it’s just a matter of triggering Jing to take a capture. You do that either through the hot key you assigned or through the strange little ball (half-circle, really) that appears at the top middle of your screen above all other windows in the title bar area:
When you go up to that ball with your mouse, it expands and you can initiate the capture. (Funny, but I can’t seem to find a way to capture a video of it because the ball disappears as soon as you start the capture.) Personally, I’m a keyboard guy, so configuring it to be Ctrl+Shift+S worked fine for me.
I guess my only major knock is that even just sitting there idle waiting to be triggered Jing seems to consume about 15-20% of my CPU (per Task Manager). The TechSmith folks seem to think this is related to .Net 3.0 but it is a bit annoying (see previous mention of performance problems on laptop).
All in all, I think it’s an interesting “experiment” and it’s great that TechSmith has made it available for people to play with. It’s definitely still got some rough edges, but I know that the TechSmith folks are currently drowning in feedback right now so I’d expect they’ll be making some changes. I don’t know how much I’ll honestly use it, in part because I’m a bit reluctant to put content on a service where I’m not sure how long the service will be available… but I will continue to experiment with it when I have the need to add visuals into IM or other communication.
Could you see yourself using something like this which makes it easy to include images or video? What do you think about it?
My colleague Down Under, Lee Hopkins, has not been as pleased with Windows Live Writer as I have been. Strange, really, because I’ve not had quite the same issues as he has with graphics. For instance, the one to the right is in at the original size, i.e. “as is” and looks to me quite like the original. Now I did not do anything to it like give it a drop shadow or a box around it, which would have resized the graphic and changed it a bit.
Lee, I’ll suggest that you click on the graphic and then on the Image tab under “Borders” set it to “None”. That combined with ensuring that the image size is set to “Original” on the Advanced tab should give you “as is” size you are seeking. At least, it does for me.
As to posting in the future, I’ll try that out with this post. I would wonder if it is a function of the blogging platform you are using. Lee is hosting his own WordPress – I am using hosted TypePad. We’ll see. I’ll set this with a date and time of today at 6:46pm, about 1.5 hours from now. Let’s see if it uses TypePad’s queueing to hold the post or if it posts immediately. (Hmmm… I wonder what Timezone TypePad operates on.)
Here goes the experiment…
UPDATE: Nope, it didn’t work. Lee’s right in that forward-dating a blog post does not appear to work in the current Windows Live Writer Build.
I’ll note that I, too, used to have this capability in Semagic, but Semagic queued it locally and then posted it to the blogging service (assuming Semagic was running at the time the item was to be posted – otherwise it posted it when it was next started).
What are you doing on September 8th and 9th, 2007? If you are in the San Francisco Bay area (or can get there), and more precisely Richmond, California (a bit north of Oakland and Berkeley), it appears that there will now be an “unconference” called “SocialNetworkDevCamp” with the purpose:
SocialNetworkDevCamp will focus on API and Widget development from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Linked In and others. The camp will also start the process of identifying open APIs and data structures which would facilitate the creation of open standards for social networking.
Very cool to see…. and hopefully it will stimulate a good bit of discussion and action around the potential mashups that can occur between all these various services. “Open standards for social networking” would also be very good to see!
If are interested in attending, just edit the wiki page and add yourself to the list of participants (or volunteers).
(Tip of the hat to Julian Bond for raising this issue in a Skype groupchat focused on mashups.)
Right at the end of May, Microsoft released a Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer and ever since then it’s been in my queue to write about, given that it is now the offline editor I use for almost all my blogging. However, I think I’ll give up on writing the massive comprehensive review I was intending to do and instead write a series of smaller posts about various aspects of the program.
So first up, I thought I’d mention the new capability to easily link to previous posts. When you choose "Insert-> Hyperlink…" (or simply "Ctrl+K", which brings back old WordStar memories) you get the dialog box shown on the left (click for larger image) that allows you to enter the URL to link to and potentially edit the link text. The cool part, though, is the "Link to" dropdown button which has as one of the two choices "Previous Posts". If you choose that, you then see the dialog box shown on the right (click for larger image).
In this window you see the recent posts you have made across all the blogs for which you use Windows Live Writer. You can simply click on one of them and the link is automagically inserted for you. Alternatively you can click on a blog title to see the posts to that specific blog. (The posts are retrieved from the blog itself so it does not matter whether they were written using WLW or through your blog web interface.) If you want to go back in time, you don’t have an option to go back to a specific date (which my previous editor, Semagic, did) but you can see the last n posts, where n is 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100 or 500 and so you can scroll back that way.
All in all it’s pretty slick and has saved me already a great amount of time in linking to previous entries. Given that I blog across multiple weblogs, the ability to link to entries in other blogs is definitely a great timesaver. (Note that you need to have setup all the weblogs within WLW, which I have done for mine.)
If you haven’t checked it out (and are on Windows), do go to the Windows Live Writer Zone and download a copy. I think you might be impressed as to how well it can help you blog faster.
Question for you all – what do you use to incorporate screen captures into your blog entries?
For a variety of reason, I like to incorporate images into my posts. Sometimes it is just the logo of the company/product/service that I am discussing[1]. Sometimes it is a part of a web page or program screen (here’s an example). In any event, my highly unsophisticated process of getting those graphics right now on my Windows XP PC is to do the following:
Press Ctrl+Alt+PrntScrn to copy the current open window to the Clipboard.
Switch to Windows Paint and paste the image into the window.
Click on one of the other tools (like the eraser) so that I de-select the entire area and then click on the selection box again.
Select the region I want to copy and then do the standard copy to Clipboard.
Switch to Windows Live Writer (my current blogging editor of choice) and paste the graphic into my blog entry.
Like I said… not very sophisticated, but it works well. However, I’d like to simplify it a bit – ideally drop it down to simply my steps #4 and #5, i.e. select a region of the screen and then paste it into WLW.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t yet seem to be a WLW plugin that does what I want, although this plugin seems quite close if I feel like dropping $39 for TechSmith’s SnagIt program (and perhaps I will). It sounds like Vista has a built-in utility for doing this, but I don’t have Vista and don’t foresee getting it for some time.
What do you all use? How do you bring in screen captures? logos? etc.? [2]
Thanks in advance.
[1] And sometimes a logo can be brought in by simply right-clicking it in Firefox, choosing "Copy Image" and pasting it into my blog editor. But sometimes the colors don’t work and sometimes a site doesn’t make a logo easy to get this way – the logo is part of a much larger image or embedded in Flash… so you need to capture that part of the screen to get the logo.
[2] And Mac users, please don’t bother telling me that this is: a) trivial and built-in on the Mac; or b) I should get a Mac and run Parallels to use Windows and again would be able to do it. I get it, okay… I understand the belief that Macs are superior for graphics. But that doesn’t help change the fact that my corporate laptop is a Windows XP box!
It would seem that those of us who use Feedburner are seeing an early payoff of the acquisition by Google – per the Feedburner blog announcement today:
Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you’ll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today.
Very cool to see! I’ve already activated what is now called “Feedburner Stats PRO” on my main feeds and am looking forward to seeing what other stats I wind up getting.
I’m also VERY pleased to see the “MyBrand” service being made free. One of my biggest concerns about using Feedburner all along is that people subscribe to the RSS feed at Feedburner’s site. They are essentially all now Feedburner’s customers (well, now Google’s!). If for some reasone I ever want to move my feed to some other site, or to host it myself, I basically lose all those folks who have subscribed to the feed via Feedburner. I have to somehow get them to re-subscribe to my new RSS feed. The beauty of “MyBrand” is that instead of having an RSS feed set up as:
While this URL does look a bit repetitive, the point is that should I need to move the RSS feed elsewhere – or should Google someday shut down Feedburner (which I can’t see happening) – the feed URL is under MY control! I might need to do a web redirect to point “/DisruptiveConversations” to some file like “/rss.xml” but that is something that I can do on my server or service provider. I’m no longer locked into Feedburner’s service and systems.
Now, I have no reason whatsoever to leave Feedburner. I’m a very happy user who is not paying a dime and enjoying the stats and all the other many capabilities that Feedburner offers. But that’s today… and who is to say that sometime in the future I might want to move my feed to somewhere else? The MyBrand service gives me this flexibility and “insurance”. Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll make the time to make this transition for all of my feeds.
Thanks, Feedburner team, for making both of these services available to all of your users!
For instance, in the picture on the left, I am choosing to include my Flickr stream into my “Pulse Stream” and specifying that it is available to the public, but note the various choices that I have. (I am assuming that if I choose “Nobody” it will only be available to me when I view my Pulse Stream.)
If you click on that icon and choose “Preferences” you get the big yellowish-orangish ball that you see in the image on the right. Yes, that’s the preferences screen. (The TechSmith folks are perhaps going a bit overboard on the “experiment” angle, although it is at least interesting to see someone thinking about a different UI for dialog boxes.) The middle button gets you into the preferences where you can create a screencast.com account and set up a hot key to trigger the Jing capture. (And yes, I submitted feedback with my concerns about some of the UI roughness.) When you are done, you press the checkmark icon and you’re set to go.
My colleague Down Under, Lee Hopkins, 
