Category Archives: Web 2.0

Decent video sharing is hard to find

I got my first digital video camera last month – a Sanyo Xacti CG65 to be exact. After way too many months of research (and way too many missed opportunities to film my little ones doing things that they may never do again), I decided against going high-def (too much money and not enough ways to play it!) and just bought something simple. I like that it records to SD cards and that I’m able to slurp the video onto my MacBook Pro in minutes instead of waiting for it to import in real-time like with a MiniDV cam.

So we have family far away and they like looking at our Flickr page to keep up-to-date with the kiddos, but I’m not sure that my search for the Flickr of video-sharing sites has yielded a satisfactory result.

I’m trying Vimeo right now (my freshman effort is posted there – first thing I’ve ever done in iMovie and I have to say it’s not as intuitive as I would have hoped…) so watch out Martin Scorcese. One of the things I like with Vimeo is that — as with Flickr — I can make a video viewable to the world, or a specific subset of the world which I deem appropriate. Some will think I’m paranoid, but I don’t like a whole lot of videos and pics of my kiddos to be “out there.” So the granular control over who can see what has been nice.

On the other hand, the site’s been wonky all day today. And there are some other things I like about Flickr that I’d like to have in a video-sharing platform. For instance, in Flickr, regardless of the privacy setting on a pic I can always send a direct link to someone without a Flickr account and they can see the picture. I like that because I know there will be people with whom I’d like to share a video, but who won’t want to go through the “trouble” of signing up for an account, adding me as a “Contact,” and then waiting for me to reciprocate before they can see something I’ve shot.

So I’m temporarily OK with Vimeo — and who knows — I may be missing something that will make it act the way I want it too. But I’d love to know what sites you’ve found useful for sharing videos.

Reality check

I’ve been a loyal GMail user for almost 3 years. And today I get this:

Unusual Usage
Uploaded with Skitch!

Essentially, it says I’ve done something wrong and as such I’m being barred from access to my email for “up to” 24 hours. I’ve done nothing wrong — I’m not running Gspace or anything like that. Other than leaving a Gmail tab open in Firefox all day, I’m a pretty low-volume Gmail user.

The trouble is, I have evidently become too dependent on all things Google to run my life. I use Gmail for my non-work email (in fact, that’s what precipitated this whole thing – I ordered some jackets for the administrative team and needed to go into my account and find the receipt so I could be reimbursed…), I use Google Docs for a lot of basic scratch-pad stuff to flesh out ideas and such before I bring them into Pages or Word (if necessary) to apply formatting, and I use Google Calendar to keep my life in order.

I guess it just never hit me that losing access to that stuff for a significant length of time could leave me blowing in the wind. Today’s Gmail “lockdown” is only affecting one piece of this, but I had a moment of panic as I went to refresh my calendar and my Google Docs to see if they’d been affected.

Has anyone else been a victim of this? How long did your “time-out” last? I’ve read some anecdotal evidence on the web of people being allowed back in after 5 or 10 minutes, but I’ve been down over an hour now. Strangely, though, my Google Notifier is working. That’s just odd.

Do you ‘social network?’

There’s no way I’m joining MySpace. And I just deleted my account on VIRB because it was kind of confusing. I just joined Facebook and I’m pretty pleased because I see quite a few of my fellow bloggers on there as well.

I am a bit of a ‘joiner’ and feel left out not being involved in this whole phenomenon. Of course, when you sign up for a social network and it’s just – you know – you, it feels a little empty. Luckily, this time I may have joined one that actually has some people I “know” involved so I’m hoping to stick with it. It seems a bit like “MySpace for grown-ups” if you ask me.

Enough of my insecurity issues… If you’re reading this, do you social network? If so, what’s your platform of choice?

Web 2.0 Tool: Numbr

It’s been a while since I’ve signed up for a Web 2.0 tool. I think I’ve been going through some kind of withdrawal symptoms. Thankfully, I have a very cool and useful tool to pass along this time.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to chaperone an overnight trip with a small group of students. Though I wanted all the students (and other chaperones – be they parents or teachers) to be able to get in touch with me in an emergency, I was hesitant to give out my personal cell number to a group of high school kids. Not because I didn’t trust any one of them, but because I know how kids (and sometimes parents!) are by nature. I always had this bizarre, uncomfortable feeling about letting my phone number be programmed into a student’s cell phone.

Enter numbr. You know it’s Web 2.0 since there’s no final ‘e.’ Numbr allows you to create a temporary phone number that forwards to your real one and, by default, expires after one month. According to their fact sheet, numbr’s vision is to keep communications from being crippled due to privacy concerns.

I’ve not yet tried numbr, but the next time I take a group of high school students out of town I’ll definitely be giving it a try.

(via LifeHacker)

Web 2.0 Tool: Timeline

Timeline [Cross-posted at the West Tech Blog]

I have started listening to the net@nite podcast on TWiT and this morning I was listening to the Easter Sunday episode on the way to work. One of the callers mentioned a very cool tool called Timeline which is a part of MIT’s SIMILE Project. (Evidently, SIMILE is an acronym for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments.)

Of course, don’t let all that detract you from the coolness that is Timeline. When I heard the site mentioned on the show, I immediately Jotted myself a note to check it out when I got to work and I must say that I’m very impressed.

According to the site, Timeline is "like Google Maps for time-based information." If that doesn’t mean anything to you, check it out for yourself and peruse some of the sample time lines. One of the sample time lines depicts the events immediately following the assassination of JFK, another the life of impressionist painter Claude Monet. Yet another example (recommended for viewing on a large monitor!) depicts the different prehistoric eras and the dinosaurs that populated the earth during each. Imagine the possibilities!

What I especially like is the ability to click on any of the data points and add text or images. This isn’t a full review because I haven’t played with it that much, but I wanted to pass along something I think may be a valuable Web 2.0 tool for education.

As the school year is winding down, I thought Timeline would be a great tool to capture students’ interest for the last few weeks. There is plenty of documentation making it simple for both teachers and students to create interactive time lines.

Internet Study – Week 6

On Wednesday I had the opportunity to do a super-quick, 30-minute overview of blogs and wikis for the teachers participating in our Internet Study. I would call it more of a learning community than a study but that’s just semantics.

I wanted to share the resources that I created for use in my presentation. Additionally, a hearty thank you all of the other folks who have shared their resources with the community-at-large. In that spirit, I’m sharing back. They’re not comprehensive by any means, but I found that it was a perfect 30-minute overview.

  • Blogs & Wikis – Wiki page with notes and links from the session.
  • West Tech Blog – Demo blog I set up using Blogger to show how simple it is to start a blog, add content, comments, and change templates.
  • Demo Wiki – Wiki I used to show how simple it is to add text, links, pictures, and media to a wiki.

I’m trying to get them to be comfortable editing wikis that they didn’t create, but I think that will take some time. All in all, it appeared to be well received. For the next two Wednesday sessions, we will be spending lunch in the lab where we will be giving them some "supervised" time to play.

Tumblelogs

After listening to last week’s episode of Macbreak Weekly (one of my favorite podcasts…), I discovered Tumblelogging.  I set one up for myself at Tumblr (with no ‘e’ in the Web 2.0 tradition) and have been finding it a very useful place to dump random things that are more than a del.icio.us link, more than a Flickr photo, and less than a blog post.

If you’re new to the concept, a Tumblelog is essentially a lightweight blog with no commenting. You get a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet that allows you to post a pic from any page in Flickr. If I could just get mine set up to receive pics directly from my mobile phone, I think I’d be onto something!

Further reading:

Update 3/8/07: Talk about being responsive to user requests!! Mobile uploads in Beta!

Web 2.0 Tool: stikkit

I’m a self-proclaimed organization and productivity geek.  One of the reasons that my personal productivity system has remained primarily paper-based is that in a lot of ways, paper is more flexible and adaptable than all the high-tech whiz-bang gadgets and programs that are out there.   For example, I want granular control over how I see and interact with my "stuff."  Unfortunately, how I want to see my stuff is not always how Outlook or iCal thinks I should be able to see and interact with my stuff.

I have no plans to ditch my paper-based system any time soon, but stikkit is certainly giving me a reason to explore the possibilities.  The company behind stikkit is called values of n and they proclaim that their mission is "to help people collaborate and get organized."  Collaboration is a running theme I’m seeing in the edublogosphere (is that a word?), and organization is one of my personal obsessions so it seems that there may be some real possibilities for this.

I have tried a bazillion web apps (Backpack, Remember the Milk, etc.) that I’ve used for a while and then abandoned because they did one or two things extremely well, but either fell short or completely failed to address that I also wanted to incorporate some other functionality.  Of course, none of these systems purported to actually to do all of the things that stikkit is doing.

If you’re interested, Merlin Mann just published an informative (if not overwhelming!) post about the nuts and bolts of stikkit‘s functionality, including its use of "magic words" that builds on the simple text input that I enjoy so much in Google Calendar.