Tag Archives: Web2..0

Video Blogs Are Just Around the Corner

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Video Blogs Are Just Around the Corner. Are you ready? I was searching and searching for a video version of Odeo the other week, and I just couldn’t find anything. With Odeo, you just hook up a microphone, and record audio straight into the website. Then you can embed the audio in any website. But it’s only audio, and the world seems to be moving to video pretty rapidly. Then, the other day, I just happened to stumble across what I was looking for: Flixn.

Flixn works a lot like Odeo. You hook up a web cam, press record, and then hit stop when you are done. Then you can get code to embed the video anywhere you want. Pretty neat. Or at least I think – I don’t have a webcam to test it out.

But Flixn seems to go one step farther – you can actually embed the recorder into your site. So, if you have an online class that you want to record video for, you can keep the entire recording process in your site. Hopefully, more Web2.0 sites will move to this thinking – allowing end users to embed their functionality into a site. Then you don’t have to constantly being switching back and forth between applications to get stuff done. Of course, Firefox’s tabbed browsing makes that easy – but it’s still nice to have it all in one place.

Zoho Notebook: Another Great Leap For the Web2.0 World

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I came home from a nice break in a tropical location to get smacked in the fact by two crazy facts of life. For one, there’s still some form of freezing precipitation falling in my corner of the world (but I can’t quite call it snow). Ouch. The second one: Google is not coming out with as many cool things as they used to. At least when compared to companies like Zoho.

I can deal with that, as long as the G-powers that be don’t pull the plug on this blog for pointing that out. The coolest new invention from the Zoho labs: Zoho Notebook. The goal of Zoho Notebook: allow the user (you) to put any content (text, audio, images, video, etc) anywhere on a page, and then share that with others anyway you want.

Don’t most web pages allow you to do that? Sure – if you know the code. Zoho Notebook gives it all to you in a nice user interface. And – the best part is – you can record audio or video straight from your computer into your page. Or upload a pre-recorded file. All you need is a microphone or a video camera hooked up to your computer.

Also, they allow you import content from Zoho Writer, Sheets, and Show (think Word Doc, Excel, and PowerPoint online). All with Skype integration. Nice. Here’s a quick overview video of some of the features:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xabm8hRyXrk

I was noticing that Zoho also has online virtual office, chat, wikis, planers, etc. I am slowly wondering if I need to switch to Zoho from Google for some of this stuff. Come on Google – get on the ball and buy this stuff!

New Year, New Firefox Version

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So, it’s a New Year. Cool. What am I looking forward to in the next year? What new Geekdom goodness am I drooling over? Lots of interesting movies, TV shows, and music to think about. Plenty of new techie things being announced that are pretty exciting. Some may happen, some sound like corporate hype (the hack-proof Vista, anyone?). The one that I think will definitely happen, and will probably live up to it’s hype, is the new version of Firefox scheduled for this year.

Well, Mozilla says that Firefox won’t be released officially until the end of 2007, but I am still looking forward to it. The Alpha version was released in early December. The people that are developing it “hope that it will be a major step toward making Web applications indistinguishable from programs that are installed on the desktop.”

This, to me, sounds like the missing piece in Web2.0 development. Programmers that are creating applications for the web are sometimes limited by browser specifications. Now that a browser is looking to make Web2.0 a reality, I think we will see even better online applications.

I found out over the holidays that some people are afraid of Web2.0 concepts, especially the thought of storing documents or projects that they are creating online. What if you internet connection goes down? What if the website crashes? well, those are always a possibility. But creating anything comes with risks. If you create a Word document and store it on a hard drive – what happens when your drive crashes? Zip drive back-ups can get lost, CD-R backups can get drop and broken, etc. There is always a risk of loss. Even printed copies can get lost, accidentally thrown away, etc. We’ve just gotten over the fears in existing project creations. I think we are just going to have to wait until people get over fears of Web2.0 technology, too.

Congratulations! You Are Time’s Person of the Year

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Just don’t expect a prize 🙂 This has been all over the Web, but I think it is still cool. And it’s Christmas time, so I don’t exactly expect to stay o n top of this blog while I am relaxing on vacation. Anyway, due to the growth or user input based websites like YouTube and Wikipedia, Time magazine has decided to name the entire world person of the year.

Of course, this is due to the growth of the Web2.0 revolution, which I have been heavily focusing on in this blog. This is great news for Ed Tech folks like me, because the more recognition online tools get, the more development there will be on that front. I read about a YouTube like site for artists the other day. I need to dig that one out. Stuff like this is really exciting for the future of Online Education.

Of course, I say I will be taking a break for Christmas, but who knows? So much geeky news to report. A new Transformers movie trailer to drool over, cool new websites popping up every where, and I finally got to see an episode of Battlestar Gallactica this weekend. Yes, I am the only geek in the world without cable. So I had to wait until I was out of town in a hotel to see it. But, the upside is that, while flipping through cable channels looking for something to watch, I finally found a Star Trek series that my wife actually likes (Voyager).

ZohoShow: Online PowerPoint Presentations

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If you can’t tell, I love Web2.0 applications. Some of them are pretty rough, some are really good, but all show incredible potential.

One of the interesting developments in the Web2.0 revolution has been the offering of (usually free) online versions of expensive office applications. Microsoft Word and Excel Spreadsheets have some serious competition with Tools like Writely and Google Docs. Oppsss…. Those are the same thing now.

Anyway, i have always wondered if anyone would create an online version of PowerPoint. And my questions were answered. ZohoShow is one of the first online presentation competitors to enter the market.

So, how does it work? Well, it’s still new. I like some of what I see. Create and edit presentations online, anywhere. Upload existing PowerPoint presentations. Collaborate on documents. Present remotely from anywhere in the world to anywhere. Well, probably not in the wilds of the Amazon, but anywhere with Internet connection. Also, you can embed html into the presentations, opening it up to a whole range of stuff that PowerPoint can’t do. Nice.

There are some downfalls, as this is an early version. The templates that you love in Microsoft probably aren’t there. Backgrounds in general are a problem – it seems like you are only allowed one size (the original size), not a scalable size that resizes based on window size. Also, animations are not available. The upload function is pretty weak on graphic quality preservation. Also, when you are doing a slideshow presentation, it doesn’t cover the whole screen (even though I have seen websites that do that). But it’s a good start.

Below is a link to the PowerPoint presentation that I presented at the IOL 2006 conference. Just click on it to get the frames to advance (or right click to go back). I uploaded the PowerPoint from my computer, had to fix a few buggy places, and then embedded it here. You can see the background problems below:

http://show.zoho.com/public/grandeped/Do-It-Yourself_LMS.ppt