Stixy and Wallwisher are very similar, both are virtual “corkboards” where participants can share notes and ideas simply by clicking on the screen and typing. Stixy has more features and seems a bit slicker. Wallwisher is dead simple. I need to look at them both again and remind myself of the differences.
Example:
Pinterest
http://pinterest.com/
Another curation tool, but focused on images. Create a collection of images for a project, a renovation, photos for a presentation, book covers, screenshots, and more. I often save images and screenshots in my Evernote files, but those can’t easily be shared with others, Pinterest boards can be shared.
One of the many new-ish curation tools. I like this one a lot. Easy to search for and add content from major social media services. Can also add content from other sources and write your own notes to add your thoughts and ideas to the story thread.
Like some of you, I’m scrambling to catch up and finish my posts. And doing them out of order! I’ve really enjoyed being part of this project. I’ve been eager to organize and run one ever since the original one in 2006 (?), since I believe it’s a terrific way for many of us to learn. I realize it may not work for everyone, and there are times when we’re too busy to finish all the assignments. But I do believe that even learning just one new thing is great progress! And it’s the little successes that encourage us to learn more. Bit by bit, step by step.
A couple of things that I think we need to do better if we run this again:
I’m surprised this worked. I don’t think it would have worked in wordpress.com. To embed a TED video
GOOGLE CALENDAR: I didn’t really intend to do my own post on Thing 7 today, but as I was updating my Google Calendar today, I realized it was a mess. So, I took some time out to figure out some answers to my problems. First of all, I had all my public training events in the default calendar and have been hesitant to update the calendar from my phone/iPad for fear of posting a doc appt or movie date on my public training calendar. Since I really didn’t want to move all those events one by one, I dug around and found out how to move them in one fell swoop. This post explains it. Having moved all those events, I had to change out the calendar that’s embedded on my web site. That wasn’t a problem.
With that done, I moved all my non-public business appts to my default calendar, combined all my personal appts and travel on another. And resisted the urge to set up even more calendars! I even remembered to double-check that only the workshop calendar was public. Only problem now, is that the Google tool to synchronize with Outlook only synchronizes the main Google calendar, I need to synchronize all of them. I need to find a solution for that – or give up on Outlook for good. But I still like the way Outlook prints a paper calendar that I can scribble on. Yes, paper and ink. How old-skool of me.
EVERNOTE: I love Evernote (but then you knew that already). But the one thing that frustrated me was not being able to take a screenshot of a piece of a webpage and immediately store it in Evernote. When I see things I want to use in a presentation, I want to grab it before I forget about it, get the screenshot, the URL and write some quick notes and move on. Then all that stuff is waiting for me in a folder in EN when I get around to updating/creating the presentation. So, silly me, EN has a very nice screenshot feature and it was sitting there on the task bar of my browser all the time. I’d just never taken the time to look for that feature before. Doh!!! So if you install the Evernote browser tools, right click on the little icon in the task bar and select “show clipping panel”. Now I’m feeling really curious and wondering what else I might be missing.
I’m all out of sequence now and didn’t use our catch up week to actually catch up! But I will. I will, I will.
As for online meetings, I love having this option for training and meeting. Would I prefer to be face to face? Much of the time, yes. But webinars provide the opportunity to check out something that might be of interest, but not so essential that I could justify spending time & money to travel to a conference or training session.
On the other side of the screen, I’ve presented a few webinars and it does take a bit of getting used to! I used Elluminate for some small group sessions and we practiced with the software quite a bit in advance to make sure the folks sponsoring the webinar could act as the moderators for the session. That worked fairly well.
Another time, I was invited to consult with some folks out of the area about a WordPress project. We used WebEx for that meeting. They were all in their meeting room with my computer being projected on their big screen. We could all hear each other, but I couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see me. That software worked well too.
Since I’ll be doing more webinars in the future, for bigger audiences, I’ve been looking for tips on how to present effectively. Tips for Effective Webinars has lots of great advice.
What advice do you have?
Since I’m so familiar with Flickr, I decided to challenge myself a bit and take a better look at Picasa, both the online photo album service and the desktop software. I’ve had the desktop software installed for a long time, though I haven’t used it as much as I could.
Two features that I love are the collage making option and the face recognition feature. The collages are simple to create (once you remember where the option is!) and are a great way to make visuals for presentations. Or just pretty collages of spring flowers. 
The face recognition stuff is kind of amazing to me. It’s so darned smart about picking up who’s in your photos, even when someone’s face has changed a lot over time. I had to laugh when it even picked out a face that was in a photo hanging on the wall in a photo that I’d taken in someone’s living room!
Picasa has terrific options for organizing photos, adding tags to index them and editing tools. Naturally, being a Google tool, it has an option to upload photos to Blogger, which is how I posted the collage above. But even better, for us Flickr addicts, you can send photos to Flickr as well. This article explains how.
I also took another look at the online photo storage service also and scouted around to find the features that are similar to familiar Flickr features. I won’t be switching my loyalties from Flickr though, I have too much time and energy invested in building a community of friends and colleagues there.
If you’re having trouble adding flickr photos to your blogs, check out these screencasts:
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| Zite knows me! |
Thanks to a post by one of our participants (SkillCollection) I learned about a new iPad app called Zite. While not really an RSS app, it is a content aggregator. I gave it a try and told it what my twitter name is and gave it access to my Google Reader account. In a flash it created a personalized ‘magazine’ with articles it thought I might be interested in. What was most impressive was the topic categories it picked up on – see the photo. Pretty spot-on for me.
I further customized it by adding sections on gardening, photography, macintoshes, wine, food, and more. As I read articles and give them the thumbs up or down, Zite will get to know me better and get better at recommending articles. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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