Nisha gives a little insight as to why Google Docs is her favorite Web app.

What’s Your Favorite Web App, Nisha Chittal? from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for links to upcoming video sound bites from SXSW by following us at @webworkerdaily. This is part of a series of short interviews with a variety of web working types.

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Here’s what you’ll find at these useful travel sites.

I’ve written about SeatGuru before, but it’s been steadily adding user-interaction features and more. On each page for any plane SeatGuru.com lists, you’ll find an In-Flight Amenities list, which can tell you what kinds of audio, video, Internet and power options your seat will offer. You’ll find complete instructions for making selections on the site at the bottom of the home page.

The real strength of SeatGuru, though, comes from its ever-growing database of airplane seat maps, which now hosts 535 maps for more than 75 different airlines, according to AltSearchEngines. Through a “Submit Comments” button on each seat map page, users can contribute comments about the particular planes, where to sit, what your Internet options will be, entertainment options, and more. If you tend to accept random seat placements, especially for long flights where you may want to work or be entertained, check this out.

I’ve also written about FlightAware before. It’s very good for its huge, nearly real-time tracking of flights via data from air traffic controllers. However, the sheer amount of information may be overkill if you just want to see if a flight of interest is delayed or not.

FlightWait, a new site that I found at AltSearchEngines, has simpler goals than FlightAware does. It lets you enter a zip code, a city or an airport code (such as SFO for San Francisco), and get a graphic depicting any flights that are not delayed in green, while delayed flights are shown in red and black. For example, this afternoon if you typed SFO in, you would see most flights not delayed, but a San Francisco to Chicago flight showing a one- to two-hour delay. This site is useful for a view that takes seconds to get at, and FlightAware can give you more information if you find that you are looking at a delay.

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As web workers, we probably have to endure meetings less often than our cube-dwelling counterparts. When you do hold a meeting with a client or with your teammates, either face-to-face or as a teleconference, you want to make it as effective as possible so you get the outcomes that you want, without wasting anyone’s time.

Here are some tips for making sure that your meetings are less of a chore, go smoothly and have outcomes that are favorable for everyone.

Decide if the meeting is required

My No. 1 meeting rule is not to waste anyone’s time. Companies hold too many meetings. Don’t hold the meeting if you don’t need to or just because you’ve held meetings for this purpose before. Can you achieve the same outcome via more efficient means instead; maybe through a phone call or email?

Decide what type of meeting you are holding

Seth Godin wrote this week that there are three types of meeting:

1. Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s primarily designed to inform.
2. Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
3. Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.

There is a danger of meetings suddenly changing from one type to another, during the meeting, without everyone being aware of it. You need to decide what type of meeting you are holding and make sure everyone knows what it is beforehand.

Have an agenda and stick to it

Nothing is more frustrating than a meeting that has no clear purpose and meanders from topic to topic. All meetings should have an agenda distributed to all attendees beforehand so that you know what you’re going to be discussing and deciding upon. Everyone needs to be aware of what they should bring to the meeting so that they don’t feel ambushed on the day. Finally, an agenda is not clearly defined if it has “Any Other Business” on it.

Only invite people to the meeting who need to be there

People should only be invited to the meeting if they are required — if they will have important input or be involved in decision-making. Be rigorous when pruning the list of invitations: attendees who don’t feel like they are contributing or required will be bored, resentful and inattentive. It’s OK to have people only attend for the part of the meeting that they’re needed for.

Have someone chair the meeting

This may feel stuffy and formal, but with no chairperson, you’ll have a hard time making sure that the meeting sticks to to the agenda. The chairperson should also ensure that everyone contributes.

Start on time and do not overrun

People are giving up valuable time out of their working day for the meeting. Therefore it is vital that meetings start on time and do not overrun: this is the chairperson’s responsibility. If you cannot finish your meeting on time, you should schedule another.

Follow up afterwards

It’s important to follow up afterwards. Thank everyone for their time, distribute outcomes and action points as appropriate.

These tips should also work well for teleconferences. For some teleconference-specific pointers, check out 27 Tips for Teleconferencing.

What tips do you use for holding an effective meeting?

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

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Over the holidays, I talked about how hard it is to explain what I do to family members, friends, and other people living in the regular world who find our web worker ways very foreign. This is complicated by my many side projects and diverse work that make it difficult to explain what I do in a concise way, which is another point that Tina Brown makes about how long it takes us to describe what we do in this new gig economy.

I usually respond with some variant of the rambling found below when someone asks me what I do.

“I’m a freelance online community and social media consultant who helps companies build online communities and social media strategies. My company is called Fast Wonder, and I also have a blog by that name where I talk about online communities, social media engagement, Yahoo Pipes, and other related topics. I also blog on Web Worker Daily. Oh, I’m also the community evangelist for a Portland startup called Shizzow. Or maybe you know me as one of the co-founders and board members of Legion of Tech, which organizes events like BarCampPortland and Ignite Portland. I also organize other events for geeks just for fun in my spare time …”

This is usually followed by questions about what all of this really means, how I make money doing this, or how I manage to do all of this without losing my mind.

How do you describe the breadth of what you do without sounding like a crazy person? Do we, as web workers, have our own language?

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Now, just about everyone who earns income is a “web worker” at least for some part of their day.

To keep up with this ever-changing working world, and so we may continue to be a go-to resource for those who work in the cloud, we’ve got some staff changes to announce. We’ll be saying goodbye to Mike Gunderloy as Senior Writer, and hello to Simon Mackie as the new Editor of WWD. I’ll be stepping down as Editor to concentrate on writing for the site.

Mike Gunderloy joined WWD a few weeks after I did in December 2006, and since then has contributed nearly 1000 posts. Mike is going off to concentrate on his development work, which has grown significantly for him over the last few months. While we’re thrilled for his success, we hope that we can convince him to drop back in for a post or two. Mike was able to cut through the hype and get right to why it mattered for web workers. His voice will be missed.

Who is taking Mike’s place as Senior Writer? Me! I am very, very lucky that I wake up every morning and I can’t wait to get to the computer to do two jobs that I love. In addition to editing WebWorkerDaily, I also work fulltime for C3: Colorectal Cancer Coalition, telecommuting from my home office. I helped start the nonprofit in 2005 and have seen it grow to become the leading colorectal cancer patient advocacy organization in the United States.

Unfortunately, I can’t work fulltime for both wonderful companies. Therefore, I asked Om Malik to replace me as Editor of WWD. As anyone who has built a successful site knows it’s difficult, if not impossible, to do parttime. WWD deserves fulltime love and attention. I will stay with WWD as a writer, which suits me (and the site) well.

I’m pleased to introduce Simon Mackie as the new Editor of WebWorkerDaily. Simon has worked in technical publishing for nearly ten years, with a particular focus on content for web professionals, most recently at Vitamin and SitePoint. He lives in Bristol in the South West of England and has a passion for the Web “done right.”

Simon has great plans for WWD which you’ll see unfold over the coming months. Please give him a warm welcome, and feel free to send him your ideas: tips(at)webworkerdaily.com.

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So what can be done about, short of severe DIY case-cracking, mother-board soldering changes that could result in death and/or dismemberment? One option shows potential. According to ZDNet.com, Pixela offers a FireWire to USB DV transfer cable, designed specifically with digital video transfer in mind.

Don’t go ordering one just yet, though. Currently, the cable only officially supports Windows XP (no Vista, either). So unless you’re running Boot Camp, or virtualization software, you’re out of luck. That said, given the sheer volume of dismayed MacBook owners (and those unwilling to upgrade until they find a solution), it’s likely that OS X support is on the way. Whether that comes in the form of a third-party driver, or (don’t hold your breath) official support and/or hardware from Apple, remains to be seen. When we contacted Pixela, a representative told us that OS X support has been discussed by their planning committee, but no firm decisions to go forward have yet been made.

There are a few problems with this type of workaround. For one, you give up on the fast transfer speeds and power distribution capability of FireWire. Pixela’s cable apparently uses “micro chip” technology to ensure the quality and integrity of the DV transfer are maintained, but this probably doesn’t entirely make up for FireWire’s high sustained transfer rates. And it looks like Pixela might require you to use their proprietary software to perform any transfers, no desktop mounting or destination application selection. There’s also price, since the cable costs $119 before tax. High price to pay for Apple’s omission.

Still, it’s less clunky than analog-to-digital video converters, and prices could drop if demand is high enough and other companies start making similar devices. Apple may also be less than cooperative if the decision to kill FireWire on the MacBook was meant to force people up to the MacBook Pro. We can only hope that, as with the microphone support finally included in the new iPod Touch, Apple eventually sees that hamstringing lower-end devices isn’t the only way to get people to upgrade.

Would you buy a Mac version of this cable, or will it take more than another peripheral to fix this problem?

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As someone who works in the broadcast industry, I like to load my iPod with videos to refer to as references. Oftentimes, I find myself spending hours importing and sorting videos, which come in a myriad formats, just so I can get them onto my iPod.

Designed as a companion application for iTunes, VideoDrive lets you batch convert, import and tag videos to add to your iTunes library in as few steps as possible.

Typically, importing a video into iTunes requires a user to perform these steps:

1. Drag and drop a video file onto iTunes.
2. Right-click the video now listed in iTunes and click on ‘Get Info’.
3. Go about renaming or, more often than not, filling in empty fields such as Title, Year, Artist, Genre, Sorting Kind, etc.
4. Search on the Internet for cover artwork and then adding that to the video.

Step 1 is possible only if the video is in a format recognized by iTunes. If it isn’t, you will have to either convert the video with QuickTime Player or create a reference file to import into iTunes, a manual process that can quickly take up a lot of time.

VideoDrive strives to eliminate steps 2 to 4 by automatically doing all that for you. You can choose to import videos on an ad-hoc basis, by dragging files into VideoDrive, or as a batch operation; VideoDrive can be set to watch a folder for incoming videos, automatically import them as they are added, or queue them for processing later.

Once the videos are in iTunes, VideoDrive will, with an Internet connection, search for and add the correct metadata and cover art for your videos. It can also do this for existing videos already in your iTunes library. For the control freak, worry not; you can specify exactly what kind of metadata you want VideoDrive to add to your videos. Finally, as a convenience, it can bundle recently-added movies into its own iTunes playlist.

VideoDrive recognizes all major video formats such as mov (QuickTime movie), mpg and mpeg (MPEG-1), m2v (MPEG-2), mp4 and m4v (MPEG-4 or H.264), avi, wmv, wma and asf (Windows Media video and audio), swf and (Flash), mkv (Matroska), and DivX (a variant of MPEG-4). VideoDrive also recognizes videos with SRT or SUB subtitles (commonly found in videos ripped from DVDs), and can toggle subtitles on and off in the videos in your iTunes library.

VideoDrive is currently at version 1.66 and is available from Aroona Software for €14.99 (approximately US$20). As someone who likes to load up videos into my iPod before a flight or long commute, VideoDrive is just the kind of set-and-forget application I need, the conveniences it offers are worth every penny. What’s more, you can use your license of VideoDrive on two computers, allowing you to stuff your iTunes twice as fast.

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The debate was live-streamed through mainstream TV media sites like CNN, MSNBC, CBS; print sites like The New York Times, and alternative locations like MySpace. Did you watch the debate online or on TV? If you watched it online, which site did you watch it through, and which one was the best?

The beauty of new media isn’t just that you can watch something online, it’s that you can interact with it. C-SPAN and Current let users Twitter their thoughts during the debate. Did any of you participate in those?

There were also numerous sites live-blogging the debate, so we’re curious as to how many of you had a two-screen experience. The TV was on, but did you also have your laptop open, refreshing to follow live updates from your favorite bloggers, or maybe participating in a discussion on a forum?

These questions aren’t just about the debate, but about the way the television experience is changing and whether or not your viewing habits are changing along with it. Tell us how you watched the debate by taking our poll and leaving your opinion in the comments.

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Vudu Releases HDX Format; new format offers super-sharp pictures, streams at 9 MBps, but isn’t instant. (The New York Times)

Q3 CDN Pricing Drops at Some Levels; 250TB service falls from previous quarter, CDNs getting more aggressive with pricing but not going overboard. (Streaming Media)

YouTube Your Money Channel Disappears; announced yesterday, the new channel is gone, as is the blog post announcing it. (Valleywag)

SAG Negotiating Committee Recommends Strike Authorization Vote; AMPTP questions the move, citing the current state of the economy. (Deadline Hollywood)

CBS Labs Tests Social Vid Viewing; feature lets you watch and comment on shows with your friends. (TechCrunch)

Neil Gaiman Does Video Book Tour; famed author will post videos of himself reading every chapter from his new book, The Graveyard Book, at stops along the tour. (Mouse Circus)

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Joost Picks Up Wizzard Media Content; catalog of video content from the podcasting network including Tiki Bar TV headed to the P2P online TV service. (release)

Adconion Launches Video Content Syndication Network; global ad network’s AMG-TV lets video creators access publisher sites, advertiser and agencies to distribute content. (release)

Kyte Mobile Producer Available for Nokia S60; live stream and record video; beta program was used by the likes of 50 Cent and National Public Radio. (release)

MSNBC Unveils New Political Video Player; fully-embeddable player allows people to skip to specific topics, reveals when a candidate brought up a particular keyword. (MSNBC) Elsewhere, startup Ved.io lets users watch the first Obama/McCain debate with accompanying facts. (Ved.io)

Watch the Volvo Ocean Race; watch live footage direct from cameras mounted on each of the boats in the regatta. (The News Market)

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