GigaOM » Collaboration

Improved Knoodle assists with “social learning”

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:02:21 +0000

Having reviewed training app Knoodle before (see Knoodle Makes Cloud-Based Training a Cinch), I was interested in the new developments with the service, announced this week. Knoodle is a web-based platform for creating, sharing and managing training presentations. Its new features make presentation creation more streamlined, particularly if you are creating split-screen presentations combining slides and video.

The latest developments with Knoodle include:

You can now add surveys, quizzes, video and audio on the fly at the time you create a presentation, instead of toggling to another screen to pull them in.
The ability to drag-and-drop multiple files for easy bulk uploading.
The ability to fine-tune slide syncing: If you have the time code, you can type in the exact time you want a slide to appear in your video or your audio track.
A new feature to manage your presentations so you can see all the presentations you’ve created in a single viewing window to help streamline the editing and publishing process.

According to the Knoodle folks, today’s workplace looks like the Web: social, integrated and on-demand. There is an increasing need for fast knowledge sharing, particularly with the rise of virtual companies. And learning within virtual teams must come from everyone regardless of location, role or function. Everyone has the responsibility to be both teacher and learner. The demand from virtual companies is that the tools they use resemble social tools: they are more familiar and easier to adopt and use. The challenge when using a holistic, social approach to knowledge sharing and information flow, within a virtual or dispersed team in particular, is to manage the chaos. Tools must be pervasive, organized, and offer some measure of control and preferably with a dashboard view.

So where does Knoodle fit in to this concept of holistic, social learning? It’s easy to implement, even for people who are not professional producers of presentations. You can create content on the fly or take pre-existing content, including slides, audio, graphics and text, straight into the Knoodle application. If everyone can capture their knowledge from the field, from their home offices, from their cubicles, and make it readily available to the rest of the team, there is less “silo-ing” of information and learning.

Pricing is flexible and based on customer needs and required hours per month in terms of viewing of presentations. You can ramp up your plan or downgrade it based on actual usage. If you export your video presentations, viewing is done out of the Knoodle system so doesn’t count against your subscription plan.

How are you capturing knowledge within your organization to foster social learning?

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3 reasons to create transcripts of your audio/video content

Terri Griffith — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:13:06 +0000

John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, has said (PDF) that “video is the next voice.” Unfortunately, just like other voice-focused communications, video content is hard to find, not accessible to all and hard to repackage. But transcription can add value to to both content providers and content users in at least three ways:

Increase the chances your content will be found. Full, or even partial, text is more searchable than tags and titles alone. “I’ve found that on several of our clients’ blogs, the transcript often outperforms its corresponding podcast,” says Janelle Kozyra, the Director of Editorial and Senior Managing Editor for Gregory FCA.
Make your content more accessible. People who can’t hear the video, or those who don’t want to search through it, will find transcripts useful. Ted Cocheu, the founder and CEO of Altus (an enterprise provider of video search and management tools) said recently, “New technology is enabling enterprises to easily combine PowerPoint presentations with audio/video into a dynamic format that is searchable down to the point of interest or keyword. . . . As a result, users can have instant access to the information they need.”
Make repurposing your content easier. Once you have a transcript, it’s a short step to a tweet, a blog post or a slide deck.

Creating these transcripts is becoming easier, and there are alternatives.

Professional transcriptionists. These professionals provide high quality and full control of the process. But this may be overkill for some audio and video.
Crowdsourcing. Ryan Lawler has covered the development of SpeakerText, a firm that supports the crowdsourcing of transcripts. The Kahn Academy crowdsources transcription and translation through Universal Subtitles.
Automatic captioning. YouTube uses Google’s voice-to-text technology to create autocaptions.

This is a call to both content creators and users to support transcription. Content creators: Please use a service that adds transcripts to your audio and video content. Users: Help where you can by contributing to the crowdsourcing efforts.

How have you benefited through audio or video transcription in your web work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iwan Gabovitch

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Using the Web and Social Media to Create More Effective Events

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:00:51 +0000

When two hundred journalists got together recently for an “un-conference” on the future of journalism, it was hardly surprising that the results were documented, minute by minute, through notes, wikis, photos, audio, video, blogs and an amazing number of tweets.

The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

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Is It Time to "Just Say No" to Internet Explorer 6?

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:00:49 +0000

As web workers, sometimes we have to walk a fine line between keeping clients happy, and providing the best possible services. For web developers like me, the issue of whether to continue supporting Internet Explorer 6 is becoming a major headache.

It would seem to be a no-brainer to ditch support for a browser that is slow, prone to malware attacks, and incompatible with modern standards. Those of us who design and maintain web sites have to resort to all sorts of time-consuming (thus expensive!) tricks to make the sites we create work with IE6 — a browser that is now almost nine years old.

Unfortunately, up to a quarter of web users still use IE6, and in big companies, the percentage is even higher. According to Forrester Research, “60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser.”

There have been a few “kill IE6″ sites for a while, but a new one, “IE6 No More“, is getting attention thanks to some very high-profile backers. They’ve come up with some simple code for insertion into web sites that I think is prominent without being obnoxious.

My company is still discussing the issue, but it’s likely that we’ll offer clients a choice:

ignore IE6 altogether during testing for browser compatibility;
include the “IE6 No More” code, or something similar to it; or,
provide IE6 compatibility at a significant cost premium.

Even YouTube is reported to be phasing out support for IE6. When some more major sites do the same, IE6 users may finally be forced to upgrade. In the meantime, though, the extra costs to provide IE6 compatibility are passed on to everyone. In this economic environment, when every dollar counts, corporations, nonprofit, employees, customers and taxpayers need to ask why money is being wasted on maintaining old browsers.

How do you deal with IE6 compatibility issues?

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34 Ways to Use YouTube for Business

Meryl K Evans — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:00:55 +0000

YouTube’s not just for posting silly videos of sleepwalking dogs and other embarrassing moments — it can also be used as a highly effective business tool. You can use it to show off your expertise, share knowledge, market your products and connect with customers, colleagues and prospects.

Here are 34 ways to use YouTube (and other video hosting services) for business.

Expertise and Thought Leadership

Upload recordings of presentations you’ve given, to demonstrate authority and public speaking skills.
Share slides from presentations that weren’t recorded.
Create short videos of valuable tips of interest to your clients and prospects to show off your expertise.
Conduct an interview with an expert.
Turn your podcasts into videos, to expand your reach.
Engage with the YouTube community by leaving comments and uploading video responses to videos on topics related to your business or industry.
Enhance your videos using YouTube’s special features, such as annotations, audioswap, insight, language options and quick capture. Also see what’s cooking in the YouTube Biz Blog and TestTube for more upcoming features.
Record an important meeting to share with employees, shareholders and others, as appropriate.

Marketing and Advertising

Set up a channel to reflect your brand and engage with others. Here’s an example from The White House.
Choose a user name that reflects your brand for your channel URL.
Add your channel URL to marketing collateral and social network profiles.
Post customer video testimonials to add to your credibility.
Put together a creative video explaining your product or service.
Show your product in action using movie trailer-style: fast, creative and catchy.
Show the results of someone using your services.
Promote your events using recordings of previous events.
Introduce your staff to add authenticity.
Take viewers on a tour of your offices and city to help them feel connected with you.
Ask others to use your product in their videos (like product placement in movies) and cross-promote each other.
Post links to your videos on various social networks.
Look into YouTube Promoted Videos to reach your target through contextually-relevant search results.
Use Google AdWords on Google Content Network, which includes sites like YouTube. These use text-based ads and don’t require a video from your business. Research the Placement Tool to identify the best placements for your ads.
Earn money from your videos by entering into a partnership with YouTube.
Run a contest.
Add Call-to-Action overlays to your videos to drive traffic to your web site.
Study your channel’s performance with the integrated Google Analytics and YouTube Insight to make the most of your videos.
Display company information in every video including name, URL, phone number and email address.

Customer Service

Create “how to” videos to help your customers use your product or service.
Post solutions to common product or service problems.
Answer customer-specific questions using videos. Imagine how surprised a customer will be when you point them to a video with the answer!
Embed videos on your web site on appropriate pages, including customer support and product tours.
Post a blog entry discussing a problem and include a video for visual support.
Go the extra mile by adding closed-captions or subtitles to your videos. Remember that not everyone can watch or hear videos in the same way.
Show a work-in-progress project to a customer for review and approval, without the need for a face-to-face meeting or in-person demo.

How do you use YouTube for business?

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Skimmer, a New Lifestreaming Client

Simon Mackie — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:12:38 +0000

If you constantly find yourself flicking between clients and browser windows for the different social networking apps that you use, you might like to try skimmer, a new lifestreaming app that launched into public beta today that aims to streamline your consumption of social media.

skimmer is a cross-platform desktop client, built using Adobe AIR, that gives you a single interface to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. Even in beta it works pretty well, and has some nice touches, such as displaying Twitpic images inline so you don’t have to open another browser tab. Think of it as a Tweetdeck-like app that also allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening with your friends on Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. You can also use it to upload photos and video. It is a very elegantly designed application that looks great.

If I wanted a full-screen Twitter/lifestreaming client I would probably consider using skimmer, but it’s a bit too heavyweight for me. I prefer having a small, unobtrusive twhirl window at the side of my screen to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on Twitter. While you can set skimmer up in a “widget”-size window, it still takes quite a lot of screen real estate; it’s probably best to run skimmer on a second screen.

I’d also caution that the app takes a lot of memory to run (a common problem with AIR applications). skimmer is currently using nearly 200MB of memory on my machine – hopefully this is something that will be addressed in a future version.

Have you tried skimmer? What did you think?

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Slideshare Integrates YouTube

Imran Ali — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:07:10 +0000

Around a month ago, we wrote about the integration of Slideshare within Microsoft’s Office, notably Powerpoint.

Rashmi Sinha, the CEO of Slideshare, cheekily announced the company’s ‘acquisition of YouTube’ – more specifically, the ability to integrate ‘Video Inside Slides.’

Available starting today, this feature will enable users to play YouTube clips inside Slideshare. This potentially brings rich media to regular slide decks; and is particularly useful for demos and screencasts of applications and web sites.

In true Slideshare fashion, the company has heralded the arrival of video…in slideware!

Some of the company’s suggestions for the use of video include:

video CVs and resumes
news videos
screencasts
soundbites for press releases

Adding a video is as simple as selecting the Edit and Insert YouTube video commands from Slideshare and then choosing between which slides the clip is to be inserted. Simple!

The company states that this brings together the largest presentation archive and the largest consumer video archive, which opens some fascinating possibilities and potentially some great mashups and enhanced creativity for boring corporate material.

Coupled with the recent Powerpoint integration, this new partnership with YouTube might indicate there’s a broader ‘Slideshare-inside’ program in the offing. This means new value without jeopardizing years of experience invested in existing tools. Both developments around Slideshare suggest that the service deserves a richer API than is currently available, to enable the support of more diverse extensions and enable the development of commercial extensions in a Slideshare ‘ecosphere.’

Connectivity From Very Rural Places – Part 2

Aliza Sherman — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:56 +0000

In Part 1 of this little series of posts, I talked about my move from Anchorage to Tok, Alaska. I went from acceptable Internet speeds at a fairly reasonable price ($60-ish/month) to barely 512K up and down, a 10 Gig monthly limit and $180/month plus $30 per Gig over the limit. As a web worker (read: Bandwidth Hog). I’m still reeling from the adjustment and keeping a careful eye on my bandwidth usage daily.

So how have these connectivity challenges and unexpected expenses affected my web work? And how am I compensating for these…developments?

1. Images

There is no way around uploading and downloading images. With all of the blogging I do, images are key to my work, and although I could link to images using a URL instead of embedding them, it is less reliable so I’ll stick with uploading. Luckily, for the most part, the image sizes aren’t over a MB each, however, when they are, I find that it is too much effort to size them so upload them anyway.

When it comes to images, they are the lowest on the totem pole of bandwidth chompers, so I’m not changing much in this area. If I’m down to my last MBs of bandwidth allowance before the end of any month, I may suck it up and start sizing images although the benefits will be minimal.

Verdict? Not giving up the pics.

2. Audio

I’ve been podcasting professionally and have to upload or email an MP3 regularly to my producer. I also need to upload my own podcasts to LibSyn although I’ve been a bit remiss with that lately since it is usually about Second Life (see “Second Life” header below). The pro-podcasting show MP3 is between 5-6 MB per segment.

Was able to email the files the other day which is a plus. Must do this 1-2 times weekly. So that is 4-8 files or up to 48 MB per month.

Verdict? Got to do audio.

3. Video

The first week I arrived here, a DVD also arrived for me. It contained a 330 MB television commercial for a client. My charge was to use mDialog’s mLoader to compress it and upload it onto mDialog, then convert the compressed file using QuickTime into a .mov file and upload to YouTube.

mDialog’s uploading app is slick, and it was doing a great job compressing the video, but alas, the file was still too large for my connection. Maybe I could have waited a few hours, however, I was also worried about frittering away so much of my bandwidth allowance on a single file.

When it comes to my own blogs, video is something I don’t want to give up. I may have to suck it up and pay an extra $30 for a Gig overage just to keep my personal videos on my blogs. Yet I must be careful to limit myself to just a Gig over per month or my monthly Internet expenses will get out of control.

Verdict? Farm out heavy video uploads to my contractors in more bandwidth-rich places. Suck up any extra expense for uploading my own videos.

4. Video and Audio Skype

Besides video chatting with my folks who are in Florida, I am video chatting and audio Skype-ing with colleagues. And recently, I attended a Tweetup in Anchorage via video Skype.

At first, I wasn’t even sure if I would be able to get clear audio, much less video. But other than the very occasional buggy sound or picture, my overall Skype experience from rural places has been pretty impressive.

Verdict? Skype rules for rural connectivity!

5. Second Life

Ever since I heard I was moving to Tok, I began researching to see what Internet access solutions would be available to me, I’ve panicked about my Second Life activities. Would I have to give them up? I shuddered to think, especially when my Second Life Web-based machinima TV show – REAL BIZ in SL – was starting to take off. In fact, we had the entire month of January booked in advance with guests from around the world (companies and nonprofits using Second Life).

I finally had my show manager push back all the guests until February when I knew (or hoped) I’d be in Anchorage rather than risk getting to Tok and finding out my avatar wouldn’t budge.

The other day, I finally tried to log into Second Life, expecting it to be a futile effort. I got in. I was also able to get onto Skype audio at the same time.

I made a note before logging in of my bandwidth usage to see what I was in for. Turns out a little over half an hour on Second Life with Skype is almost comparable to several hours on video Skype. Each ate up about half a Gig. If I limit my video Skyping or Second Lifing to 2x a month, that means 1-2 Gigs of my 10 Gig allottment gone.

Verdict? Be strategic and frugal, definitely not bandwidth happy, but don’t totally give up Second Life.

6. Bandwidth Paranoia

Every time I get a particularly large file attached to an email now, I look at it with a sinking feeling. “How much is that going to cost me?” is the first thing that runs through my head. And “Do I really need that file?” follows shortly after. I have to admit I’ve stopped downloading funny photos and videos from friends already.

For business, I respond to anyone sending me something that seems large and ask them to send it my my assistant or a colleague for viewing, vetting, optimizing, sizing or distributing in any way. I’m preparing everyone on my team with their new role as “Large File Handler” as needed.

Verdict? Paranoia will save me money.

Once I get my next bill, I’ll know if I have to be even more stringent with my big file policies and processes. When I saw my first DSL bill at $258, I almost choked. That was the last month of December along with the entire month of January paid in advance.

I’m just a high-speed gal in a slow-speed world. You just do what you gotta do.

What are you paying for connectivity? And could you still do your job without it?

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More on Live Blogging an Event

Aliza Sherman — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:00:31 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I was poking around the comments on my Preparing to Live Blog an Event post and came across a conversation about live blogging events at ProBlogger that made me think more about how I’m going to handle single-handedly “live blogging” a 3-day conference. The discussion also made me think more about what exactly “live blogging” means.

The social media maven for nonprofits Beth Kanter defined Live Blogging as: “basically taking notes, photos, or recordings at lectures, conferences, and presentations of what was said and posting it to your blog.” (quote found here) I agree with Kanter’s basic definition, but for anyone who hasn’t tried live blogging before, I think this definition isn’t detailed enough.

If I had to define live blogging, I’d define it this way:

“Live (multimedia) blogging is capturing the words, sounds, and images at an event and posting them online to a variety of Web 2.0 enabled sites with the goal of sharing the experience for those who cannot attend while preserving key moments in an archive.”

Here are some more of my thoughts about live blogging.

1. The view is skewed.

I think that there is no way to avoid the fact that each live blogger will bring their own personal perspectives, experiences and understandings to the multimedia content they share. Is this good or bad? I think it can be both. Knowing where a live blogger is coming from is key – although they will quickly reveal their POV after a few posts.

Should a live blogger remain totally neutral? Sure, like a journalist should. Is that realistic? Not at all, but it is worth striving for. When I live blog the upcoming 3-day event, I’ll be covering specific sessions requested by my client. However, I may hear things differently than others in the room because I’m not in the same field as the attendees. That can be a good and bad thing. The client sees it as a good thing as I will likely bring a fresh perspective to the coverage.

2. Live Blogging doesn’t necessarily mean real-time.

I think some people mistake live blogging for real-time coverage, which you can’t really achieve if you are typing, even if you are a phenom typist. So unless you stream live video or audio, you can’t consider live blogging real-time. With microblogs like Twitter, you can certainly attempt near-real-time live blogging, but if you’re flying solo like I am, I’m not as concerned about near-real-time or real-time.

In my case, the goal isn’t to create a real-time experience for people who cannot attend. If that were the case, I’d stream it all live using Ustream.tv, Qik.com, Justin.tv or another such site. I’d even look into CoverItLive which many live bloggers are raving about. But the tools you choose are based on your goals.

My goal is to carry out a proof of concept, demonstrating how Web 2.0 tools can work in concert to create a rich, dynamic and unique presentation of an event that can be distributed/shared and archived for future reference. They key is to know your goals before live blogging and pick and choose the tools and methodology that will best achieve those goals.

3. Live blogging needs to be “vibed.”

By “vibed” I mean that the live blogger should use their social media instincts to pick and choose the right medium at the right time for the right effect. I don’t think that there is any way to dictate in advance which tools you will be using at what point of the live blogging project. Each session requires a creative gut check.

If one session features an incredibly dynamic speaker, a little live video streaming might be in order. If another speaker relies heavily on PowerPoint, a few photos of choice presentation slides could pepper a culling of key points that are posted as text quotes. Picking up audio often can be helpful, especially during post production to fill in the gaps and go back to post quotes that you missed during the session.

I don’t think a live multimedia blogger has to feel obligated to use all tools or stress out over using more of one over the other. Sometimes the decision of what medium to go with is also a comfort level. A writer may lean more toward text, a photographer more toward still images, a videographer more toward video. The key is to be open to the instinct to grab an audio recorder when that feels like the tool needed at the moment or even to put down the digital tools altogether and use pen and paper for a while then transcribing the notes later.

4. Go deeper.

Because I’m not attempting to document every moment of every session I attend but instead to capture standout moments (which, of course, will be subjective based on the way my brain responds during a session), I want to supplement the session content. I’ll be conducting spot interviews with panelists and speakers before and/or after sessions in a catch as catch can fashion.

Having been a reporter for a number of years now, I feel very comfortable posing a few questions to total strangers. Not everyone feels comfortable interviewing others, however, so that activity would not be in their bag of tricks. I’ll toggle between video interviews with my Flip camera and audio interviews with my Roland Edirol. I’ll also grab interviews with session attendees to get their feedback and takeaways.

5. Flexibility is key.

If I happen to have my Nikon Coolpix still camera in hand at an opportune moment to grab a soundbyte, I’ll just use its digital video capabilities rather than digging through my bag for another device. If the wifi goes down for a while, I’ll just type my text offline and archive images, video and audio to be pasted into a blog post later. If one device runs out of juice, I have several fallbacks and won’t stress over it.

Live blogging isn’t about perfection. It is about spontenaity and point of view. It is a collage and montage. It should be dynamic, organic and flexible. Too much structure or rigidity can kill a live blogging project (or the live blogger).

6. Do your homework.

I’m going to score over the session descriptions and panelist and speaker bios and make some notes to trigger some interview questions and give me some background as a framework. But I’ll also be careful not to let the description or bio color my perspective or limit my thinking.

How many times have you attended a session based on what the description said only to find that it wasn’t about anything related to the blurb? In those cases, we often spend more time examining the disconnect than we do listening to the actual presentation – we’re so worried that we’re in the wrong room or peeved that the description wasn’t accurate. Just letting go and being open to the new, unexpected information is important – especially as a live blogger.

7. Be at the top of your game.

For me, getting plenty of sleep, limiting my evening alcohol intake to one glass of wine, and drinking plenty of water is key to being fresh and alert for work as is eating carefully to keep my energy level up and sugar level even. I’m partial to eggs for breakfast and fish or chicken with a salad for lunch. I need to avoid caffeine until I can no longer avoid it and try to take it in the form of chocolate when my energy really starts to flag after lunchtime. While I love the clarity my brain thinks it has with coffee, the crash is often too staggering to be productive.

Another very important tip for any live blogger: Identify the nearest bathroom at all times. Then run your audio or video device while you are taking a bathroom break to review later and see if you missed any nuggets.

8. Not all live blogging is public.

My challenge live blogging the 3-day event is that the client wants all the elements to be private. I had to verify that each site I’m using online offers private posting. Twitter does. As does Utterz. And Vimeo for video (as well as YouTube, of course). Also, I have a feeling that those who cannot attend this conference don’t have the time to sit around and watch Twitter and the blog all day to see what new content has popped up. I think they’ll eventually poke around out of curiosity when pointed to the archive of content from the client’s e-newsletter or web site home page.

Knowing who you are live blogging for is just as important as knowing why you are live blogging. A non-techie audience will be much more forgiving about the speed of posting because frankly they are just not that into the instant gratification of Twitter, Seesmic and the like.

What other things do you do or think about as you prepare to live blog?

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Google Launches Helpful Site Aimed at Non-Profits

Jason Harris — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:56:40 +0000

In an effort to educate non-profits about available services, Google has launched a special site for these organizations. According to Google’s Blog they’re calling the new site, “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.”

Google is highlighting many of their services, including their program which donates Google Apps Education edition to non-profits. This will allow organizations to focus on their worthy causes, rather than having to spend time/money on supporting an email server. Also, YouTube gives the charity an opportunity to tell the world about their cause on the most popular online video community.

If they aren’t already using a calendaring application, Google Calendar provides organizations a wonderful way to organize schedules and arrange upcoming events. The rest of the Google Docs suite including a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation (PowerPoint) applications are also at any organizations disposal.

An important service that is mentioned on the Google Non-Profit page is the ability to use Google Checkout to collect online donations with zero processing fees. Google Grants offers organizations free Adwords online advertising on Google search pages, and will instantly increase traffic to your site

It is great that Google is engaging Non-Profits in this way. The new portal doesn’t offer any new services, but knowing how they all fit together may be daunting for non-techie non-profits. Bravo, Google!

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