When I first logged in to Google Wave, I was fortunate enough to have my one and only Wave contact online as well. So together we set about learning and experimenting with Google Wave.

Collaborating in a discussion with multiple Wavers

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Having toyed with Google Wave almost the whole of today, there is no doubt that there are a lot of creases that need to be ironed out but overall Google Wave has lived up to the hype. I have been able to do the basic features such as IM (with real time typing display), create waves, send attachments, organise waves into folders e.tc but in addition to these, I have also been able to collaborate with other “Google Wavers” in a group discussion. Also using Google Wave Gadgets and Robots, I have been able to easily insert maps into waves by just typing a postcode, ask any question I want and get an instant answer (accuracy is around 70%), embed videos and some “Google Wavers” have also been able to tweet from within Google Wave using Tweety.

Adding a map in a wave

Google Wave is a great tool to use within an office environment for collaboration between team members but it also has ample features such as instant messaging, integration with social media sites, games e.t.c that is sure to attract the younger generation.

Asking BingyBot a question through Google Wave

Further Information -

• A complete guide to Google Wave
• Google Wave 101
• Top 11 Google Wave robots

I have been asked numerous times as to the best way to caption YouTube videos hence this blog post. When I initially started to caption videos, I used the ever popular MAGpie software but found that captioning YouTube videos proved to be extremely tedious with MAGpie. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools available on the web that makes the captioning process a whole lot easier. Below is a review of the tool that I use CaptionTube:

CaptionTube

It has taken a while but Google have finally come up with their own tool for adding YouTube captions. Unfortunately it does not integrate with YouTube as fluidly as we may want it to but neverthless works efficiently as a caption editor once you get past the learning curve. It allows you to connect directly to your YouTube account and have access to your videos within CaptionTube. Once the captions are created though, you will need to export the file and then upload the file to your YouTube account, this is where the fluidity is lost. Add a functionality to automatically add the caption to the YouTube video and I think we are on to a winner app. CaptionTube is what I used to caption the LSBU YouTube videos

Screenshot of captiontube

Other tools that I have found useful include:

• Subtitle Horse
• dotSub
• Easy YouTube caption creator

Screenshot of the LSBU YouTube Channel

Things have been quiet on my blog over the past few weeks as I have been extremely busy at work and one of the projects the web team here have been working on is the launch of the YouTube channel for London South Bank University (LSBU).

What makes our University channel different from every other University channel out there you ask? Simple, our channel is “probably the first” University YouTube channel to ensure every video uploaded also has captioning incorporated that makes use of YouTube’s captioning system, you can turn the captioning on or off and even use the inbuilt google translate engine to view the captions in a language of your choice. Matt Cutts goes into detail about the YouTube Translation functionality in his blog.

Let me know what you think of the channel. It has around 10 videos up at the moment and I will be hoping to build on these over the next few months. The University is slowly but surely making it’s debut into the social media realm and the web team here intend to make the best use of Web 2.0 . Only a month ago I created the LSBU Twitter page and without any publicity we have already managed to pull in nearly 200 followers. In the grand scheme of things, these may just be baby steps but the web team here have a lot planned to ensure that the University embraces the latest social media technologies.

Twitter 101

Twitter has just just launched their dummy’s guide to using twitter – “Twitter 101″ with some really interesting case studies about how businesses have successfully implemented Twitter into their online strategies. Twitter have also provided on the site a downloadable slide version of their guide for those of us thinking about promoting Twitter usage within our organisations.

Visit the Twitter101 website

Twitter have done their research before compiling this guide with Biz Stone stating on the Twitter blog -

We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies. The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value. While this work was envisioned for businesses, it’s also useful for anyone using Twitter so have a look if you like.

The Twitter business case studies include Dell, JetBlue, Teusner Wines, Current, Tasti D Lite, CoffeeGroundz, Etsy, NAKEDPizza, America Apparel and Pepsi. Recommended bed time read for all you social media strategists!

The site contains six sections. They are: “What is Twitter”, “Getting started”, “Learn the lingo”, “Best practices”, “Case studies” and “Other resources”.

See my vCard for contact details

Social media provides us with a means of reaching out and interacting with a huge number of people that only a few years ago would have been practically impossible. But with the ever increasing number of social media sites we are on, for most of us it has become a nightmare to keep track of our profiles or even to decide which of our profiles would be the best to give out as our main point of contact.

The easy solution would be to create our own site and just add all our social media links on it and use that as our online contact card. Unfortunately not everyone has the web design skills to go about implenting their own site. This is where the Card.ly comes in very handy, it provides a very easy interface where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. They are then able to share this out to the world through a very easy to remember URL – http://www.card.ly/yourname .

There are nearly 30 odd themes you can choose from for your contact card, most of which are free, though personally only found 5 or 6 that are visually pleasing (yeah I am a picky old SOD).  Some of the themes also have a stream tab, that pulls in your twitter and RSS feeds to display within your contact card, unfortunately the stream overflows the design borders, so I would not recommend going with this option atelast until they get better themes. What I really like about Card.ly is that it creates an online contact card that is hCard compliant and anyone can easily download your vCard by clicking the an icon under the title.

Card.ly also provides a widget that you can embed in your blogs/websites e.t.c to link to your online busines card. You could also pay $24.99 a year for the premium version which has a extra goodies like more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, usage stats and advertisement-free cards.

Below is a screenshot of my Card.ly profile - http://www.card.ly/niroism

Screenshot of my Card.ly contact card

YouTube logo

As many of you may be aware YouTube were quietly testing out the beta version of their channel re-design (first via a secret opt-in URL that many of you ptobably discovered, then as a visible opt-in link) for a while now. As I logged in today to create a new university YouTube page, I was immediately greated by the new Channel 2.0 design. It takes a bit getting used to especially to those of us who are power-users of the old design, but the new design is much more neater and sleeker and the learning curve in my case was a matter of minutes.   The White House uses the new re-designed channel, when you compare that to the old channel design of popular YouTuber Fred you will see what I mean. Here are a few cool examples of great new channel designs: IceflowStudios, Vlogbrothers, nalts, LisaNova, sxephil, ThadewGrum, and University of Phoenix.

All newly created YouTube accounts (as of June 24th) will now have the new channel 2.0  design. On July 15th, all existing and new accounts will receive the new channel layout. Keep in mind though that the new channels are still in beta for now, so there may be a few elements missing here and there.

OneUpWeb summarzies the New Channel Features:

• Simple Video Navigation – Viewers no longer have to jump from page to page to view a channel’s videos – all videos are accessible via the main channel page.
• User Actions – User functions such as commenting, adding to favorites and playlists, and video sharing are placed in an easy-to-use menu directly beneath the video you’re watching.
• Easier Editing – Admins have the ability to edit channel elements such as modules, colors, and themes right from the channel page instead of a separate edit-only page.

Twitterfeed

So I walk in to work this morning, and am told that the last couple of News stories that we posted haven’t been auto-tweeted on to Twitter. We use Twitterfeed to pick up our RSS feeds and tweet it to our twitter account @lsbu, but it seems to have failed to do this for some unknown reason. Having checked our RSS feeds and Twitterfeed settings everything seemed to be working fine. So had to turn to the ever helpful Mario Menti (@mario) founder of Twitterfeed:

“If you select to post the item links to twitter (in the twitterfeed options), twitterfeed checks if it has perviously posted an item to your account with the same link, and if so, won’t post it again.
There’s 2 ways around this: either untick the “include link” option in twitterfeed for this feed (the link isn’t very useful if it’s the same for every post anyway), or else – preferably, but maybe a bit harder – change your feed so the link on each item actually points to this link, rather than to the blog generally. Then, since every link will be different, twitterfeed should post new items.”

So I doublechecked our RSS feed and noted that the ids used to identify the stories in the hyperlink were not unique and were already used in hyperlinks for older stories hence breaking Twitterfeed’s policy of not tweeting the same link twice. A quick correction of this by adding the date of posting to the hyperlink id, made it unique and Twitterfeed was more than happy to tweet out the stories and my world once again became a happy place.

T-mobile dance viral

Dance for T-Mobile by Saatchi & Saatchi

Cut for Women’s Aid by Grey London

Diesel XXX SFW for Diesel by The Viral Factory

Laughter Chain for Skype by The Viral Factory

Whodunnit for Transport for London by WCRS

Happy Christmas from AKQA

Unboxing for Samsung Mobile by The Viral Factory

Extreme Sheep LED Art for Samsung LED TVs by The Viral Factory

It looks like Microsoft have really pissed of the designer and the web standards community. The Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor and Newism have set up the website Fixoutlook.org to gather as many Re-Tweets as possible to show everyone’s disapproval of the rendering engine to the Microsoft Outlook dev team.

The site displays the avatars of everyone who has fixoutlook.org in their tweets as the background of the site. I guess this is one of the reasons why it is a trending topic as individuals who have no interest in the subject try to get their image/avi up on Fixoutlook.org

The campaign is now clearly viral with over 11,000 tweets within a few hours of the site going up, well done to all those involved in the campaign. Very remarkable indeed.

fixoutlook.org

MS Outlook2010 logo

Campaign Monitor have been fighting to get Microsoft to stick to Web Standards since Outlook 2007 first came out and they have more information about this, including a response from Outlook product Dev Balasubramanian:

“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”

“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective – at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”

“Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume.”

What this would mean is HTML emails created in Outlook would look great in my friend’s outlook but look completely messed up in email clients of everyone else who don’t use Outlook. How does Microsoft justify this? Isn’t this just taking us back in to the propietary stone age!!

I really hope Microsoft listen to everyone’s feedback and actually do something about it!!