Sep 13, 2007 | blog
I’ve been talking with a number of people in differing areas of companies while drumming up consulting or contract gigs, and something is becoming very apparent. While there is a huge amount of misunderstanding regarding social media, there is also a growing interest in online professional networking.
What intrigues me is how the growing interest in social networking can’t address the biggest problem facing these tools in corporate settings. That is, the need to provide a business case that is benefited by these tools and technologies. Fine, sure, yeah, I know that there are many business situations that simply do not require new ways to do their jobs, but there are many other situations that do.
Communication is one of the obvious ones, but I remember a number of individuals who could not look past the continuing arguments of “its a time waster” or “it’s a security hole”. Sure, they can be that – but no worse than email. This problem and these arguments are as old as technology itself. No matter what the new idea/tool/concept is, it requires a new generation to prove it’s worth.
What we need to do to help foster corporate uptake of social media is to provide learning opportunities. This might be by sending articles addressing the professional and productivity aspects to key decision makers. It may also be done by providing “brown bag” lunches with an agenda of exploring online and hosted social tools. One could also use themselves as an example of how to use social media to leverage their personal brand within an organization – I think many of us are already doing that.
At any rate, I’m going to continue to look for those opportunities for companies to leverage new media/social media tools to their advantage.
Have you discovered innovative uses for social media in your organization?
Jul 2, 2007 | blog
Since getting started in video blogging, I’ve found I needed something for importing video. While I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, I’ve finally picked up a package to help do this. Pinnacle’s Studio MovieBox Plus is now mine and operational on my Windows Vista laptop. An initial import from the vidcam was pretty strait forward, and the Studio software seems to be pretty good for editing video as well.
It also allows me to use my video camera in place of my web cam if I choose – much better video quality! Another nice aspect is to live-preview on a 3rd display while editing video, green screen (chroma key), and picture-in-picture.
The side-benefit of course, is that I can now also import and burn those home-movies to DVD that I’ve been meaning to do for awhile! Can’t wait to try some things here shortly!
Technorati tags: Pinnacle Studio MovieBox Plus, Pinnacle Studio, Importing Video
Mar 12, 2007 | blog
Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger asks:
If you had to choose 5 blogging tools that were the only ones you could use for the next 12 months what would they be and why?
Well, here is my list of 5 blogging tools I can’t live without (in no order of importance):
- WordPress
- Windows Live Writer
- Feedburner
- Google Analytics
- Akismet
Via: ProBlogger – What are Your Top 5 Blogging Tools?
Technorati tags: ProBlogger, Blogging Tools
Jan 12, 2007 | blog
Hey, been looking for a web-based replacement for Visio? Well look no further, there is one and it’s called Gliffy. Its a nice tool for diagramming and creating flow charts or floor plans, or network drawings. Neat stuff to add to your web-office arsenal, and highly recommended by yours truly – I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it fills my needs completely.
You can learn more about Gliffy here.
Jun 12, 2006 | blog
I’ve been looking for better tools to write, manage, and post to my blog lately – and I’m still looking. The freebie tools are interesting, but are not working that well for me. w.bloggar is about the best one for post creation, and it lets me save posts as files on my PC, so I could manage them in a set of folders prior to posting.
Writely is another tool I’ve been using to write & manage, but not to post. I had been posting directly from Writely, but it soon started to display this ugly skill of skewering my blog layout. The first time I thought it was something I did and it took me about 2 days to track it down, then I wised up.
So this past week I started trying to use Microsoft’s OneNote 2003/2007 as my blog post manager. While it does not have the ability to post directly to a blog, it seemed to be a great way to organize by folders, tabs, and pages all the research, pictures, links, and posts for my blog.
While OneNote is great at doing exactly the thing I was hoping for – organizing & managing the research and post creation – it failed at the most simply thing. Or at least Windows did – Copy & Paste.
When I copied the post text and pasted it into WordPress, the full HTML formatting followed the text. Now maybe I’m being stupid again (shh…), and there is a simple way in Windows/Office/OneNote to copy only the text – like when you paste in most Office apps, you can choose unformatted text as an option. If there is will someone point that out to this slow IT guy? 🙂
If I can get past the copy & paste issue, I’ll be using OneNote full time. I’m about ready to try and request the product at work, it is that helpful to the way I work. Being able to combine all forms of digital information into one page is huge – makes me want to get a Tablet PC ;).
