Blodget’s Blog

I’ve been using Brushes to paint on my iPod Touch. I’m very impressed with the versatility of this application.

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I use Google’s RSS feed reader on my iPod Touch to keep up to date on what’s new. Sometimes I want to share my findings with others. A good way to do this is to email posts to a Blogger blog and use Feedburner to let people subscribe to the blog by email.

My Blogger blog is called Jim’s Findings. Feel free to subscribe by email. You’ll get a daily email with all the things I find that day.

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Google reader just added some new features which makes it really easy to share the things you find while reading RSS feeds or visiting web sites.

First, the new Notes feature adds a button in your browser’s toolbar. Whenever you are on a web page, just highlight some text and click the Add notes button and that text and the link to the page is added to your notes in Google reader. So as an example, while I’m cruising, I find something I want to read later or save to share with friends, I click the button and bang, I’ve saved it.

The next feature is tags. As I’m reading in Google Reader I can add a tag to the item. Items can have multiple tags so the same items can be grouped multiple ways. Items with the same tag can be shared. For example I quickly added the tag “Mac” to some of the articles I found and now I have a public page with all my Mac findings. Check it out:

See my Mac shared items

The cool thing is you can tag your notes. So you can share web pages that don’t have RSS feeds.

This public page has a RSS feed so you can subscribe to my Mac links in your RSS reader or in Safari. As I add new ones, you see them in your reader.

Mac shared items feed

This makes it super easy to share findings in any topic and you can share multiple topics.

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Artpad.art.com is a free painting program. I think it’s Flash based.

Once you complete your painting, you can play it back. I did this and captured the playback using SnapZ Pro on my MacBook and saved the movie as a H.264 mov file.

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VCASMO.com is a free web service that provides storage and display of presentations. The unique thing about this one is that you can display video and slides side-by-side and the slides can be timed to change with the video. Most people are using this for lectures with Powerpoint slides, but as this sample shows, it can also be used for tutorials. Besides embedding the presentation on your own site (like I did above), you can link to it on their website.

I like that you can have hot-links in the slides. I also like that the player can display thumbnails of the slides and that you can navigate to a slide by clicking the thumbnail. This gives you chapter stops. (Click the little black arrow on the right of the slide window to see the thumbnails).

The full screen playback look good and they nicely provide you with embeddable versions – a small one for you blog (like the one above) and a bigger one for full page display.

The editing is very straightforward. The video is displayed above thumbnails of the slides and arrows point from each slide to a time line. You just click and drag the arrows to position each slide. You can play back the video to check your timing and position each slide based on the audio.

You can also present other file types including audio, images, and PDF files. Presentations can also have subtitles in different languages and visitors can add subtitles.

Another cool feature they have is called “Instant VCASMO”. This lets you pair slideshow.net presentations with Youtube videos.

Altogether it’s a great feature set. The website, however, still feels like it’s in beta. Site navigation is funky. It’s hard to get back to your own dashboard. Also, there is no Help. But, hey, try it out!

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This is a sample slideshow created in Adobe’s Photoshop Express which is a free photo storage and editing web application. I uploaded about a dozen image files into Express, created an album, and made some display settings and viola, I had a web based slideshow.

I opened the album on my MacBook in Firefox and used SnapZ Pro to capture the movie. I then used QuickTime Pro to trim the movie. I uploaded the H.264 file to blip.tv and embedded their code in this blog post.

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You can embed a nice show player from Blip.tv. Below is a sample.

I like the quality of the full screen mode. You can see the movie on Blip.tv to see how it differs from the embedded version. The embedded version uses the Quicktime .mov file. The one on Blip.tv uses a Flash file.

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You can embed a nice audio widget from Box.net. Store your audio files (mp3) on box.net (they allow up to 1 Gb) in a folder. They give you the embed code that you can use in your blog or web page. Here’s a sample.

Update: I embedded this code using the embedit WordPress plug-in. Get it here.

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Sprout is a free new web service (still in beta) that lets you build cool interactive Flash widgets that you can embed in your blog or web page. Here’s the first sample I made last night.

Click the little buttons at the bottom to go to other pages or click the header to open the zipboingwow website.

I like that you can edit your projects later and the changes show up everywhere the widget is embedded.

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I’m trying the Flickr Photo Album plug-in for WordPress. It makes a special page for your Flickr albums and photos right in your blog. You can see mine at http://blodget.net/blog/flickr_photos. The plug-in also adds a Photos tab in the Post entry area so you can insert a Flickr photo in your post like I’ve done here.

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