Category: My Tools

Posted on

The Blog as a Conversation Room

I put this slide together for the spot I did in Sheryl’s presentation in Shanghai this morning. My bit was entitled Learning is a Conversation, and I was trying to get across the idea that a blog is a wonderful vehicle for getting conversations started, and that a blog is much more than just a website. Unlike a website – which is a very Web 1.0 concept – a blog is dynamic and changes often (or should!), it encourages conversation and interaction through the commenting feature, and it also enables the use of external feeds and services to help bring the page to life, making it far more than just static content on the web.

You can click to enlarge the image, but the idea is that most of the sidebar features on this blog are dynamically fed by data from either the internal content management of the blog engine itself (past posts, archives, and comment management) and also from external sources such as Twitter, Flickr, Clustrmap, del.icio.us, YouTube, RSS feeds and so on. As I add content to all those external services, the results just flow onto my blog page. Once you start to automate that process from start to finish, it becomes a much more interesting tool… for example, using a Java phone app called Shozu I can take photos on my mobile phone (a Sony Ericsson K610i) and then push those digital files directly from the phone to Flickr. Once the end up in my Flickr photostream they then automatically appear in the blog sidebar without any further intervention from me.

Similarly, I can push comments to Twitter using a variety of methods – the Twitter website, Twitterbar, my mobile phone, or Twitterific – and they just magically appear on my blog page. Same with any websites I bookmark using del.icio.us. Same with RSS feeds. I save and store those things as normal, but they just appear on the page without any further work from me. This is a huge difference between a regular “webpage” and a blog.

If you take a good look at the optional plugins available you can start to do some pretty cool things. This makes it super easy for your blog page to become a central hub for your digital world as it pulls all your resources into one place, as well as being a place to start and continue conversations. Blockquoting lets you bring in snippets from other sites you read, while commenting lets those ideas bounce back from your readers, starting real conversations and making your blog into far more of a conduit through which ideas can flow. Combine all this with the built in trackbacking feature and the humble blog becomes a remarkable tool for personal communication.

Posted on

My Podcasting Workflow

For a while now, ever since I’ve been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I’ve been meaning to blog about the workflow I’ve developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I’d started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together.

Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife ’08 and all that changed. Normally I don’t like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it’s win-win all round.

For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I’ve got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I’m excited about these new workflows.

Firstly, I record my interviews using Skype. I use a decent USB headset microphone, a Logitech 250… I had a 350 but it broke, and the 250 was cheaper with the same audio specs. With Skype I can call to another computer anywhere in the world, but I can also call to a telephone line as well, so either works fine. Skype also let me do multiparty calls, so it can be several people online in the chat at once.

To record the call I use Audio Hijack Pro. I used to use Call Recorder which is one-button easy, but it can be a bit flaky and drop out at times. It’s mostly reliable, but for podcast interview mostly reliable is not acceptable of course… I once did an hour long interview with Luc Zwartjes from Belgium only find that Call recorder crapped out and dropped the whole recording. Not happy, and I felt very embarrased to have to let Luc know about it, although he was gracious enough to record it again with me. From then on I have always used both Call Recorder and Audio Hijack together, but have since decided that Audio Hijack is good enough just on it’s own.

What I like about Audio Hijack is the way you can capture the audio of the call to AIFF format. I never realised this for a long time and was capturing to MP3 and using Quicktime Pro to convert it to AIFF, but I’ve since discovered that I can go directly to AIFF which simplifies things a lot. The other advantage is that I can choose the bitrate and mono/stereo setting, which can bring the file size down a lot. I currently record using AIIF format, 16 bit, Auto Sample rate, Mono and it seems to work really well. Recording in mono halves the filesize of stereo.

Once I record, I drag the AIFF file to The Levelator. This simple and easy to use tool runs a very complex analysis of the file and applies compression and normalisation filters to the audio. This fixes any overly quiet or loud bits and makes it sound much better. If I wasn’t fussy, I could leave this step out, but I think it’s worth doing for the better audio quality.

Once I get the adjusted AIFF file out of Levelator I drag it into a new podcast episode in GarageBand. I really like Garageband as an editor and find it simple to use and easy to shuffle audio tracks around, make edit points, add multitracks, etc. I also add the tops and tails to the interview directly in GarageBand, and well as any music, sound effects, etc.

The big news in GarageBand ’08 is that you can now export directly out in MP3 format. This is great… prior to this I had to export out as an M4A file and then use Quicktime Pro again to convert it to an MP3… it was an extra step and made it hard to work in mono. The new export dialog in GarageBand has all the features that a podcaster could want… I set mine to MP3, 64kbps, Medium High VBR and Mono. The sound quality in the tests I’ve done is really good, and the filesizes are way down on the older episodes.

Finally, I use Podcast Maker to add my metadata, shownotes, XML data and album artwork, and in one click upload it to the Virtual Staffroom server. Podcast Maker generates all the required XML and RSS feeds very nicely. It’s a wonderful tool.

So there you have it… it might sound complicated but it’s not really, and this new workflow is way more simplified than the previous method I used to use. Apple has really listened to podcasters and added just the right features into the new GarageBand. Combined with the extra tools like Skype, Audio Hijack, Levelator and Podcast Maker, making podcasts has never been easier!

Tags: , ,

Posted on

Blown away by Jing

I think I just experienced one of those “Oh my God” moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you “potentially” do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren’t too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah… Too hard!

So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this process. I literally sat in front of the computer repeating “Oh my God!” several times. Perhaps I am just easily impressed, or perhaps this is just the sort of thing that I see very clear uses for, but I am amazed at what Jing does, and even moreso at how it does it. I can see tons of uses for this in a school… for example, teachers could create their own support pages for software the kids need to use so that they don’t have to answer the same questions over and over… students can be creating movies to document their software skills… you can make tutorials for teachers showing them how to do specific tasks… or an end-user could use it to show you exactly what is happening on their screen… and lots more. The finished out is a .swf Flash file.

The Jing Project website will explain more, so check it out or check out my little sample. Let me know if I’m just being easily impressed.