Category: Blogging

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Collecting Cool Clips

Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did. 🙂 Although I’ve written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I’d respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well.

The question was this… “If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?”

This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren’t connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don’t play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really well with them).

So, here’s a solution…

  1. Go to YouTube and load up the video you wish to view.
  2. Select the URL of that page and copy it to the clipboard.
  3. Go to www.vixy.net and paste the URL link from YouTube into the empty URL field.
  4. Select your choice of output video format from the dropdown list.
  5. Click the Start button.

Just be a bit patient, as Vixy goes over to YouTube, finds the video, converts it, and then downloads it to your computer in the format you’ve selected. Too easy! Hope that helps you out Bernie…

Now, if you’re the more geeky type (like me) and you use Firefox or Flock or Camino or any other Gecko-powered browser, you might like to try another method using the free Mozilla add-on called UnPlug… it’s one of my favourite add-ons for the Gecko engine… Unplug let’s you, well, unplug any embedded media from a webpage and save it to your computer. Of course, this means it is still in .flv format, but I then just drop it into the wonderful VisualHub application and it spits it out in whatever format I want. Noice!

BTW, this is the video we were trying to convert…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/csS_RnOhd-Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Walls Come Tumbling Down

Boy, is my face red…

As one who so often espouses the true value of a blog as being its ability to encourage direct discussion and conversation with its readers, I happened to find a couple of stray comments over at Paul Wilkinson’s 24 Learning blog that took me by surprise. He and others were noting how difficult is was for them to leave a comment here on Betchablog. Paul, Rachel and an anonymous somebody were all saying how they tried to comment on my recent laptop trolley post but couldn’t because this site required them to log in to comment. Oops! Sorry about that.

Here’s what happened… I was having a heap of comment spam a while back, so I played with the WordPress settings to make life harder for the spambots. Apparently I made life harder for everyone. I’ve now turned off the strict security that required a login to leave a comment. After my chat with James Farmer last night on the Virtual Staffroom podcast where he mentioned the new Edublogs features for minimising comment spam, I feel much safer in backing off the security so people can easily post.

So, if you’ve wanted to leave a comment at some stage and it was all too hard, I’m sorry for the inconvenience. However, it’s all fixed now so go for it. 🙂

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We Blog

Top_30_Edublogs
How many educators are actually blogging these days? How big is the edublogosphere? What makes a “good” blog?

These are some of the questions being posed by Scott McLeod over at the Dangerously Irrelevant blog. Scott has been trying to do some research into the size and scope of the educational blogosphere, in order to get some feel for just how big it is and how much influence it might have.

Scott tries to do this survey twice a year. If you are a blogging educator, you may like to fill in this very brief form to let Scott know about your work for his next count in January 2008.

I found his thoughts on Authority and Rank by using Technorati was rather interesting.

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