Today, the online media universe is inventing and producing ideas, services and new tools at an unprecedented rate.
For anyone, including topic experts, news researchers and media reporters like me, it is not easy to monitor and track all the new announcements, technology releases and fresh ideas being launched out there.
Photo credit: Scott Maxwell
A whole new class of filtering, aggregation and content browsing tools are indeed emerging to help individuals and large organizations alike to make more sense of the information tsunami reaching their desks daily. If you have not have heard of them yet, news radars, topical news feeds, newsmastering and news hubs are new terms and buzzwords that you will be hearing and reading a lot more about in the near future.
For now, if you would like to keep yourself on top of new great tools and services that may help your work as a communication officer, public presenter or trainer, I invite you to give a good look at my weekly Sharewood Picnic.
Out every Sunday morning on www.masternewmedia.org, Sharewood Picnic is my weekly collection of the most interesting new media tools and services captured during the week and of which I have not had any opportunity for full coverage or review.
Here for you today, a manual selection of the best and most recent picks from the Sharewood Picnic that relate to presentation, digital imaging and visual communication. Enjoy.
Photo credit: Scott Maxwell
Best Picks From Sharewood Picnic
1. Online media center archive for documents, audio and video files - Streamload
Streamload MediaMax is officially out beta, with a free storage limit raised from 10 to 25 GB and with the addition of a full-quality video share service. Streamload MediaMax offers a suite of services that allow users to centrally store, organize, access, and share their personal media collections online. Users may upgrade to industry leading 250 GB of online storage space for $9.95 per month. Among its new offerings, Streamload MediaMax features VideoShare, the first full-quality video sharing service of its kind. It enables users to create video albums, preview their videos via automatically created thumbnails, and share full-quality video files (including high-definition video) as easily as they send email. In addition to VideoShare, new features include:
1. PhotoShare -- One-click photo sharing
2. Music, TV and Movie Lockers for automatically organizing
files
3. File Manager – for managing personal and business files
4. Tagging
5. Server-side transcoding – one-click file format conversions
Streamload MediaMax runs on Windows®, Mac OS and Linux.
http://www.streamload.com
2. All-in-one web-service to record, upload, encode, and publish video clips online - OpenVlog
OpenVlog is a free web-based service that allows anyone to record, upload, encode, publish and share their video in a simple and straightforward manner. There is no software to download or configure and the service works with all types of computers including PCs, Macs and Linux boxes. OpenVlog utilizes Flash-based technology to convert, encode and display all videos uploaded to its servers. The nice feature, pioneered a long-time ago by services like Audioblog.com and more recently by Video Egg, is the ability to record your own video directly while using your own computer webcam. OpenVlog also allows the direct upload of existing video clips and it supports most existing video file formats. Max duration for video clips uploaded is five minutes. Free to use.
http://www.openvlog.com/
3. Text-to-mp3 conversion tool - MT1
MT1 is a text-to-voice tool that translates textual files (email, MS Word documents) into audio files that can be listened to on a PDA, iPod or other portable audio device. Produced by Irish company MagneticTime, MT1 replays your documents to you in "natural sounding voices" such as the soothing sampled female voice that greets visitors to the MT1 website. Text files submitted to MT1 are exported as standard .mp3 files. However, it is not a one-product-fits-all program, meaning that different versions exist to support iPods, PDAs or cell phones. Currently supporting only English language documents on Windows PCs, MT1 is available for about €34 ($40 USD) or for a free, limited-time trial.
http://www.magnetictime.com/
4. Favicons creator - FavIcon from Pics
FavIcon from Pics is a free online service that converts any digital image into a Favicon (aka a Web page icon). The service is extremely easy to use, as you only need to input your selected image file URL or location on your hard disk and FavIcon from Pics immediately returns a 32x32 pixels icon version of the same. Free to use.
http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
5. The principles of easy interface design
The Center for Universal Design recently published The Principles of Universal Design. The Chinese/English on-line
magazine is dedicated to increasing usability through quality user interface design. This article lays out seven simple principles that can be applied to any project to make it more usable by the public. A valuable read for software developers, web designers, engineers and even writers, the article includes several key points to keep in mind when designing communications designed for public use. Free to read.
http://www.uigarden.net/english/...
6. Presentation enhancer for PowerPoint shows - Ovation
Oviation is a program for spicing up PowerPoint presentations. Mostly devoted to reworking existing shows, Ovation uses simple, built-in enhancements that make your presentations more engaging for your audience. Users enter their slides into Ovation and the program recasts your message using numerous customizable features like high-resolution text, 3D visuals, subtle background motion and eye-catching transitions. A unique feature is the teleprompter, which allows you to record audio associated to specific slides in an effective way. Also available a countdown timer for keeping presentations on schedule and a navigation bar for jumping from slide to slide easily. The program is currently in Beta and is available for free with a final release version expected soon. Windows only.
http://www.seriousmagic.com/products/...
7. Photo-sharing site with captions - BubbleShare
BubbleShare is a photo-sharing service incorporating web-based tools for captioning and easy sharing sets of images to be shared as photo albums online. The free service requires no downloads or registration and is easy to use from the moment you access the BubbleShare homepage. It is also possible to share photos directly from Mac's iPhoto as well as . Images are stored for free for 365 days and then the account can be renewed for free.
http://www.bubbleshare.com/upload/basic
8. Self-service mini-ad display matrix - PixelBannerAds
PixelBannerAds is a new online advertising service which allows small sites and blogs to easily monetize some of their screen real-estate. PixelBannerAds provides a snippet of code to place inside any participating site which displays a matrix of 20x20 sized squares that can be purchased directly by readers as ad spaces. Since a 20x20 area is rather small, advertisers can only fit in there a small logo, an icon or some other very simple graphic. A single 20x20 ad costs $10 per month. PixelBannerAds are not complicated to install, and they are a discrete though innovative way of monetizing screen real-estate without adding more flashing, moving or intrusive ads. PixelBannerAds can be served in almost any shape and size to fit and match the different needs of a blog entry, a forum post, or even a web-based email, all clicks and earnings are tracked, and payments are made once a month via PayPal.
http://www.pixelbannerads.co.uk/
9. Watch driver-shot video of any road on the map - Fotogopo
Fotogopo is a Google Maps mashup capable of displaying a driver's video viewpoint of any road along side a dynamic reference map of the road being watched. The goal of this online service prototype is to enable drivers to see any road they want to drive on, ahead of time and in a full video format shot from a driver's viewpoint. Fotogopo has a great deal of potential, but it is still in its early stages. Thus the number of roads and streets that can be "navigated" is relatively limited and covers only US locations. It remains fascinating to drive through San Francisco or the Golden Gate Bridge while seeing yourself moving on a map and while being able to decide what to jump and see next. Strikingly enough Google Sergey Brin announced yesterday at CES convention in Las Vegas a new implementation of Google Local developed for car dashboards. Think of it as your GPS on steroids, harnessing the power of Google Earth to not only provide directions, but also enable the driver to compare on screen what he should be seeing based on his location with what he is actually seeing. Supercool. Free to use.
http://www.fotogopo.com/
These reviews were extracted from the weekly Sharewood Picnic published every Sunday on: http://www.masternewmedia.org
Specifically, the presentation and digital imaging gems presented here were extracted from the following issues of Robin Good's Sharewood Picnic:
