Looking for ways to explain what social networking, Twitter, podcasting etc is all about?
Commoncraft do a great job of this with simple, cartoon like videos where they manipulate paper cutouts and a voice over using clear, plain English.
Here’s one on social media:

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

CommonCraft offer a number of free to use videos from their commoncraft show as well as licensed videos that you can purchase. They do a really great job of explaining concepts that might be complex to some, in a really simple easy to understand manner.

technorati tags: social networking, Twitter,Commoncraft

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Well… not really but one of the biggest problems that I have with Twitter (which is a great idea) is its reliability. I just experienced not being able to get into it yet again. This follows closely from problems I had yesterday and on what seems like many previous occasions. So why do I mention Google? Basically Google is my Internet health check. It’s just always there - fast and reliable. If I can’t access Google I know I have network problems. Twitter could learn from this commitment to reliability and performance. Either that or someone with the financial might and commitment to performance/reliability should just buy them out and sort it out.

Cheers,

Jerry.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Can’t force yourself to leave Twitter but still interested in the ed.au blogs? Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/edaublogger.

Cheers,
Jerry.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Technology plays a large part in the work I do and while I have made a commitment to try and blog about technology and its application relation to our work it is interesting to see just how difficult this can be at times. There are some quite natural constraints for work blogging which in essence, reduces the number of things that I might like to blog about considerably. Then there are time constraints - I am putting this post together while eating lunch. Sometimes it seems that I have been so occupied in day to day operational tasks that there is just nothing new to comment on. During the first part of my lunch, I came across this interesting article on twopointouch. It provides some really interesting perspectives on blogging. There are some great reasons why people do blog, a pile of barriers/reasons why they don’t, some discussion on microblogging (I’ve joined the Twitter crowd and can see the attraction but haven’t ‘drank the cool-aid’ yet). More interesting to me is the notion of passive blogging - I think I have a lot to say but just don’t have the time etc to devote to blogging it. I am definitely going to follow this up.

Cheers.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Well, SEOmoz’s 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of ’same old same old’ in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are ‘over 200 sites in 41 categories’ there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It’s really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here’s a few interesting ones:

1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
4. twitter - my views here

Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

technorati tags: Web 2.0 Awards

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back