For many of us, it is no longer something that we “turn on” when we are looking for a specific answer or experience . . . but rather something that is “always on”.

Our ideas, assets and creations are stored in various place on the web, most of our communication and information is web-based, so why aren’t we using a presentation medium that is tightly integrated with the web?

I mean . . . have you ever tried to link to a web page from a PowerPoint presentation and back again without it disrupting the presentation!?!?

Then I discovered how easy it is to create a media RSS feed that can be displayed as a Cooliris Wall!

If you haven’t come across it before; Cooliris is a browser plugin that will “transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to enjoy photos and videos from the Web or your desktop.”

This is an ideal alternative to more ‘traditional’ presentations, as you can simply export your PowerPoint or Keynote slides as images and display these on a Cooliris wall, interspersed with other images and movie files.

Now enough theory . . . if you are interested click on the image below to go to the launch page for this demonstration / tutorial.

Is this something that you would use?

Would love to hear your thoughts. Click here to go to the comments.

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He runs his Ute on chip oil, builds houses from whatever materials are around and has just finished doing up an old ship he found up North with the intention of using it to help in overseas charity missions.  Well, this is Steve . . .

. . . and this is his ship ‘Viking May’ . . .

I would tell you about his first charity mission but I am not sure you would believe me!  Maybe that story can come later . . .

Steve writes some pretty amazing stuff and when he showed me ‘Internal Revolution’, we began discussing how we can best present these thoughts to the world.  Eventually deciding to put a kinetic typography animation together with the track ‘Mars’ by spaze craft one.

Enjoy!

(If you can’t see the video below, click here to go to the original post).

Old paper texture by villa-arts.

Would you like to see more of this type of content?

This is my first attempt at kinetic typography, let me know what you think in the comments before you subscribe to my RSS feed and wander off to check out spaze craft one.

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This experience prompted me to find the easiest way of checking out my new followers and easily return the follow (i.e. without logging into twitter).  I have been using Topify for the last week and cannot stop raving about this service! Here is why . . .

Get a New Follower and Topify will notify you via email.  For example:



Now no offense meant for this David character, but I love twitter for the conversation so can tell at a glance that I will not be following this person by the Mr Tweet stats: 1% Conversation.  If I did decide to follow David all that I would need to do is reply to the email . . . pretty easy.

Another example, I have been following the wonderful @mistygirlph for a while and when she began following me I received the following message via Topify:



You can see the difference, 87% Conversation, 45% Links & 30 Mr Tweet Recommendations. As I am already following her updates Topify gives me the option of sending her a direct message via reply email . . . which is also an option when you receive a confirmation message from Topify saying that your follow request was processed:





Topify is currently in beta, however you can grab an invitation code here, or follow @topify and request an invite!

If you would like to learn a bit more about Topify, take a look at their You Tube video:

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like to read about my experience with twitter spam and learn about how to opt out of recieving automatic direct messages.

If you enjoy following me on twitter, please drop me a Mr Tweet recommendation - Thanks!

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Thanks to the unexpected rise of Twitter, global communication is happening more often than ever before.

One of the trickiest parts of communicating globally is timezones – the manual calculations become tiresome and even with the various online timezone converters there is still room for error. I once missed out on an online conference that I had been looking forward to for 6 weeks because I accidentally selected a ’slightly’ incorrect timezone . . . I stayed up until 2am one morning only to find the conference had finished 24 hours prior!

This experience prompted me to look around for the best ‘time converter’ tool I could find.

Enter Permatime, it doesn’t get much easier than this!

You simply set the meeting time in your timezone, and email the link provided to other participants who will see the meeting time in their timezone, or any other timezone they wish to view it in.

Magnificent tool, bookmark it now and follow @Permatime on twitter.

All the timezones used by Permatime are listed in the locations page (you can even request for more locations to be added!)

There are lots of ways that Permatime can help facilitate Global Communication, how will you use this?

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How did this happen?

Well, I have been very busy recently and hadn’t been keeping up with new followers on twitter, I had 100+ emails from twitter inviting me to check new followers profiles and I felt bad about having not done so.

I mean these are real people who have found value I what I have to say and have chosen to follow my updates, the least I could do is take a peek at their profile.

I then decided that rather than going through the 100 emails that I would just  follow everyone who has followed me recently, automatically.  A bad decision, I advise that you don’t do this!

I was surprised that nearly a quarter of my new follows were people who used automated services to broadcast utter rubbish.

So after unfollowing everyone who sent me a direct messages I did a little bit of research about how to automatically block DMs, here is what I ended up doing:

• Follow @OptMeOut
• Await DM advising that @OptMeOut is following you
• Respond to DM to finalize process

Now I will not receive any automated direct messages from TweetLater, for full details on the process click here.

While I am sharing, I also came across Turn This Thing Off! and love the frustrated bird!

If you use automatic DMs . . . can you please tell me why?

If you don’t use automatic DMs . . . how do you feel about them?

Before you go, have a look at how I am now managing new twitter followers and subscribe to my RSS feed.

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I have been a BlackBerry addict for the past two years.  Originally I had my trusty Curve, with a battery that lasted around four days and now the magnificant BlackBerry Bold.

I am also a tad additcted to twitter, the only problem was – up until recently my BlackBerry and twitter were not the best of friends.  All of the twitter applications that I tried were lacking in some way.  Then, I came across dabr . . . hallelujah!!!

dabr has been accurately describe as ‘m.twitter.com on steroids’ – it is the only twitter interface that I have used that does everything!

Have a look . . .

Before we look at the features of dabr, let me highlight the above discussion I had with the developer on twitter.

I was playing with dabr trying to get used to the fact that it didn’t have a character counter and tweeted the following . . .

dabr didn’t ignore me . . . but rather responded with a solution half an hour later!

Very impressed, now I just need to wait for them to add a character count to the RT & direct messages!  Ok, you got me, dabr doesn’t do everything  . . . but it does have Twitpic integration; meaning that you can easily upload a pic from your phone and preview thumbnails of other twitpic posts automatically!

I even love the fact that dabr has an ugly orange theme by default (that is always a good thing right?) . . . however you can change the look if you wish.

Using dabr is very intuitive, there are great navigational controls on each tweet . . .

The navigation of different parts of twitter is also intuitive, with shortcuts included if you have a little tiny itty bity phone . . .

I mean the developer even advertises his competitors on the front page of his site!!!

dabr states that “Your ideas aren’t just welcome, but are the driving force that makes dabr improve and hopefully be your mobile twitter client of choice. So please get in touch ”

I believe they mean it.  What do you think?  Are you going to try dabr right away?

You may also be interested in reading about how I manage new followers on twitter.

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There are some great introductory videos showing people the basics, such as Common Craft ‘Twitter in Plain English‘:

That being said, I haven’t yet come across a video that explains #hashtags, Retweets, #FollowFriday and the importance of conversation in Social Media.

I am sure there are some, but I feel like making one.

To do this I need your help . . . I don’t want the tips in this movie to be based only on my thoughts, but to base them on community response.

Please take a minute or two to share your thoughts about twitter in the comments below.

To get you started:

How do you use twitter? i.e. is it for communication with friends, advertising, networking etc.

What is the most confusing thing about twitter? e.g. “why is everyone putting #blib at the end of their twitter letters?”

What other advice do you have for the Twitter Noob? e.g. complete your profile and upload an avatar.

Thank You!

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I came across a product tonight that I was relieved to find and I wanted to share it with you:

So let’s make this review even stranger:

[Disclaimer:  The above image links to the DIY Themes website via an affiliate ID meaning that if you go to the site and purchase the theme I will make a little bit of money.]

Yep, I am actually advertising to you about a product that I haven’t tried!

I feel okay about doing this because I found this product on Chris Brogan’s site and figure that I can trust the co-author of Trust Economies, and author of some of the greatest content on the web!  (If you are not familiar with Chris make sure you read “You’re Doing It Wrong“, “The Righteous Web” and the “Social Media Decision Tree“).

I went to Chris’s site because he is great at what he does and I figured I can learn a lot from him.

While there is a lot that I could say about Chris’s site . . . I am here to talk about Thesis and its ‘behind the scene’ features and ‘futureproof customization system’.  This is a premium theme.

“Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme on the market today . . .”

There are thousands of different marketers who will happily sell you the “Learn the Secrets of SEO & Have A Million Clicks on Your Website in Less Than 3 Minutes” ebook.

If you like spending all of your ‘blogging’ time searching for indexed algorithms in your XML sitemaps, worrying about spiders crawling over your robots.txt or have trouble spamdexing because you cannot decided what hat you are wearing . . . then you are obviously really passionate about SEO!

I am glad someone is passionate about it.  I read the ebook.  It sucked.  You are better off donating your heavily discounted, today only member special price of $20 to me.  I won’t send you any bonus gifts to the value of $35,000.

“Not a coder? Not a problem. The Thesis option panels allow you to command your site with ease, while Thesis does all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

My coding ability = I have been to this page more than once.

“The difference is in the details. You may not know it, but typography and visual clarity are two of the most important aspects of your site. Properly setting type on the web is an exercise in mathematical precision, and this is not an area where you want to compromise. After all, typography is the primary vehicle for the most important thing on your site—your content!”

This is an important point.

Put simply, if the text is hard to read . . . people won’t want to read it.

“What about customizations and design changes? Thesis contains a futureproof customization system that allows you to produce unique designs, all while keeping your changes isolated to just two key files!”

This is major.  You can test different layouts, fonts, images etc. easily.  To give you a bit of an idea of some of the ways others have customized Thesis, have a look at this video appreciation of the Thesis Gallery Showcase.

[Music:  music by spaze craft one, it's use donated to matthewbibby.com]

“In addition to our in-house support staff, there are also tons of amazingly talented users who help newbies and veterans alike in our forums. On top of that, we’re ratcheting up the support with the addition of video tutorials, so now you’ll be able to do more with Thesis than ever before!”

In-house support staff, an active and supportive community of users, video tutorial and everything else mentioned in this post . . . well worth the $87 in my opinion.

If you agree, please click on the below image to go to the Thesis site:

Oh, and before I forget, here is Chris Brogan’s review of Thesis.  Have a read and have a look at how he has customized the design.

What do you think about my strange review?

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Enter Xtranormal, the “If you can type you can make movies” people.

xtranormal is different. They are easy to use.

Seriously, check it out.

A demonstration of how to create movies in xtranormal:

The finished product:

As far as customer service goes, xtranormal rock.  Not only does @xtranormal provide real time updates on any site developments or hiccups, they are also fantastic to deal with via their contact form.

So, xtranormal is a great tool to have in the toolkit. It is part of the puzzle for the branching scenario idea discussed at the beginning of this post . . . next time I have a spare hour or two  </laugh> I will show how to bring it all together in Adobe Captivate CS4 (yes, on a Mac!).

If you have any suggestions on the topic or storyline for this presentation then leave a note in the comments.

Then go and see the guru of branching scenarios, Tom @ The Rapid E-Learning Blog.

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How cool is that! What would you like to see animated in a similar way?

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