tools: October 2008 Archives

I'll start off by saying, I'm bad at managing information from conferences.  I think I'm writing this as a way to start pondering how to be better at it.  I always go to conferences thinking, "this time I'll blog" or "I'll make sure I will get my pictures up right away", or even that I'll take notes and reflect on everything that I hear, but anybody who has been to conferences knows that this is so difficult.  Then you get home, you're so exhausted, and it hits you that you actually have another life that you've been neglecting!

This time I decided to blog before the conference... hopefully that counts...

So tomorrow I'll be on my way to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio (by the way, Go Bucks!)  I went to this conference last year as a student volunteer, this year I'm going as a student...

You learn what works from each conference you go to when it comes to managing information (there's just so much of it).  I think the key is really finding a way to aggregate everything to one place so you can find it later.  Is that a blog?  Is that something else?  I'm not sure yet.  Tags help, but it's difficult when there isn't a known tag before the conference starts, or there's a couple variations of tags.  It's good to find these things out beforehand.  Also, it's hard to blog from an event when there isn't internet... this is one of the main problems of the ASIS&T conference.  There's internet, but you have to pay for it, so most people don't bring their laptops, or they skip internet access for the event.  I also remember poor reception inside the meeting rooms last year.  I really am hoping the internet situation is better this year.

How do you keep up?

I don't have one method down yet, but I think I like to keep track of what's going on using the tools I already use.  This makes sense right?  There is a wiki for this event, there's a few things posted (but not much), I do think I pulled the tag 'asist2008' off of there, so that's what I'll try to use for the event.  I try to monitor Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious during and after events.  I don't regularly use Technorati (other than monitoring my own blog traffic), but I do throw that in for conferences to see if anybody's blogging.  That sounds like a lot, but if you can aggregate the feeds from the tools you most regularly use, you can either create 1. a decent journal of your own activity at the conference, or 2. a feed of all activity at the conference... depending on the participation level.

For IA Summit last spring I created a public Google Reader feed of these items, which was interesting for keeping up during the conference, I've already created one for ASIS&T 2008 to see how well this works again.  The Google Reader page is a nice format and not a bad way to catch up with things.  Of course all of these feeds are in one folder of my normal Google Reader, I like to make it public in case anybody else finds it useful.  Oh and it seems that Google has been changing their shared pages features and I think I'm stuck with the fish themed page, at least for now, the page where I was able to change the theme before has disappeared.

I wanted to create a FriendFeed room (well I did create one), but it turned out to be rather limiting for events like this.  I had difficulty adding anything more than Flickr photos, so I guess FriendFeed is better for individuals rather than groups or conferences.  All I ended up doing was add my public Google Reader feed, so it's just duplicating my other feed, but the FriendFeed room gives people the ability to comment on items.  Things can also be posted directly to the FriendFeed room too, but I'm not sure if that's a feature I would use at a conference.  I'm honestly not happy with the FriendFeed room right now so I don't know if that's something I'll keep messing with.

I recently discovered that Twitter Search (formerly Summize) is awesome for real time updates to what's going on with Twitter... I like to keep this open in a tab in my browser if I can (not sure on the number of Twitterers at this event though).  I think Hahlo on the iPhone has a Twitter search, not sure about tracking events on any of the other apps or how they work.  I tend to be more laptop centric at events.  I suppose if internet is flaky then I could use my iPhone more.

Flickr & Pics

I'm going to bring the Eye-Fi card, but I've never successfully got it to work on a wireless network other than my own.  To have pics automatically uploaded to my computer and to Flickr during a conference would be cool.  If I can get it to work then I'll probably let go of my perfectionist angst over pictures and use Picnik to edit them right away online.  If I can't get it to work, I'll probably make the effort to put them up right away from my computer, or later in the evening at the hotel.  I'm bad about pictures... mostly the perfectionist thing, I like to edit them all before I post them online, but then I never have time for this.  Sometimes I publish the photos real quick and edit them later to replace them on Flickr.  As I'm writing this I realized I never published my photos from ACPL Library Camp... this is why I need to do these things right away!

Liveblogging

I have mixed feelings about liveblogging.  On one hand I like the idea of just getting it all out there, because I know I won't sit down and form a well thought out blog post like I should.  On the other hand, I don't always like reading other people's notes as live blogs (twitter posts I don't mind so much though).  Maybe the best way to approach liveblogging is just to aggregate?  Or is it a wiki format?  I'm really just looking for a way to keep this information for myself.  An interesting liveblogging tool is ScribbleLive, which I discovered some time ago and looks pretty fun.  There's some cool embedding feature with ScribbleLive, and I think you can aggregate things like Twitter to it too, but the embed tools seem to only work with WordPress right now.

My dilemma is that I often take notes at conferences and then they never get published somewhere where they'd be of any use to anybody... including myself, they usually just get lost somewhere on my computer.  I guess it depends on what I get the most value out of during the talks.  I like links to resources, websites, and even the presentation itself so I can refer to it again later.  This is the sort of stuff I think I need to keep better track of during events.

I know a lot of people like using their mobile phone for conference blogging, but I really don't like typing out long things on my iPhone so I use that more to check in with Twitter friends and email.  I do like to take a few quick pics with my phone and upload them to my Tumblr though.

Another interesting thing is keeping track of all of the people you meeting, who are either on different social networks or no social networks.  I collect people on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and LinkedIn pretty regularly.  It would wonderful if there was an easier way to manage those connections in one place.

I am looking for new suggestions in this area.  I think I pick up new thoughts on this as I go to different events.  In summary it seems the best ways to approach this type of information management is to collect thoughts quickly (and clearly), in an aggregated sort of way, and to make sure you have the appropriate access to a network during the event.  Realistically, getting this stuff collected after an event seems pretty difficult to do anymore.  I'm curious how other people like to manage information from conferences and what they do with it once they have it.

My mode of operation seems to save knowledge of specific features, products, tools, whatever, in the back of my brain until the need for them surfaces.  I guess this is sort of what happened with Prism.  My knowledge of Prism really started with my decision to simply not download Google Chrome.  I'm not against the browser, I just feel I'm too invested in Firefox as my web browser, and as much as I would love to play around with the new browser, I simply don't have the time.  So I didn't download it.

But some of the features do intrigue me, which is why when I saw the article in Lifehacker about putting Chrome's best features into Firefox, I filed that in the back of my brain for when the need surfaced.  I've picked up a few good extensions out of this article, but the one that I didn't think I would really have a need for, turns out to be pretty cool, and that is the Prism for Firefox extension.

Prism is an extension that allows you to create stand alone applications from any website.  I'm really browser based, I admit it.  I don't mind having multiple tabs open and working out of the browser.  That's why I wasn't sure this application would be one I used often.  The feature in Chrome to allow tabs to run as separate processes seemed like a good and useful one though.  In a way, Prism sort of replaces that function in Firefox, but you have to choose which sites you want to be made into applications.

I don't usually try these things until a need comes up, and last week the need appeared out of frustration.  If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed I have absolutely no love for the course management tool, Blackboard.  We use it for all of our classes, and I think it fails on both functionality and usability.  Last week as I was trying to post a video link to a presentation to the discussion board of one of my classes, my browser crashed multiple times.  I also had tabs open that I didn't necessarily want to lose, but because my browser crashed with Blackboard open each time, each time I restored the session it would crash again.  The crash resulted in multiple postings on the discussion board even, which I found absolutely annoying.

It's not the first time I had browser crashes with Blackboard open in my browser.  It's just such a problematic site that I come to expect it to happen again.  That's when I remembered that extension, which I did download to my browser, but hadn't had an opportunity to try it out yet.  I decided to create a new application for Blackboard using Prism thinking that in the future if it decides to crash it won't take down my whole browser.

Not only has it not crashed, but it runs beautifully in the window!  I'm impressed, although don't think that leaves Blackboard off the hook, it should run with no problems in Firefox too.  I shouldn't have to use it in an outside environment to make it work!

Things I like about Prism:

• When I minimize, it can minimize to the system tray (yea, less task bar clutter!)
• I can create a desktop icon, start menu icon, or quick start icon (or all 3).  The nice thing about the start menu icon though is that I can now open directly using search in Windows Vista.  I do have a desktop icon created too.
  
• The window is uncluttered and simple, I see this coming in handy for doing things like screencasts!
• Links open in your browser, not your application window.

This could work for creating a desktop application for Gmail, or at work I decided to create a little application for our ILS, which is web based and normally I just open in a new tab.  It's really easy to use too, just visit the website, go to tools, convert website to application, check a few options... done.  It may not be a total replacement to Chrome's tab processing feature, but it works for what I need it to do.

Tonight (er, this morning) I'm working on a multimedia presentation for my Information Architecture class.  I really enjoy putting presentations together.  Last winter I did one using screencasting which I enjoyed, and this semester we're required to appear on video so I've been trying out different tools to accomplish this.

A few days ago I put a question out on Twitter asking if anybody knew a good tool for including video and PowerPoint together, Nick DeNardis responded back saying that SlideRocket "changed how he did presentations forever", so I decided to check it out.  Let me just say, wow!  I don't know why I haven't looked at this sooner.  The presentations look really simple, and they're completely editable in the web browser.  You can add video, audio, and/or images really easily, and presentations can be shared online through the web browser, or if you like an offline viewer can be downloaded.

As with any new thing there's been a bit of a learning curve for me though.  This is a group presentation for an online class so we have to collaborate completely online.  My classmates and I have to all appear on video at some point during the presentation too.  You can add video to PowerPoint I guess, but another group did this in what looked to be an attractively packaged presentation, but the video boxes included within the presentation did not play for myself or another group member.  I'm not sure why.  SlideRocket uses Flash video, is easy to learn, and the presentations really flow much better than anything I could ever create in a PowerPoint.

I was up for the challenge of combining all of these elements together, video, audio, basic PowerPoint slides (yes, you can import .ppt files!), into one presentation though.  I mentioned that SlideRocket uses Flash video, it does also accept .mov or .mp4 movie formats, but I opted for the flash, it seemed more native to what I was trying to do.  First I did raw editing of the camera .avi files in Windows Movie Maker, which is what I usually use.  It's easy for me to use, it's on my computer, it just works.  I exported those into .wmv files.  Exporting to .wmv always seem to work the best when I'm working in Windows Movie Maker.  Keeping them in the .avi format (which is actually the default) makes them huge and even distorted so I pick an appropriate sized .wmv setting to match the dimensions of the original .avi file.

I had to hunt around for a tool that does media conversion.  Luckily I didn't have to hunt too far as Lifehacker did a pick of top 5 media converters on Sunday!  I eventually went with SUPER, I'm not impressed with the interface or their website (both are difficult to navigate), but it had the most options and I wanted to do two different conversations with my .wmv files.  Despite the confusing interface, the converter works really well once you get it going!

I converted each file into a .flv and a .mp3, and now I'm in the process of uploading those to SlideRocket and incorporating them into my slides.  I wanted one of each so I could decide between a video or just an audio for slides, I didn't necessarily think that the video had to be on every slide, but the audio certainly does since this presentation will be delivered online.

It's a long process, but I have learned a few things along the way... although I'm hoping to get a few hours sleep tonight!

I love Twitter, and I was already fully aware of the usefulness of the microblogging service in a personal and professional setting, but just now, in a very serendipitous way, I discovered how a combination of Google, Blog Posts, and Twitter can get you exactly the information you need in school research too.  I'm very inspired by this.

I'm putting together one part of a presentation on Usability in Web Design for my Information Architecture class, my particular topic in this presentation is defining and describing what usability is, and I have reached the section where I wanted to talk about some considerations for usability in web design.  I have found some incredible resources, but I sort of got stuck with browser considerations, at least in a very general sort of way that I can sum up for my classmates, with maybe a few very general tools.  I'm talking real basic here... things that librarians can understand without overwhelming them.

Ugh! I know browser compatibility is needlessly complex (thanks to browsers being needlessly non-standards based), I've totally been there, but I didn't realize finding a general article, blog post, anything would be that difficult.  And to be honest with you, I can't even trace my path back to how I initially found this nugget by Jared Spool on UIE (I do know it started with Google and veered in some strange direction after that), but I'm thrilled that I did, and it was even posted yesterday!!

In sum, a client asked Jared if he could recommend an article on designing for specific browsers for one of his clients.  Jared admitted he didn't that he didn't know the answer, but thought somebody must know.  Since Twitter is awesome like this, Jared posed the question to his network and got some good responses from people he knew.  Then he posted the question and responses on his UIE blog in a simple sort of digest form, which I can now benefit from with my own research.

Thank you to Jared who thought to post these responses so that others may be able to enjoy!  I looked through a few of the suggested links and did find some resources closer to what I was initially hoping to find when I started on this web searching journey. 

More evidence that Twitter just rocks.