cogdogroo

Cogdogroo is an absolutely fantastic wiki by Alan Levine about how to tell stories/deliver presentations using Web2.0 tools - he starts of with this version of the Cinderalla story as a demonstration of how not to do it, (though I have to say I think it’s rather good).

He then goes to on to deliver a workshop on “50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” - great tips on “prompts”, what you can do if you’re stuck about what to say; and then goes straight into doing it.

Why is it called “50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story”? Because, having outlined the story he’s going to tell (the story of Dominoe), he then goes on to recreate it (gulp) using 50 of the on-line presentation tools available now - everything from photo slideshows to timelines to video mashups and beyond. He gives a brief review of the services as he goes - good stuff. The quickest way to look through it is to check his Webslides (that way you’ll also see which services aren’t working at the moment :)

Vimeo allows encoding to HD

Vimeo is an online video sharing site - but it allows you to upload and transcode to HD720p quality, (1280×720) which is a clear advance on youtube. There’s a good comparative review between Vimeo and Viddler (the other sharing service that allows HD encoding) here.

 via Read/WriteWeb

bubbl

Bubbl.us is a ludicrously easy to use brainstorming - diagramming tool. It doesn’t do 2-way arrows and you can’t embed stuff in the bubbles, but you can share authoring with people - embed, link, export and mail them - standard web2.0 yadada. Marvelous.

via Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom

Zamzar - file conversion

Zamzar is an online service that converts a humongous number of different file formats - it’s worth trying out if someone sends you an attachment that you can’t open - or you need to convert between different office/av/audio/multimedia formats.

The caveat is that it shouldn’t be used to convert confidential files/documents, as the converted file is left on their servers on a publicly accessible page for a day (it’d be pretty unlikely that anyone would find it, but still.)

RSS in Plain English

A very simple explanation of why (and how) you might want to use a feed-reader.

where’s the soap?

I’ve been looking at the Google Custom Search feature, this allows you to setup a search page that will use Google to search only the sites/resources that you specify - pretty neat. What moves it into the “seriously useful” category is a gadget, available here, which allows you to tell it to automatically use the sites listed on your blog roll or links page as the resource list it will target. Since you’ve already selected those links for relevance - you get a focussed “deep” look into them for about 60 secs work (that’s how long it took to do) - or it would have done, but….

One Laptop Per Child, Reviewed by a 12-Year-Old

And a very articulate 12 year old at that. Reading through the comments it appears s/he is reviewing the Beta2 version, which may explain their experience of the machine as being “slow”; and s/he criticises the battery life, but otherwise it’s a favourable review. Pictures of the OLPC can be found here and a history of the project (including criticisms) can of course be found on Wikipedia.

skydrive goes live

Skydrive is Microsoft’s place to keep your digital stuff. They’ve been testing in the US for a while but now they’ve opened it up to the UK and India - so I can get in and take a look at it. Must say, I’m impressed by the interface - very clean, and lays out the options well: stuff you want to keep to yourself, stuff you want to share with your friends, stuff you want to share with the world - simple.

You only get 500MB of space though. I’m sure they’ll upgrade that once they know how things are panning out (there’s a lot of people in India!) but, do I expect Google to trump them - soon - completely? Kind of, lets see.

mindmeister

Mindmeister is an online Mindmapping tool - it allows simultaneous editing by multiple users and is designed for collaborative work. You can upload mindmaps done in Mindmanager - and export your work in a variety of formats as well as publishing to the web, it evens keeps a history of the changes you’ve made so you can revert to an earlier version if things go wrong. There’s a limit of 6 maps for the free account, and no RSS feed (boo..) but it’s *so* easy to use, I’ll forgive them.

via Weblogg-ed

Online Media God

That should keep me busy for the weekend…