Toufee - Flash movies made easy Thursday, March 20, 2008

When I first stumbled across Animoto last year I was delighted with the site for two reason
Of course, you were limited to the pre-set formats, but these were fine for amateur hacks like me, and most people seeing the results were astounded. Admittedly I only used Animoto to spice up sets of photos I'd taken at weddings, events etc for friends and family.

So when I read about Toufee, which claimed to be the easiest and fastest flash movie maker online, I thought it would be worth evaluating.

Ordinarily, if I want to put movies online I use Microsoft's free application, Window Movie Maker, to edit the video and add effects which I've always been happy with and offers a large range of output formats.

So looking at Toufee, my initial thoughts were that [despite a gawdy home page]
But then as I watched the demo video, whilst continuing to be impressed by the enormous set of features, it struck me that the application was a little like Powerpoint [and Windows Movie Maker] i.e. dangerous in the wrong hands.

Powerpoint has many animation and transformation tools to add effects, and many slide creators spend lots of time applying them to their slides. Unfortunately, you soon realise as a viewer that less is more in most cases and sometimes the creator has overshadowed the message content with gaudy effects [assuming the presentation had quality content at all!]. Even worse, given most people have seen every Powerpoint effect, they now appear tame and passée.

Hence, one can easily imagine the shabby results that will be created by most people. Indeed, the movie created in the Toufee demo looks tacky and a brief glance at the gallery of movies on the site, made by some of the 100,000+ users they claim, amplifies this point!

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for talent, creativity and design flair regardless of the tools - give me a block of marble, a hammer and chisel and you'd end up with a pile of rocks rather than a work of art, albeit it would probably get admitted to the Tate Modern based on the "tat" I saw in there recently.

So perhaps worth a try, but if you're thinking about using it to impress potential customers with your own home-cooked movie, I think you'd be better off getting the help of a designer. For the avoidance of doubt, let me stress that this is not a criticism of the site.

Toufee offers a 30 day free Trial means after which its $5 per month, but you do need to give your credit card details upfront.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 8:54 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Wordpress - Worth checking/comparing Friday, March 07, 2008

I confess that having started using Blogger as the host for this blog, there has been little motivation to move. Whilst it may not have all the sexy features offered by some other hosts, I didn't perceive the need for anything other than the basics. In almost 2 years of blogging, it's been fine.

Yet as with backups, it is wise to have alternates in your back pocket. Many people I know use Wordpress and are very pleased with it, mainly because it has such a breadth and depth of features.

Whilst I've had a Wordpress account, other than playing with it a little when I opened the account, it has remained dormant. However, having decided to check that the restore function of BlogBackupOnline service actually did work [it did work], I took a fresh look at the Wordpress offering. It is immediately obvious why people enthuse about it, since the configuration options are several magnitudes greater than with Blogger.

Interestingly they have already catered for users of other blogging services and enable you to directly import your blog and related comments from Blogger, Live Journal, Moveable Type and other Wordpress blog accounts.

If you're contemplating starting to blog or want a racier service, you should definitely check out Wordpress.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 11:14 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Backing up your blog

Early on in blogging you quickly realise that losing your blog posts/entries would be incredibly annoying and hence should be subject to the same backup procedures you might employ for other irreplaceable data.

Of course, you could rely upon services like Blogger, to never lose your data but that seems a tad risky - for instance, they may decide to disable your account or data cente problems means it is accidentally lost. Such things are not unheard of amongst online services. Moreover, if you ever decided to migrate your blog to a different service provider or host, you would probably want to copy your posts across as well.

I've been using BlogBackupOnline since it came out in beta, which was incredibly easy to set up and feature rich, with no ongoing maintenance required. It enables you to take a full backup of your blog at a point in time and then will incrementally add to that backup thereafter.

The service allows you to restore your blog to one of four services [Blogger, Live Journal, Windows Live Spaces and Wordpress] although you should be aware that Blogger only allows 50 entries per day to be restored and so you would manually have to perform the restore function each day per 50 entries. You can also export/download your blog and the export file created will include all blog entries and comments output in the RSS 2.0 format. To date, I confess I've no experience of using the restore or export features and so can't personally verify their success, albeit writing this is prompting me to try it using an alternate service such as Wordpress.

The service is now coming out of beta with several sevices levels, one of which is a free service offering 5mb of storage. To give that context, my blog is using 3.2mb for the current 885 entries.

So, if you blog, you should obviously backup and you may as well do it for free with this incredibly easy to use service.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:38 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content Sunday, April 29, 2007

This post from Lorelle VanFossen should be helpful to most website owners who she asserts WILL have their content copied without their permission. Aside from providing useful pro-formas on what to say to the perpetrators of the crime and the steps to follow, there are tons of links to other useful resources.

Labels: ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:12 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Skype take down a blogger

Phil Wolff reports that Skype lawyer Seema Sharma emailed blogger Jan Geirnaert Friday afternoon. She told him his popular skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com blogs put him in legal jeopardy, because they use "skype" in the domain name. As consequence, these popular sites have been taken down.

What a great PR move for skype - not! Of course they have to protect their brand name, but it doesn't feel like this was a competitor trying to pass itself off as skype. Nor was the site portraying itself as an officially endorsed site.

It'll be interesting to see how the skype "big company" machine plays this one out.

Update: Robert Scoble thinks Skype did the right thing but suggests Skype could have easily licensed Jan if they felt he was a positive force.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:10 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Blogging for mercenaries Friday, January 26, 2007

Charlene Li of Forrester is referring to a report they've produced on blogging called “The ROI Of Blogging: The “Why” And “How” Of External Blog Accountability” which apparently includes a spreadsheet to compute the monetised benefits/costs.

She goes onto list some Q&A she considered relevant, one of which struck me.

Q: But this is heresy - you can't put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You've just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.

Funny, most companies I know don't have the first clue how to calculate a return on their marketing spend but happily commit large sums to marketing because it seems "the right thing to do". Bigger challenge if one is to adopt this fiscal disciplined approach is surely assessing whether the company is prepared for the blog author(s) to speak with a honest voice about interesting stuff. Recycling press releases as blog posts don't tend to work so well, nor does related corporate fluff or failures to recognise the imperfections of a company.

Labels:

posted by John Wilson @ 4:26 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



A blogger with the "Hoover" syndrome Tuesday, January 16, 2007

This blogger has made the offer to anyone that comments on his blog in the next two weeks, that he will comment on every blog post of theirs for the next two weeks.

Potentially, that's a huge undertaking as there are already 36 people that have left a comment on that post alone. Assuming he has the time to do any more which attracts new people that comment, you can quickly see how fast his task might multiply. It reminds me of the Hoover offer, whereby everyone that bought a Hoover vacuum cleaner received a flight ticket(s) to New York. So many people took them up on their offer that the company was forced to make a huge write off, given that the flight costs greatly exceeded the profits on a vacuum cleaner.

Obviously he may just quit once the enormity of the task becomes apparent; it could even be a great stunt.

Labels: , ,

posted by John Wilson @ 10:27 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit