Author: davecriswell

A colleague turned me on to a collaboration tool today that I wanted to share.  The tool is called Twiddla and is a virtual white board platform that is super-easy to use and doesn’t require any download or even signing up for an account.

I’m working a website development and design project and we had a couple of site concepts to look at plus some graphics and a document to review.  There is a browser built right into the system that allows you to view any website plus a toolbox tucked into the bottom of the site that allows for uploading of graphics and documents.

Anything that you put onto the white board can be manipulated with a set of annotation tools including text and drawing tools. As my colleague made annotations to the website and document we were looking at his username would appear above the changes allowing me to see who was making the change.

Another window on the side of the frame  kept a record of each action and who made the change making it easy to rollback and see the history of the session. When you are done, take a snapshot of the whiteboard and save it for future reference.

I only spent about 45 minutes in the system on my first time and felt comfortable right away. If my experience is similar to my initial one, I’m sure after checking out more of the features will be simple.

If you haven’t already done so please check out the announcement by google regarding their new social search feature they announced at the recent web 2.0 conference. I’ve included the video below.

Next, enable the feature on Google Labs and give it a shot.  In a nutshell, Google has added results from the social networks you’ve added in your Google profile.  I’ve only started to use this feature but already I see that it’s on a different level than some of the other modifications to the Google search engine results page.  Being able to view the informaiton by time frame and by type of content were both very useful additions. But adding results from your own social network raises the bar on relevance.

The mantra for earning attention on the web has been content is king, but this has evolved to relevantant content is king. For many, there is no more relevant content than that of your social network. As an example, I’m considering signing up for the Marine Corps Marathon. Entering this term in to google yielded the obvious results in addition to the result below:

Thad and I have had some exchanges on Twitter and he is someone I would trust asking their opinion of the marathon.  Clicking on the results would yield other results people in my social network who have some relevance to the Marine Corps Marathon.

This could be a game changer folks. I’m still digesting how to leverage this in my B2B marketing role but there is no doubt in my mind that marketers need to consider this in their online strategy.

I’ve been a casual user of Evernote for several months but its only recently that I’m beginning to become more of a power user. Originally I began using it for capturing ideas that I had while in the car (using their voice memo tool) or tapping out a thought I had for a blog post while trying to fall asleep (using the Blackberry application).

In contrast, at work, my normal routine for taking notes was to write everything down on a notepad while in a meeting and then transcribe that into a word document or use the notes tool in Outlook.  One of the issues I constantly ran into was trying to find notes without spending 5 or 10 minutes remembering which folder the word document was in.  (The Outlook notes feature in Office 2007 is a whole other story. Notes in Outlook 2007 constantly crashes on me – does anyone else have this problem?) I also didn’t like having to log into to my office remotely to find a note I needed at night or while traveling.

Hence my shift to Evernote for both personal and business notes.  Using the desktop version of notes on my work PC, my home Mac and Blackberry app, I can now take and/or access my notes wherever I am, and, can search the content of any note.  I like not having to worry about where I’m storing anything. I also like knowing if I want to find everything I’ve taken down about Twitter or personal blog post ideas, it’s easily findable using the search tool in Evernote or the tags feature.

I’ve covered just a few of the features that I use in this application. There are lots more features that I use (web clipping including the ability to search the content, capture notes using Twitter, etc) and probably some that I haven’t discovered yet.  If you are looking for an easy way to keep track of information and want quick access to your stream of consciousness, give Evernote a try.

I’m trying something different with this post – a video post that includes updates from along the course using my Flip video camera.  It’s my first time trying to do the video thing and there is plenty of improvements that I’ll make for the next one but I hope you find some value in the content, if nothing else than for the pure entertainment value of seeing me get less coherent as the miles tick by!

What started out as a 13 mile relay run turned into a 21 mile effort, with an interesting twist at the end!

 

 

After bouncing around on Blogger and WordPress for a while, I’ve settled on the Squarespace platform as a place to be my home on the web.

Blogger for beginners

Blogger was great to get started and for my first blog the features and customization it allowed were fine.  Dropping in pictures was simple and there were enough widgets available at the time that initially I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

Graduate to WordPress.com

But, as I got a little more adventurous I started my 2nd blog on the WordPress hosted platform at WordPress.com.  This allowed for a lot more customization from the popular platform’s extensive widget collection and I really liked the user interface.

As my blogging frequency increased and I began having to dig into more and more HTML code (and I’m not an HTML guy) I found myself thinking it was taking more time than it needed to do what I thought were simple changes (for example, it is next to impossible to change the size of your font!).  In particular, because WordPress.com doesn’t accept any javascript  in their customer HTML blocks, there were a ton of cool widgets that wouldn’t work. Very frustrating.

Try to upgrade to WordPress.org

I kept reading that all the cool widgets I wanted to use on wordpress.com were available on wordpress.org.  The problem is this meant finding a place to host the site, which wasn’t that big a deal. However, I found with wordpress.org also comes the need for even more HTML knowledge. This was somethig I want to learn, but finding the time to do it was another story. At about this same time I took on a new role at Direct Capital as their Interactive Marketing Manager. I wanted a platform that would just let me do what I needed to do without having to get to techie.

Along comes Squarespace

Thanks to Jazz Gilbert, he felt my pain and suggested I check out Squarespace. While I’m relatively new to the platform, so far, it has allowed me to do everything I want to do without digging into HTML code. It was super simple to merge both of my blogs into one site using the blog importer. The possibilities do seem limitless, even for a HTML lightweight.

Best features so far: love the drag and drop, love the ability to use widgets with javascript code, love the user interface.

And as a bonus, I can change the font with a couple of mouse clicks!