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Category Archives: Tools
Business & Marketing Twitter Tools – oneforty
Plenty of them I don’t know.
Hours of fun to come …
I don’t know if you already knew this directory, but looks like a nice one to bookmark.
Youtube trends : your daily dose of inspiration and amazement
Youtube released quite silently youtube trends : the latest trending videos in the last 28 days for men / women, by country, by age. Quite amazing indeed.
Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard
Something to check out : Montage
Share your visual album of the web.
Montage is a shareable, personal, visual album of the web. You are able to design your personal Montage around a topic by adding content that pulls information from a variety of sources including, RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, YouTube, video and Bing Images. Your Montage is constantly evolving as you arrange each area with the content of your choice – which is easy, intuitive and fun; and can be on any topic from, movies, sports, to robots.
So, you want to design an infographic ?
So you definitely think that infographic are the über cool things to deal with at the moment, you have plenty of data, a great idea in mind but wonder are the tools around ?
Of course, you can start with this outstanding blog post : http://text100.com/hypertext/2010/07/infographics-and-communication/
Interested to go further / give a try by yourself?
Here is some tools to start with playing data for you, courtesy of Google and IBM. You can also have a look at the work of Neoformix and also the famous Gapminder.Any suggestion to share? Help yourself on the comment section hereunder
Hereunder, a bunch of really cool tool to play with data and – why not – start your own infographics.
10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics.
Otherwise, keep in mind that our good friend at Beyond are really good at designing great infographics … don’t hesitate to contact them !
Dashboard building – best practices
Some of our clients currently asks us for Dashboard solutions for Monitoring purposes. Here is a bunch of good practices for building such tools.
What is it :
A web page build by the agency with a selection of RSS feeds to help the client to get a view on what is said about him, the challengers, inside the main media targets on the web.
Benefits for the client :
Bring an immediate view on relevant information directly impacting the business of the client
Recommended tools :
I recommend the use of welcome page such as Netvibes.
Easier to understand for beginners, uses tabs, with a clean and slick ajax interface
Other tools available :
- http://www.portaneo.com/solutions/en/opensource.php (an open source solution you can host on a server – for internal resource, for instance)
- http://www.webwag.com/startup/
- http://www.pageflakes.com/
- http://www.yourminis.com/
- http://www.protopage.com/
Which RSS feeds to include :
- I first recommend to use rss feeds from search engine to track what is said about a specific client / challenger
- Search from Google News – you can choose to display the news limited to a language / country. Be sure to display the news ranked by date (not relevancy). An RSS feed is dynamically created on such page.
- Search from Google blog search – works exactly like Google News – as an alternative, Twingly is definitely a good solution to look at, especially if you have issues with spam on blogs (splogs).
- Search from Twitter : you can track keywords on Twitter based on the language. But since many people uses english on Twitter, it is often more relevant to filter the Twitter search based on the geography. Define for example the center of a country (For example, the center of France would be around Clermont-Ferrand – you’ll just have to indicate the distance to the FR boundaries – around 600 km).
Keywords :
As always, it’s all about the keywords and their relevancy.
- If you’ll choose a keyword too wide, the number of irrelevant results will lead to too much data. If it’s too narrow, not enough
- Using operator (for instance “security” AND “Technology” OR “IT”) might help to narrow down the number of results and lead to better insights.
- Again, the use of inverted commas ” ” is definitely the top trick to use for such searches.
Additionnal resources
- http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-01-29-netvibes-the-new-social-media-dashboard
- http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/04/06/the-one-page-social-media-dashboard/
- http://blog.netvibes.com/ogilvy-pr-offers-social-media-dashboard-with-netvibes/
- http://www.thedailyinfluence.com/
Any other feedback or experience to share is more than welcome 🙂
[EDITED] Some Text 100 references
Following Jeremy’s request, some additionnal references :
- Text 100 FR internal page : http://www.netvibes.com/text100fr
- The Novell page for Identity and Management topics : http://www.netvibes.com/novell
- We also built a page for IBM Spain, but this page isn’t currently public.
Tutorial – Top 7 screencasting tips
“A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration.” (Source : wikipedia)
… And it’s incredibly useful to share information,tutorials and to make trainings. I assume some of you already did screencasts, but just in case here are the few tips I can share. All you need is a computer, a microphone, a few additionnal softwares and a plan of what you’d like to say.
Software (all of them are free tools).
I personnaly recommend and use Camstudio : http://camstudio.org/
Camstudio is a pretty old software with a crappy interface, but it’s free and it just works. It also record your voice during the presentation.
Other software you might like to check out : http://www.jingproject.com/
Top 7 screencasting Tips and tricks
- Prepare what you’ll say. Make a plan with catchy titles, as for a traditionnal presentation.
- Double check the software, the internet connection.
- Avoid noisy background, make a sound test.
- Make short sequences that follow the plan
- Anticipate the transitions in your plan
- Make a final recap when finishing your video to highlight the important things to remind.
- Do not lose time to restart a sequence – it’s about sharing knowledge, not imitating famous movie director.
Final editing
If you need to make transitions with titles, Windows Movie Maker will be absolutely perfect for that (OK, it’s not great, but it works, and it’s free on our machines ^_^). Just drag and drop your sequences and make sur to insert titles. And then upload (Idex, Opex, the web …), share and publicize your video !
Should you have done screencast in the past, feel free to share your best practices and recommendations !
Beginner’s guide to posting on wordpress
We just had a request to draft a few bullets about how to write on a wordpress plateform. Probably nothing new for the people coming in here, but do not hesitate to share it with your colleagues if they have a questions about how to post on the disruption blog, Hypertext or other local blogs running on WordPress.
- Do not copy/paste your text straight from Word or Outlook – it would break the formatting. The formatting should be done directly on WordPress.
- Connect to wordpress with your password and login (http://www.NAMEOFTHEBLOG.com/wp-admin) / Posts / Add New.
- For any details about the writing interface, check out the short video (1’24) : http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/15/writing-and-publishing-a-post/
- If you have to write a very long post, you can create a post excerpt http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/14/creating-a-post-excerpt-using-the-more-tag/
- If you absolutely have to make a copy paste from Word or Outlook (it is NOT recommended), there is a dedicated button for that
Bonus
I’ve added a couple of basic recommandations on writing on blogs. Very very basic. But might reassure people lost with the idea of writing on a blog for the first time.
General considerations
- Keep it short and snappy
- Find catchy headline and title
- Do not hesitate to insert subtitles
- Find funny / relevant pictures and visuals (worth a thousand word)
- Links, links and links as much as possible
- Quote your sources and link to them