Every so often I stumble on a new tool that makes my life easier (how nice those moments are.) Hopefully this is another one of them. I just found a nifty Firefox Add-On called ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging. It basically lets you post to a number of popular blog formats, including a custom wordpress install like this one, right from within your browser. So, here is my first post (hopefully of many) using ScribeFire. Enjoy.
Distributed content on the web is nothing new. RSS feeds, widgets and other embeddable content (videos, images, slideshows, etc…) have been popping up in blogs, personalized homepages, and social networking profile pages for several years. As marketers however, this illustrates a major point that needs to be considered. People are off your site, much more than they are on it. We can’t expect people to come to us for information, we need to be where they are.
Technologies such as RSS are basic tools to address this, but recently Chip showed me an app that allows anyone to create dynamic flash widgets sprouts that can be embedded throughout the web. The technology is called Sprout Builder, and after trying it out I was amazed at how easy the interface was to use. As my friend Mike Gowan once said, “Any simpleton could do this!” It took me about 20 minutes to build a simple EPInteractiv sprout that was fed via RSS, a Google Calendar, and a set of photos.
When you get a moment, check it out. Thank TechCrunch for the beta signup.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lBiW1CcygM4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Tune in to our live internet TV station! (This is a test of Mogulus Studio - Live Internet Video Broadcasting)
We’ll have some fun with this technology for sure. You can edit the video feed on the fly with predetermined storyboards composed of YouTube clips, recorded video and yes… live video.
More to come on this.
In our business we thrive on bringing people to our site. Whether it’s a microsite to educate visitors about a product, or a more traditional site designed to show knowledge in a market segment - our projects would fail without self promotion, traditional advertising, and word of mouth.
With all of these there is a certain level of trust that your visitors place in your site. An example, most of our sites have a ‘Send to a Friend’ link. This small form makes it easy for a visitor to send a note to someone else with a link to make it that much easier for word of mouth advertising. When a visitor uses this function they place a certain amount of trust in us that we won’t be storing these addresses for later campaigns. And, just in case there is any question out there - we don’t.
This trust is difficult to establish and even harder to keep in an online world where each of us receives a few hundred spams a day. There was a time that people felt free to share they’re email address with anyone that asked. Today, all it takes is that fourth email from your great aunt telling you that Bill Gates will come and wash you car until you begin to realize that your email address should be a protected piece of information.
This brings us to todays lesson in how not to spread word of your site. And if you’re the kind of person that clicks on links and doesn’t finish blog posts, don’t sign up for this site. The folks over at Quechup are a bit late to the social networking sites, so they have a unique method of generating new members. On sign up they ask you if you want to scan your address book for other Quechup users. If you say yes, then they email everyone in your contact database with an invite to join.
Far too often the most effective solutions are overlooked. If you favor a lightweight, simplistic, intuitive (and free!) approach to software, the open-source communities have alot to offer you. Listed below are 10 open-source or freeware apps I use daily and I can’t imagine not having them.
Fans of of iGoogle will likely be impressed with what Netvibes has to offer. Netvibes is an AJAX-driven customizable start page featuring modules that syndicate RSS feeds, access POP3 email accounts, stream podcasts, access photos and lots more. Some of the more popular modules enable quick access to Flickr, Gmail, Myspace, Digg, Youtube, and Google Maps. Users can browse new modules and share their sets of tabs via the Netvibes Ecosystem. I’ve been on it about a year. A+++
Big props to Nokia for this one. Not only is the “News” section on their NSeries product site void of any boring corporate press releases, but it is filled with blog articles ranging from the installation of Ruby on Rails to integrating Google Maps. A blogroll, Digg and del.icio.us links, RSS feed, and a Send to a Friend feature round out one of the single best integrations of Web 2.0 into a mainstream product website that I have seen. The fact that the product itself offers some really cool technology doesn’t hurt either.
P.S. The all flash interface is pretty slick too… but sorry Tim, no CSS here.