Monthly Archives: July 2011

Jul 13 2011

OTR Links for 07/13/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Jul 12 2011

Photos in Google Plus

My explorations into Google Plus turned to photos yesterday.  I’m currently at the CSIT Symposium and have been taking the odd picture as I get a moment to wander around in New York.  I was very pleased with how easily photos could be added to and shared from within my account.

There are a number of photo sharing services and so Google Plus wades into this already established realm and does it so nicely.

Adding photos is slick. From your profile, there is a photos tab and you’re prompted to find your photos or you can just drag and drop the image to have it sent to your photo gallery.  The resulting presentation is interesting as you’ll see below.

A mouse over to any of the images uses the same sort of zoom effect that a Google image search provides.  It gives a nice polished presentation.  But, there’s more.

When you select any of the thumbnails, You get the same sort of presentation on a black matte that we’ve become accustomed to with other services.  Below, you’ll see this cute little miniature dog I ran across that was the spitting image of my dog.  I did a double take when I first saw it and just had to take a picture.

Of course, I had to take a picture and share it.  Like other services, you can add tags and descriptions for your images to help share them with others and also make it easier to find it again yourself.  The seven images compose the current photo gallery.  However, there’s an additional button at the bottom of the image which prompts you for actions.  “Edit Photo” caught my attention and I figured that it might have a flip orientation option like other services do.

I was surprised when if turned out to be more than that.  Now, I’m not sure that this is the time and place for a great deal of fancy editing but certainly there may be room for a last minute tweak.

If you’re a user of Adobe Photoshop Elements, then you’ll be really familiar with its quick fix capabilities.  Same deal here.  You’re one click away from applying any of the above final edits to your photos.  I really like that.

So, I tinker with the gallery for a bit and decide to share it.  To whom?

Ah, circles!  I could share the gallery with any of the subsets of contacts previously defined or the superset of extended circles.  Sharing of a gallery is no different than sharing of anything else.  Just choose your audience and away you go.  How about everyone with a link?  No problem … just share the gallery to the public!  It works nicely and you can see the gallery here.  The controls for who gets to see it are impressive and nothing new to learn once you’re used to defining your sharing circles.  While sharing, consider commenting on the images.  Google Plus has you covered there nicely as well.

As with all things you’re posting and sharing to the web, the terms and use and rights about who owns what needs to be understood.  The terms and conditions here are worth reading.  I know that some folks are concerned about putting their professional efforts on the web and the abuse that could follow.  It would be nice to have access to a creative commons statement for the galleries.  Also, I think that you should plan for the worst and that web surfers may use your content in ways that you don’t anticipate.  It would seem to me that a professional who is concerned about that should be putting a watermark into their images anyway or just don’t post them to the web in the first place!

My explorations continue and the handling of photos is a very important aspect of any social networking service.  My first thoughts are that Google Plus handles it nicely and provides some useful tools in a manner consistent with the rest of the service.

Powered by Qumana

Jul 12 2011

OTR Links for 07/12/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Jul 11 2011

It’s a Small World

I had mentioned previously about how I felt that Google Plus just felt like it was more secure when you originally set up accounts.  When you’ve got it running, it’s always a good idea to stay on top of things and tweak it to your liking.  How it’s done may not be so immediately obvious.  Just remember this – look for the “small worlds”!

Clicking on them bring up options everywhere when you’re trying to configure settings.

 

It’s worth keeping tabs on because you may have just gone with some defaults when setting up your accounts and then elect to change your mind.  To get to this point, navigate to your profile and click the edit profile button.  Options that have the “small world” are wide open to the world!

By clicking on them, you have the option to change the level of security and who gets to see what.  In the example above, you’ll see that most of what I have is available to the world.  But, if I’m concerned about a particular item, I can limit the visibility.  So, for example, I may not wish to have my education available to everyone and I may elect to limit it to a particular circle.

Use the editor to make any changes, and the pull down menu gives you finer control over just who sees what.

It’s a quick and easy setting and let’s you have the exact level of visibility that you want.  With all things on the web, it’s a good idea to check through periodically and just make sure that you’re broadcasting exactly what you think you are.

Jul 11 2011

OTR Links for 07/11/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Jul 10 2011

Baseball History

So many times, I end up reading about historic events in the newspaper or watching the reruns on television.  But, on Saturday, July 9, 2011, I was witness to baseball history.  Derek Jeter had his 3000th major league baseball hit.  What is so impressive is that he is the first New York Yankee to do this (I find that amazing) and only the 28th person ever.

Within minutes, the internet is full of the news.  Nobody could claim that they didn’t know!  Perhaps the most interesting post appeared on the Huffington Post where, in addition to the story, an interactive infographic of all the others appears.  It’s a who’s who of some of the best.

Al Kaline, Rod Carew, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, George Brett, Cal Ripken Jr. to mention just a few.  Check out the infographic at the link here.

Of course, the nice thing about today’s technology is that we can play it over and over at will thanks to folks that post the info for us.  Shortly after the event, YouTube was full of the story.

Amazingly, I had put off going yard saleing for a while and caught it live.  I’m glad that I can say that and going 5 for 5 on the day is just the capper to a momentous event.  I’m so glad that I was able to witness it.

When you think of the impact of technology, it’s almost scary.  We know of the achievements of previous superstars largely from handed down records.  Today’s youth will have all events so well digitally recorded and preserved to live again and again.  Could you imagine if Ty Cobb had his legendary career highlights captured on YouTube and an infographic illustrating it all?

Jul 10 2011

OTR Links for 07/10/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Jul 9 2011

Learning Together

It started as just a silly little comment on Google Plus.  The suggestion was that we should meet to face to face to see if we could learn from each other and flat line parts of the learning curve.  That wasn’t really practical but @pmcash suggested that he would host an Adobe Connect session and those that were available could join in the learning.  When I was all done, there were four of us with five devices comprising Macintosh, Windows, and iPad computers exploring and sharing our findings.  Joining the session was @pbeens and @aforgrave.  It turned out to be a great couple of hours learning and sharing online.  In fact, I had to leave first so I don’t know how long they continued….  It was great to join the lads again from the east and mid-Ontario.

I just think that Andy should have brought enough for everyone.

We actually started in Adobe Connect where the latest update had been applied and we just worked our way through some of the features.  As we noted, it seemed quick and more responsive, particularly to those of us with slow network connections.  As such, it was great for screen sharing as we dug into some of the elements fairly deeply.

Of course, we started by sharing our thoughts about Circles.  This seems to be a great discussion point whenever you talk to anyone about Google Plus.  For such a simple concept, we all have our own take on how best to use them.

Probably the most important exploration for me was about privacy.  Just what information was being shared with the rest of the world.  With good friends, you don’t mind if there’s an info slip because you might well know the information to begin with.  As it turns out, security settings seemed to protect information as one would expect.  That was great to see.

Then, we turned our attention to +1s.  Is it a thumbs up?  Is it a like?  Is it a bookmark?  Are all things that are +1ed available?  Can you see all of the webpages that you’ve marked with a +1?  Can others?  After all, on your profile, there is a tab labelled +1.  As it turns out,  the default is not to share your +1s.  But, you can if you want.  While we suspected that it might be somehow embedded with the gear menu, it turns out to be much simpler than that.  Just go in and edit your profile.  Right there, you can turn it on or off.

We then got into a really good discussion about whether publically sharing this was wise or not and when and how you might.  My takeaway was to leave it off but I can’t speak for the others.  We also wanted to know how to add a +1 to one’s blog.  Of course, if you’re running a hosted blog, you are a little handcuffed.  But, @aforgrave hosts his own and quickly downloaded and installed one on his own.  That’s fine for him but how do you handle it when you’re on someone else’s and they don’t have the setting?  Off to the Chrome Web Store where we found a number of extensions that do the deed for you.  Quite frankly, this isn’t something that I do often.  If I want to recommend a site, I sent it to my Diigo account so that it is available there and then is posted to this blog in my OTR links.  Maybe it’s something that I should think about.

Next, we played around with the concept of muting.  I don’t know if it’s the novelty of the new platform or that it just encourages people to talk more but I do find that there is a great deal of activity and my account is just a week old.  Muting or silencing runaway conversations looks like a good feature but we all agreed that we would like selective muting.  Perhaps collapse the replies as an option in addition to the complete silence rule.

@pbeens then created a hangout for us where we decided to, well, hang out.  It took a little bit of magic to get everyone up and running, it seemed but we were able to do it and did some experimenting with the setting.  The thumbnail of the participants is pretty impressive but even more impressive is how the video shifts to the current speaker.  After a little clicking and green frame hunting, we found a way to override that.  The chat window on the left is very handy to use to avoid people talking over each other.  Unlike Adobe Connect, there is no host and common courtesy would be needed for a successful hanging out.  There were a few things that would be nice to have added to this – one would be to record a session and the other would be to do some screen sharing or facility to have a presentation running   Perhaps that will come.

The YouTube sharing seemed like a great deal and we thought it might work a little better than what it did.  We think that it should allow individuals to share their efforts.  But, for our trying and trying, we seemed to get stuck on the first video that we experience.  So, Andy and I had one video and the two Peters had their own video.  That was a little frustrating and we couldn’t get to the bottom of that one.

Amidst all this learning, it was also great just getting caught up with friends.  It’s been months since I saw the Peters and I even learned a little more coming out than I did going in.

So, we went into the learning with no set agenda, just a bunch of learners wanting to learn and discover.  It was time well spent and I know that I went deeper into these topics than I would have on my own.  I’m a little bit smarter leaving and that’s about the best testament to learning that one can have.  We’re already bantering around topics for our next learning session.  If you’re interested, keep your eyes open on Google Plus and we’d love to have you join us.

Powered by Qumana

Jul 9 2011

OTR Links for 07/09/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Jul 8 2011

An Ontario Educator Circle

The more I mess around with Circles inside Google Plus, the more I realize the flexibility (and restrictions) that there are.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that Google Plus is new or if the platform encourages more discussions but I’m finding that I’m losing track of important conversations very quickly.  But, I have found a way to keep track of things that I want to get back to quickly.  I hope this works and I hope that if you have a better plan, that you share it.

I have created two Circles that I plan to just put myself in.  One is called "Archived Important" and the other is "My Posts".  I’m planning to share comments that I make that I don’t want to lost track of into the "My Posts" Circle.  That should allow me to access things that I know I’ll want to get back to quickly.  On the other hand, there are posts that others make that I know that I’m going to want to follow and I’ll share them with "Archived Important".  It’s going to be a little extra work but I’m hoping that it shortens the search time for previous messages that have long since rolled off the bottom of the screen.  We’ll see, but I’m finding that the conversations so far in Google Plus are far richer than on other platforms where I don’t particularly care to follow.  In essence, this is becoming a self-constructed bookmarking scheme.  We’ll see.

In other news, it’s Friday and I like to do something for those hard blogging, hard collaborating Ontario Educators.  I’ve created a LiveBinder, a ScoopIT page, and a Twitter List in the past.  All of these have served me nicely to track and find out what folks are saying.  So, it seems natural that an Ontario Educator Circle would be in order.  The members certainly are smaller in number compared to the others at this time, but it’s a start.  Just like the Twitter List that let’s me keep track of what’s happening on Twitter, this should work just as nicely on Google Plus.

But …. there’s a big difference.  Unlike the other resources I’ve created, I can’t seem to find a way to share this Circle with anyone else.  Is there a way to do so?  If so, I’d love to hear about it.

This technique has already paid off.  I started a message stream asking if there were any others that wanted to get together face to face to learn and experiment with Google Plus features.  Lots of friends have jumped in and want to do so.  It doesn’t appear that we’ll be able to do it face to face, but colleague Peter McAsh has offered to host an Adobe Connect session for us to facilitate the learning.  At this point, there’s a great deal of interest in participating.  Hopefully, it will work for us.  At this point, we’re ready to go with a preliminary meeting to brainstorm ideas in need of a solution and we’ll move forward from there.

Never stop learning!

Powered by Qumana