Our second attempt at webcasting stuff from the church will take place this morning at 9:00 AM. For those new to the ustream.tv concept… be warned. This is nothing like broadcast television. Think of this as a live camera feed, completely raw and unedited. (Something similar to the raw feed you can watch on FoxNews.com) You’ll be getting a raw audio feed as well… straight for a little mic on the sound board. Keyword for this second attempt: Experiment.
Message notes are below
I’m a self-proclaimed webdork. But as a webdork and the developer of some websites/blogs, there are a number of free web tools out there that are not only awesome, but have recently gone from "awesome" to "awesome-er."
iGoogle (Formerly known as "google homepage" or "personalized homepage.") Not only is this the best and easiest feed reader on the planet, now it is the best looking and most flexible. A couple months back they added the ability to select a theme. Having been a longtime user of my.yahoo I was pretty leary of this because Yahoo’s themes were lame. But iGoogle’s theme’s take it one step cooler! The themes actually morph to your current weather, season, and time. For instance, the beach theme shows the sun rising and going across the sky to match your current solar position. When the sun goes down, the moon comes out. Other ones show your homepage raining or the characters putting on shorts depending on my local weather conditions. Also brand new to iGoogle is "Make your own gadget." This allows you to easily make a widget or gadget that you can share with friends. Totally sweet tool that I’m positive loads of people will learn to love. Seriously, if you don’t use iGoogle (duh, it’s free!) than you aren’t experiencing the web properly. 
Google Analytics As a webdork, this is a major site I use regularly to see where all my traffic is coming from, doing on my sites, and going when they leave my sites. Of course, it’s free which adds to the joy… but they also just did a major remodel job on this thing. The dashboard layout is much more detailed and the statistics are now much more integrated and much "deeper." For example, the map feature now gives me the ability to "drill down" to find out exactly where users are coming from. Before it just showed this globe with little dots on it. Now I can see traffic from specific towns… unfortunately not from specific homes! For the church site, this is massive. Now we can see if our traffic is coming from our target demographic. Love that.
Sitemeter More than just a counter for me. Sitemeter gives me easy access to simple site statistics… perfect for a blog. They just released a site redesign which I totally dig. Besides the nice new look to their pages the biggest enhancement I’ve enjoyed is that it requires me to login to see my traffic details. So, for non-Adam’s it will show a summary of Adam’s blog traffic. But for Adam it will show the normal details. Not a major change, but something that makes this free tool now "awesome-er."
Bonus: Though not really new, an honorable mention must go to the best free application on the net: Google Docs. They’ve taken the most used features of Word, Excel, and soon to be PowerPoint and made them usable on the net for free. For example, 100% of the publication process for YMX is now done on Google docs. Once the article comes to us, we can create a document on our page, share it with all the people involved in t he process so they can collaboratively work on the article at their own pace, and we can export it to the main site easily. Trust me, when this thing catches on, handing in papers at school is going to cease altogether. You’ll just email the teacher/prof a link… they’ll grade it and publish their thoughts on your document and send it back. Even for business, I see this as a powerful underutilized tool that can revolutionize the way documents are created and distributed.
I’ve already established a pattern of letting the world know what a cow-suit wearing dork I am, but I think there are times I have a point of my dorkdom worth sharing to the non-dork blog reading public.
What if I told you that in a typical day I have the ability to read more news, blogs, and other internet stuff than you do in half the time you can? My guess would be that you’d say… "Hey, Adam… I want to do that too!" (You have to say that with your best Matt Foley impersonation)
Well… here is a video I’ve seen posted all over fellow dork blogs and I thought it was worth sharing.
Now that you understand RSS… click on that pretty orange icon and subscribe to my feed on your new reader. (I suggest/use google reader. More reasons to love google reader coming soon.)
Apparently Microsoft isn’t happy with sales of its new operating system, Vista. The company is saying that the slow sales are likely due to pirates. I think that this is far from reality. Unfortunately it’s proof that the largest manufacturer of software has painfully lost sight of their consumers. (Fortunately, they’ve got companies and end users in such a bind that it’s merely a matter of time before we all will have to upgrade.)
I think Vista sales are slow for a few other factors. Here’s my list of reasons I’ve not upgraded:
I’m not saying I won’t ever upgrade to Vista, they just haven’t yet given me a compelling reason to do so. And this has nothing to do with my supposed man-crush on the iMac. Though if someone wants to send me one… e-mail me and I’ll let you know the address to have it delivered to.
This video pretty much captures the way my brain has been working/spinning/thinking. I know it’s hard to believe for some people, but the web as people are getting used to using it has drastically changed in the last few months. It’s called Web 2.0. I’ll provide three easy examples of how Web 2.0 is utilized on this blog, then enjoy the video. (Click on the read more button for some discussion questions!)
Web 2.0 is more than just cool widgets . It’s about online collaboration. It’s about "our collective ideas" forming something really cool. It’s more than the information superhighway of the 1990’s. It’s millions of people around the world meeting, working together, networking, connecting, growing, organizing, and changing every second of every day.
Lost? Here’s a video that will make you more lost.
Vote for yourself, vote for your favorites, don’t see what you like… add it!
This has a lot of applications. For YMX, I’d like to see our members help us just tell their blog readers about what’s getting published currently. But this could also work well any blog as it places easily on just about every blog and social networking platform out there. It’s called "widgetbox." Widgets are a big part of the Web 2.0 movement.
Last night at midnight, Microsoft released it’s new operating system called "Vista." This is the first major release since Windows XP in 2002 or something like that. I’ve seen some screen shots from Vista and it looks fine enough. I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying it unless you are getting it free with a computer. I just haven’t seen a compelling reason to upgrade right away.
Now look at the picture (May need to click on it to see the large version)
On the screen it says boldly… "The ‘Wow’ starts now" But look closely at the stage. Not a smile there. Instead I see "ugh" and "why bother." There is simply no "wow" on that stage. If you compare that to Apple’s big announcement of the iPhone you look at the image and you get excited because Steve Jobs is excited.
This is a simple principle in action: People will naturally be more excited about a product that you are excited about. Whether it’s me telling a group of middle schoolers about a game or me telling a group of adult about MainStreet or a politician telling me his plan or a Wall Street executive telling me about a great stock pick. If a person is interested and excited… I am much more likely to feel the "wow" and get on board.
Just found this and I thought it was worth passing along. This would be perfect for anyone raising money for anything. Mission trip. Camps. College education. Pointless computer upgrade. It’s pretty slick. What I really like about it is that it’s a widget that people can take from your site, if they believe in it, and put it on their site really easily. Best part… you can collect money via PayPal if you don’t want to use their collection system. Check it out at Chipin.com.
I came home today to discover that while I was busy working, YMX got a nice Spam bomb. 1500 junks mails in 30 minutes. Merry Christmas to you too Mr. Spam man. [Insert me sticking out my tongue!]
I hope Santa brings that guy a big fat chunk of coal.
