Join me in an experiment

Normally on this blog I share information and ideas mixed in with a bit of humor (well at least I am trying to be funny). But today, I have something more to share then that. I was recently granted some new Google Wave invites and I am willing to give away 5 of them to Technology Plumbing readers who can tell me why they deserve an invite to the Wave Preview program.

To enter, simply comment on this web post and I will pick the 5 best comments and send each of you an invite to join the preview. Be sure you provide your email address in your comment.

Why am I doing this? Well, first of all, because I can as I have the invites, secondly, I want to know who is reading this blog and gets enough out of it that they are willing to post a comment and finally, these new Wave users can form a Technology Plumbing group that can join some waves to see how like minded folks can collaborate on Wave. I am already doing this with folks from my corporate world, but want to see how folks that don't share a common employer interact.

We will let the experiment run for a week allowing you time to come up with something that will move me to give you an invite.

I await your comments.

Talk about being connected

I have often heard the expression that a person is connected. Now in the normal context this normally means politically connected, but in today's technology world being connected means something completed different. Today there are so many ways that people can reach each other and being the kind of technologist that likes to track things I decided to figure out the many ways that I can connect with people.



As you see for handy little Google Docs embedded spreadsheet above, I have 17 different ways to connect. This of course is subject to change and the spreadsheet will change as I add new methods (what am I crazy, please don't answer that).

So what is the point of this whole exercise? Well besides reminding myself of the fact that I spend way too much time trying to keep up with all of these communication channels, I hope it illustrates the many ways that you can use to keep in touch with your friends, families and customers.

If any of these methods are new to you check them or better yet contact me and I can write about the most popular methods in an upcoming blog.

Picture this on your Website

One of the projects I have been working on recently is adding some pictures to one of the websites I maintain.

It started out as an effort to take pictures of the shop's stylists, but then we started taking pictures of the various locations inside and outside of the shop.

Soon I had a bunch of pictures and we started talking about what to do with them, when I remembered the movie function in Picasa (a Technology Plumbing favorite).

The Picasa movie function is not going to make you a Steven Spielberg, but it does allow you to select a series of pictures, create some nice transitions, add some music and you have poor man's "Ken Burns Effect" video.



Once you create the video, you can upload it to YouTube (part of the Google umbrella). Once uploaded and processed the video can be linked and / or embedded into your website.

Now the video is OK for what it needs to do, but I definitely learned some lessons.

• The music is important to set the tone. My original soundtrack was nice but didn't give enough piazza. My "critics" were very happy to provide some alternative soundtracks that made it work.

• When you are using pictures as video, you can't have enough pictures. If you think you have enough, take more to give the video more "movement". I want to add some pictures in the next version of the video.

• All of Ken Burn's videos use a lot of voice over narration. My video has no narration, but that too will be added in a future version of the video.

For now, we will see what kind of feedback we get from this version of the video and create some updated versions going forward.

Let me know your thoughts on using pictures and videos.