On the Nodes

After much debate & exchange of 140 character Twitter thoughts, a number of people started using Plurk during the dark days of the Twitter ‘whale fail’ page - which was becoming much too frequent.

I’ve been plurking for a few weeks now. It’s an interesting application - along the same lines as Twitter - 140 characters to have your say. There are a few things I like & a few I don’t…

I like the fact that you can have a thread of comments under a plurk - although this can do your head in if they get too long - and they can! Above is a shot of the plurk screen with a comment box open.

I like the way it tells me how many unread plurks I have & I can just click on ‘read’ to get to them.

I like that I can just type a YouTube URL & it will embed the video right there in the plurk. Here’s a shot of the plurk screen with a video opened.

I’m not sure on the layout - at first I thought it was a bit visually confusing - but I’m used to it now.

I don’t think I like the karma aspect (one gets more karma for more plurks, introducing friends etc).

It seems to lead to an endless stream of meaningless plurks about karma when you first start - just to get your karma up! And if for very good reason you don’t plurk for a few days your karma takes a dive.

So for the moment I’m plurking - while still Tweeting - but I’m not sure how much longer I can maintain the two. I have a few ‘new’ friends on Plurk who aren’t on Twitter - so what to do? Stay tuned…. and in the meantime plurk me.

Here’s some fun - I just wordled this blog:

You can see it full size here.

Wordle is a ‘toy’ for generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Make your own wordle.

The folks at SEOmoz were very busy in May (and probably for a few months before that!)… They scoured the web for Web 2.0 sites both new and old, developed a “short list” of over 300 sites in 41 categories and then had some of the web’s best bloggers, entrepreneurs and business people vote on winners, narrowing the field to 174 place-getters and Honorable Mentions in the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards.

Everything from bookmarking to widgets are covered - so swing by & find a few new tools to use.

Forvo is the place where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. At the time of writing there are 70,831 words, 25,613 pronunciations in 186 languages. It’s in beta & still building up its list of words, but basically here’s how it works.

If you want to know how to pronounce a word you just type it into the search box & Forvo will come back with that word pronounced by a native speaker. Click on the icon & you’ll hear it. Or you can click on the word to get more information eg I typed in ‘pizza’ & there are 4 pronunciations of pizza - Italian, Argentinian, Spanish & Portugese. There’s also a link to ‘pizza’ in wikipedia if I want more information.

It’s a social sharing site so you can join and add words that you’d like pronounced to the list , or you can provide the pronunciation. Try it out.

I’ve written about Miro previously, but a query on a listserv prompted me to write again & explain how to download videos onto your hard drive - in case you haven’t worked it out yourself.

Recap - Miro is a free app that let’s you download videos from YouTube, Google, Blip, Yahoo etc etc. It’s like iTunes for video. Read more about Miro.

If you leave Miro as it arrives, it will automatically download videos into itself. You can change this & have them saved onto your hard drive.

1. Go to Miro preferences (in the drop down menu).
2. Click on the Download tab.
3. At ‘Store downloads in this folder’ click the ‘Change’ button.
4. Set your download file to one on your hard drive.

Bingo - use Miro to search for the video you want on YouTube etc & download it. It’ll be in the very folder you chose & you can now play it anytime offline or add it in the usual way into PowerPoint or Keynote etc.

Wow - who can remember these old days?

Schmap is an interactive map and guide all in one. It also allows you to publish your own ‘schmaps’ - to share trip itineraries, local reviews etc. In their words:

Schmap’s series of digital travel guides integrates dynamic maps with useful background reading, suggested tours, photos from the traveling public and reviews by local correspondents (for sights and attractions, hotels, restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, galleries, museums and more) to profile 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Schmap Guides can be browsed online, or downloaded for offline trip planning and when traveling with a laptop.

It interfaces with Google maps & so has the marker on the page that you can run your cursor over to read information or see a photo. I ran a Schmap on Sydney - have a look for yourself.

I’ve just added a translator to the sidebar - just below the list of ‘My Other Stuff’. It looks like this:

Try it out (the one in the sidebar) & let me know how accurate it is.

It comes from DennyHalim.com - specifically from this link. They say:

the only widget that translate your website into 30+ language. the power of Yahoo babelfish, Google, gts, and tranexp all combined into one.

Looking forward to some comments about this one - over to the world….

Do you often wonder if your favourite website is down or is it just you? Well here’s the answer - go to downforeveryoneorjustme.com type in your website & it will tell you.

I thought I’d written about TokBox - but alas I see only wrote a draft sometime last year. And it has evolved since then - now out of beta.

Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. You sign up and you’re given a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat. When you click the ‘Make a video’ tab Tokbox asks to access your camera & microphone.

I haven’t used the live video, I’ve sent video emails. This is an easy process you click ‘Video Mail’ (left column) & the recording box pops up. Type in email/s you want to send to, record & press send. You can add a text message if you want.

The receiver gets an email message - XXX sent you a video mail. To view your video mail, follow this link. And it includes a very unflattering screen shot of you with your mouth in an odd position!!!

Try it out & send one to yourself. I’d share mine - but I didn’t brush my hair this morning ;->

You can also hold a conference video chat - you’re given a URL to send to participants. I’m not sure how many can be involved but the icon shows 4 so maybe that’s it. I haven’t tried this feature either.

You can put your TokBox on your social network profile, blog, or personal webpage. Anyone can come to your page and see a “Push to Talk” button. They click it and connect to you in real time using live video and audio.

Go to TokBox front page & you can watch a short video.

If you work in education, you’ll be interested in this post from Danny Maas about how you could use TokBox with students.