amanda's blog

Check out this side-by-side comparison of nine different video hosting sites, including youtube, vimeo and blip.tv. Granted, this is only a quality comparison, not a user experience comparison... but still interesting! Which do you prefer?

I was just alerted to the existence of Teachertube and Schooltube today. Perhaps these are a good place to promote SMILE resources? Schooltube has a review process before videos are approved.

Until today I hadn't really explored the beauty and simplicity of Favelets (also known as Bookmarklets). They can also be very evil.

What's a Favelet? It's a little bit a javascript you can put in your bookmark bar of your browser so you can apply it to a page when you choose! For example, drag this link to your bookmark bar, go to a page with lots of photos, and click.

If you tag any of your bookmarks on del.icio.us with "ltcsmm" they will now appear in the list to the right. Enjoy!

Vocalo.org is a (Drupal!) website for sharing audio, video and photos. It uses a thickbox upload form, nicely non-Drupally. You can upload a file OR share a youtube video. The twist is that uploaded stories and media are played on a Chicago radio station (spun off from Chicago Public Radio, 89.5FM -- as well as a streaming online.

In researching examples of innovative instructional videos, Bryan Kennedy pointed me to Commoncraft.com, which uses "paperworks" to explain complicated technical ideas -- like social media, wikis, social bookmarking and podcasting -- in "plain English." Paperworks is their word for these stop motion paper cutouts. Very fun.

For your entertainment, Commoncraft on ZOMBIES:

I've been experimenting with Peacock, A.viary's pattern generating software. It's fairly intuitive, using connectors (as opposed to layers in Photoshop) to apply effects to your original image. I've seen this method in Yahoo Pipes before, and it's pretty effective.

See this example:

... is an adorable shop in Buenos Aires, Argentina with handmade dolls (monsters, animals, robots) made with vintage fabrics. The opening stop motion animation is super cute!

I attended the Edward Tufte workshop last week and learned a little about what not to do when presenting data.

 #1 Do not put important information in a box and in all caps. That makes it hard to read.

 #2 Don't use a lot of chartjunk, like color/pattern coded symbols that are meaningless and cause color vibration.

 #3 Don't distort or cherry pick your data

Matt Kirkland pulls apart robotic stuffed animals and documents the results. Perhaps not so shocking to us, but amusing, nonetheless.