Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Integrating Your Blog and Facebook

Using social networks can be a great source of traffic and generating a group of people around your blog site. Many people have profiles on Facebook, and people are quick to put their URL in their profile. This is good, but it is difficult to expand beyond your network of friends. You should keep your “friends” to the people you actually know or have some type of relationship with. This is where Facebook pages come in. These pages were created for authors, businesses, and celebrities etc. to build groups of people around whatever they are promoting. You can only have a limited number of friends on Facebook, so there is no way to send email to all your friends at one time. Once you have created a page on Facebook, people can then become your “fan” or “supporter”. You do not have to accept people and they can’t see your individual profile. On a page you can add pictures, video, have a discussion board and add any applications to your page. You can send email updates to all your “fans”. Also there is no chance of messages going to a “junk mail” inbox; your messages are assured of 100 percent deliverability.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Wrap Up of Google Video

Since this is my last post on my Web 2.0 topic Google Video, I thought I would give a brief overview of all the things that I have learned about it throughout this class.
Google Video is a very simple video-sharing site. Though not as popular as YouTube, Google Video does offer some unique features. The cost of Google Video is FREE.
All you need is a gmail account to use Google Video. There are two simple ways of uploading content to Google Video. You can use their online uploader, which accepts files up to 100MB and emails you a link to your video right away. Or you can download the Google Video Uploader, which lets you upload files from your desktop. This is handy because you can upload much larger files and also upload multiple files at the same time.
Google Video uploads are fast and generally result in better-quality videos then YouTube does. They recommend using the online uploader for the best results. Unlike YouTube, Google Video does not ask for search keywords; it does however allow you to list credits for the movie. You can make your video ‘unlisted’ so that it doesn’t appear in the search results. Google Video lets users email a video link and you can also allow viewers to download the video to their computer or embed it on other web sites. You can also post the video to MySpace, Blogger, or TypePad directly from Google Video.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Integrating Your Blog with Twitter


Twitter seems to be taking over the web. Everyone seems to have a Twitter account, or two these days. With all the hype surrounding Twitter, there are many ways to integrate Twitter and your blog together, and why wouldn’t you? There are a few applications that I feel would help your business when integrating these two networks together.
TweetThis is a link integrated into your blog posts that make it easy for users to click on and post your post to Twitter without having to go separately into both.
TwitterFeed can take your blogs feed and post an update automatically to your Twitter account when you make a new post to your blog.
TweetBacks integrates Twitter updates about a certain blog post much like trackbacks or pingbacks. This allows a blog author to see if other Twitter users are discussing their posts.
TweetDigest This will pull a daily digest of your Twitter updates and post them to your blog as a blog post. This way, if some of your blog readers are not on Twitter, they can still see your updates.


Monday, August 31, 2009

Sharing Videos on Google Video






Sharing video is as simple as clicking “browse” to find a video and “upload” to start sharing. Google Apps gives video owners multiple controls for sharing videos such as:

Share videos with individuals, groups, or the entire organization
Add descriptions and tags
Embed videos in any internal web page, including Google Sites

Viewers across the organization can:

Search for any video to which they have access
View high-quality video from popular browsers (including Safari on iPhone)
Submit ratings, comments and additional tags
Optionally download videos for viewing offline or on portable devices

Google Video for business is available to Google Apps Premier Edition accounts at no additional cost. Each Google Apps Premier Edition domain gets 3GB of Video storage per user account. Existing Premier Edition administrators can enable Google Video for business immediately from the Google Apps control panel.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Google Apps Premier Edition – Google Video





With Google Video for business, anyone can upload a video on anything ranging from executive communications to product training to trip reports and share it securely with individuals or the entire company. Google Video is available as part of Google Apps Premier Edition at no additional cost.
“YouTube” has enabled millions of consumers to easily capture and share video at an unprecedented level, yet corporate videos have remained expensive and complicated.
With Google Video for business, companies can leverage the power and intimacy of video to communicate all flavors of corporate information including:
Leadership communications such as business updates and corporate announcements
Training and how-to videos to share product knowledge and business expertise
Customer insight derived from site visits, interviews, or focus groups
Social videos that evangelize relevant activity and initiatives across an organization
Cost and complexity have, until Google Video came along, limited the effective use of video to improve business functions.



Thursday, August 20, 2009

Google Video for Business


Four Main Reasons Why Google Video for Business Can Be a Serious Business Tool:

1) Share rich video information – Video sharing makes important communications like internal trainings, and corporate announcements more personal, appealing and valuable.

2) Keep videos secure and private – Employees can securely share videos with select coworkers or everyone at the company without making confidential information public.

3) No large files or complex communications – Google securely hosts and streams your videos, so employees don’t need to share videos over email, or burden the IT department for a video explanation.

4) Everyone at your company can contribute – Employees can share videos instantly. Viewing and annotating doesn’t require any special software, just a standard browser.

Google Video can provide significant opportunities for innovation and savings within a company. Google video for business uses the same infrastructure that powers YouTube, but the one big difference between Google Video for business and YouTube is security.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Google Video


Google Video is a free video sharing website and also a video search engine from Google. Google Video allows select videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provides the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allows for websites to host large amounts of video remotely on Google Video without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues. On October 9, 2006 Google bought former competitor YouTube.


In 2009, Google posted that they are no longer offering uploads to Google Video. Google wants to focus their mission on search and search technology. This will allow Google Video to spend more time on technologies that make the information contained in online video more available and accessible, enabling users to search all kinds of videos across the web. Although you can no longer upload videos to Google Video, you can still upload videos to Picasa and YouTube.


This change does not apply to Google Video for business. Google Video for business is part of Google Apps Premier Edition, and it lets employees share video content with each other, like team updates and recordings of training sessions and guest speakers. Business users can continue to upload and share videos, and the service is actively being developed.