Well the votes are in and Knowledge Thirsty Thursday inched by Random Ramblings of a Raving Revolutionary. Hmmm starting to sound like a horse race around here.
Now I find the submitted name a tad hard to say so I've taken the liberty of slightly refining it to the new official title -- Thirsty Thursday of Knowledge. Heck, I might even start doing these via video along with a drink of the day or something ;-) Anyone know a good liquor sponsor? But I digress.
And I think it is really cool that Brian won because a) all college kids need money and b) Brian is one of my most active readers, commenters and sharers on Twitter. So I think it is cool that y'all voted his name best of class. So congrats Brian. DM me a physical address so I can mail you that brand new $100 bill.
That's it for now. Next week I'll be sharing my first official Thirsty Thursday of Knowledge post -- it's a new service I've been using to do a better job of managing new followers on Twitter. It's email based and gives you a perfect snap shot of your new followers. Think y'all will like it.
And hey, if you enjoyed this post or you just like to win things, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent directly to your eMail in box. And don't worry, I'll never share your email with anyone and I don't send anything but blog posts... because that's not what your here for right?
So I finally finished looking through the entirety of responses to my poll and I've decided that from here on out - I'm going to focus on one thing every Thursday and cover it with a bit more depth.
BUT -- that means I need a new name for this series. I've been toying with Insight & Information but that doesn't really go with Thursday.... so that's where you come in.
I wanted to Crowdsource the name with you, my readers helping me out. So here is the brief:
Objective: create a catchy, SEO friendly name that pays off the key benefit of this series
Key Benefit: introduce readers to marketing oriented tools, applications, websites, reports, and ideas with associated context to help the reader relate what they're reading to their world/industry. The key will be to offer a breadth of information and I'll be striving to expand my list of resources from which I pull things. I'm hoping to be your long-wide antenna so you have more time to focus on what you do every day.
The Rules: there aren't any really. Just enter your suggestions as a comment on this post. I'll pick the best ones that I like the most and next week we'll vote to see who wins.If you want to comment on other names or "vote" for them or have your mom stop by and vote for you suggestion -- I will be taking that into account when I pair down the entries. So feel free to comment or stuff your ballot box.
The Prize: see the photo up there...yes that is the prize. I'll send you a crisp, clean $100 bill or you can tell me what charity you'd like me to donate it to in your name.
So - you game?
And hey, if you enjoyed this post, or you just want to make sure you don't miss any future giveaways of money or prizes, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent directly to your eMail in box. And don't worry, I'll never share your email with anyone and I don't send anything but blog posts... because that's not what your here for right?
Let me start by thanking all of you that took the time to answer my Three For Thursday survey. The feedback was sooooo helpful. Basically you had this to say:
you like this series and find it more helpful than not
you like the fact that I cover a lot of ground and don't just focus on any one thing (iPhone apps for instance) but try and cover a broad spectrum of interests
you'd rather have me cover fewer items per post but bring a bit more context and depth to the coverage
many of you really, really, really like when I cover or find interesting iPhone apps ;-)
So the verdict is that I'm going to keep doing this every Thursday but I'll focus on covering one new find in more depth.
I think I'm going to change the name too... maybe to something a bit more SEO friendly. Maybe you can help me pick a new name? As my new company is Converse Digital -- maybe you can help me find something that helps promote that business a tad??? Let me know -- really would like to hear what y'all think.
In the meantime, here is this week's Formerly Known as Three for Thursday entry. And yes, it's an iPhone app. ;-)
The app is called iTimeLapse that is made by LannLabs and I can't remember how I found it but I'm glad I did. Basically, it gives you the ability to create time lapse videos using an iPhone (even a 3G which doesn't have video capability). It does it by taking snapshots at predetermined intervals and then stitching them together to create a video. You can even include music!
I gave it a whirl today. First by doing a time lapse video of my son Maes (2 1/2 years old) getting a hair cut. Here is the video.
Now this was pretty easy to do. I just set up the interval of shots -- in this case every 5 seconds -- and then set the amount of time I wanted to shoot. Conversely I could have chosen the number of pictures to take. Then I just sat there holding the phone real still. And presto, every 5 seconds, the phone would take another picture. Now I'm not sure where the pics are stored because they are not in the Camera Roll or Photo Library on the phone but they are stored. Then you simply select Render and here again you can play with your settings, like how many frames per second you want your video to render. The more frames you render per second, the more pics you need. You can also add music, which I'll share in the next video.
Once you're done and you're happy with your little movie you can upload to YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook by simply giving the app your username/password. Now I didn't try and upload to Facebook, but I did try unsuccessfully to upload to Vimeo. (update: I retried the Vimeo and it does seem that it worked but the video doesn't seem to format and be available for viewing immediately) My Vimeo account shows the app is connected but the videos I uploaded (and the app said they went up successfully) are still not in my Vimeo account. However, the YouTube worked like a charm, hence why you're seeing a YouTube embedd above.
All in all - pretty damn cool and very, very easy. Note - you'll probably want to put your iPhone on some kind of tripod if you every try and do a serious one of these.
Next, the app claims to allow you to do Stop Motion films. That's where you take a picture, move the objects in the picture a tad, take another, and so on and so on. When you're done, you paste them all together in a timeline and presto, a movie is born. Now the app says you can take manual pictures but honestly, couldn't get that to work. So instead, I set my time in between pictures to 10 seconds and got my budding filmmaker son Hayes to help me. We'd take a pic, and in the 10 second delay, he'd reposition the stuffed animals in our movie. When we were done, we rendered the movie with a click of a button and even added some music (the app gives you something like 6-8 music tracks to pick from) and presto, another movie. Again, we uploaded to YouTube and here is the result. Not bad if you ask me -- considering we did this in like 5 minutes.
Now I can certainly see some marketing uses for this -- if nothing else you could do some cool little videos and if you could add some custom music of voice over... could be neat. Or you could just use it as an excuse to grab a few stuffed animals, your 8 year old and crawl around on the floor imagining your James Cameron ;-) either way, this app certainly fits in the "pretty damn cool" category and should find it's way onto your iPhone if for no other reason than to give you something to do during really boring meetings.
In fact, if you download it and "video" your next boring meeting and send me the YouTube/Vimeo link - I'll post it here on my blog. Heck, if enough of you do it, I'll create an entire category because frankly, that could be hilarious.
Well that's it for the first "formerly known as Three for Thursday" post -- let me know what you think of the app and if you have any suggestions for a new name for this series.
Carry on.
And hey, if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent directly to your eMail in box. And don't worry, I'll never share your email with anyone and I don't send anything but blog posts... because that's not what your here for right?
If you're a vigilant reader here you know I'm rethinking my Three for Thursday series. I'm looking for ways to make it more valuable to you and you've helped a lot. Over 40 of you gave me some great input that I'm sifting through and trying to process.
Based on what I've heard, I know that I'm definitely going to change this series up a bit to make it more valuable. I'm also thinking about moving it over to my new blog Converse Digital where it may make more sense. This will allow me to focus the kernel of this blog toward positively disruptive thought -- which is what I fear Three for Thursday drifts away from... so if you have two cents to share on that idea, let me know... if everyone says no, leave it here, then so be it, we'll leave it here.
In the meantime, here is like 30 for Thursday compliments of my good buddy Marc Meyer. He's got a ton of great Twitter info here to make Twitter a more powerful tool for you. Cheers to him for sharing and if you'd like another smartie to follow, he's @Marc_Meyer on Twitter and his blog is Direct Marketing Observations. And without further commentary, I give you the brilliance that is Marc Meyer.
Welcome to the "It's my birthday so I hope you'll give me a gift" edition of Three for Thursday.
Today I wanted to continue gathering opinions on how I can make Three 4 Thursday more valuable to you. I've been doing this series for a few months now and it's quite a bit of work to constantly find three new things. As I said last week, lately, I feel like maybe I've not been doing this series justice and maybe it has become less valuable for you.
So, today, instead of sharing three cool things with you, I'm hoping you'll give me a very special birthday present by sharing three things with me - specifically your answers to three important questions I have. Thanks in advance... I really do appreciate the input and hope to use it to make this series more valuable to you.
Just click this link below to get started.
And if you enjoy reading this blog, why not Subscribe to receive it via email. I don't share email addresses with anyone, so no worries there, and it will ensure you never miss a post.
Welcome to the "I'm taking the family to DC" edition of Three for Thursday.
Today I wanted to try something a bit different and I truly hope you'll play along. I've been doing this series for a few months now and it's quite a bit of work to constantly find three new things. Lately, I feel like maybe I've not been doing this series justice and maybe it has become less valuable for you my reader.
So, today, instead of sharing three cool things with you, I'm hoping you'll share three things with me - specifically your answers to three important questions I have. Thanks in advance... I really do appreciate the input and hope to use it to make this series more valuable to you.
Just click this link below to get started.
And if you enjoy reading this blog, why not Subscribe to receive it via email. I don't share email addresses with anyone, so no worries there, and it will ensure you never miss a post.
Ok, it's late so I'm going to apologize in advance, this is going to be the "How can I share three cool things and not have to type a lot" edition of Three for Thursday.
Making it easy to find you
Seems like there are a lot of services out there lately that want to make it easy for you to link all of your social media accounts from a single domain. Hi.im is a newer one that I found. Really simple, straightforward way for you to have a single domain that you give folks and from there they can discover all that is you on the internet.
Here is my Hi I'm Tom Martin page. (ain't it purdy?)
Profiling Your Connections
Do you have a great eMail database but wish you knew if any of those folks were on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? Or maybe you've got a few folks on Twitter and you'd like to know where else you might be connected to them? These and a host of other questions can be answered via Flowtown. A nifty little sleuthing tool I came across. It also seems to offer up "campaign" tools, but honestly, been too busy hustling new clients to truly put it through it's paces... but if you have, could you help a brotha out and let me know what you think via the comments? Thanks in advance.
Real-Time Search
Ever wonder what folks are Kurrently talking about on Twitter and Facebook? Yea, me too. And no, that wasn't a typo... I meant Kurrently as in a cool little website that lets you search Twitter and publicly shared Facebook updates. Last night was the Idea Village graduation and so for grins I thought I'd see who all was talking about the Idea Village last night via a Kurrently search of Idea Village. Sure you can run Twitter searches and Facebook searches, but this brings it into one tool which is efficient.
Well speaking of efficient...that's all for this week's I've got to ramp up a new company edition of Three for Thursday. LMK what you think via the comments please and as usual, if you see something cool that you think I'd like to feature here... tell me!
While in Asia doing a few Social Media Workshops, one of the attendees asked about a good polling app for her Facebook Fan Page. As I've not really used polls on any of the FB pages I work with, I started looking around and recently found PollDaddy. It is super easy to use and lets you embed your polls on your blog, Facebook page, MySpace page, etc. In fact, here is my first poll I created...will you take a second and answer it?
You can also do Survey's and it looks like you can create Ratings for blog posts, etc. I'll be playing with those features next.
Looking for an alternative to Ning?
Can't remember who turned me on to this site... BlogFrog... and while I haven't used it yet, it looks simple enough. If you've ever wanted to create a micro-community around your ideas, passions or blog, BlogFrog seems to be a valid option to consider.
Like Ning, you'll be hosted in their environment but you can place a widget on your blog.
Merging The Real World with The Digital World
I'm really interested in this next find... StickyBits. I first came across this during SXSW when I found a booklet of these stickybits barcodes in my conference bag.
Luckily for me - I recycled most of what was in the bag but kept these. The idea is pretty cool. There are things in the world that you might want to attach additional information to. For instance, you might want to give someone your business card but also be able to have them see your company portfolio or a quick video explaining the ethos of your company. It's pretty easy... just download a sitckybits bar code -- kind of like the one to the right over there...
Then attach whatever you want to that code and presto, when the code is scanned via the stickybits app (iPhone and Android) the person holding your card will get a special treat. Go ahead... download the app (iPhone & Android). Then scan the barcode image you see above and see what you get... NOTE: after a bit of experimentation, it seems that if you want to be able to ADD content to the stickybit, you'll have to register/sign in to the app on your phone. Once you do that... works pretty well.
Well that's it for this week folks... tell me what you think... really interested to hear your thoughts -- especially about my stickybits....
Welcome to the one small step for me, one huge step for me kind edition of Three For Thursday. This week we've got a bit of mobile information for you and a cool scheduling tool. Enjoy.
Takeout 2.0 goes Mobile
From Springwise, a European iPhone app for the Wagamama restaurant chain. This trend only makes sense... with American's and pretty much all worldwide citizens tethered to their phones, making it easy to see a restaurant's menu, order the food (including customization requests), see when the order will be ready and pay for the meal -- all from one app is a no brainer. To me the question will be -- who will be the first company to create a multi-chain version...Yelp, are you listening?
Adhoc Mobile Networking
While in Singapore a few weeks ago, I had a chance to meet and chat with a few Singtel Product Development guys. The talk quickly turned to mobile social networks like Foursquare and more specifically of the numerous opportunities to use mobile, location based apps to create truly useful networks. For instance, I was traveling alone on this trip... it was my first time to Asia and frankly, I would have loved the opp to meet up with other solo travelers or maybe residents of KL or Singapore that would be willing to serve as "tour guide" or just someone that would show me the local side of the town. So I get really excited when I see platforms like Urban's Signals. While it may be little more than Hookup 2.0, the underlying approach is exactly where I think mobile networking will go. What about you? Agree? Can you think of a few applications?
Schedule Me
Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting with someone or a group of folks? How many emails does it usually take? If you're lucky and work in a company that is on an exchange server, you can see your fellow workers' schedules, which is great but God forbid you need to loop outside resources into the meeting. Then you're back to the emails. There are a number of folks (Google included) that are trying to help. One that I've been playing with is Tungle. Tungle will sync with your calendar and then show folks when you're available and when you're not. It doesn't tell them what you're doing - just that you're scheduled to do something. That alone is pretty cool, but then I popped over to my friend Sloane's new consulting site - AnswerWithAction.com -- I saw a really interesting way to use Tungle to let prospective clients schedule a session with Sloan.
Once you get to her site, click on the "Book a Consultation" button and watch what happens. Very cool use and for folks that sell blocks of time this combined with something like PayPal (also on Sloane's site) creates a super simple schedule/payment process. When you add in the iPhone and Blackberry app versions of the service, which lets you manage your Tungle calendar from your mobile -- well now you've really got a complete package.
That's it for this week's one little step for me, one huge step for me kind edition of Three for Thursday.
Welcome to the "I'm launching something really, really big next week" edition of Three for Thursday. I found a couple of really cool ideas and tools for your reading pleasure. So check'em out and be sure to let me know what you think of them in the comments section. Here we go....
Custom Travel Planning
As usual the folks over at Springwise have found a bunch of cool stuff, like this interesting travel agent service. As we all know, the web and specifically sites like Priceline, Expedia, etc., have placed a lot of downward pressure on pricing in the travel industry. Airlines and hotels have transferred that downward pressure to their agent community and consumers have forever altered their behavior. Now, rather than contact a travel agent, many consumers simply hit the web. But let's face it. Unless you're a real travel junkie, you really don't know what you don't know and that may result in your missing out on a few great experiences.
Enter OfferMeaTrip -- where you as a consumer (sorry UK only right now) describe the trip you'd like to take. You may say for instance,
I want to visit New Orleans, LA and I want to make sure I take in the culture, art, music and great food. I'm not interested in packaged tours but I would like to visit a plantation.
You'd then submit that description to the site (or more if you like) along with dates for travel and a budget you'd like to stay under. Then competing travel agents put together your dream New Orleans trip, package it up in a custom online trip brochure for you and submit for your approval to book. You as the consumer get multiple trip options to choose from depending on what each travel agent puts together and best of all - you get one fixed package price. A pretty cool service I'd say. It would be even cooler if you could do group travel like this... say you were putting together a "We're turning 40 trip" for a group of friends. You could outsource the planning/execution of the trip via a site like this. Very interesting model and it will be interesting to see if it jumps the pond. Guess the more important question - what other industries lend themselves to an approach like this? Thoughts?
Self Publishing I'm totally stoked about this next find -- again from Springwise. Leanpub is a new eBook creation platform that purports to let you quickly and easily convert your blog posts into eBooks. It also allows you to update the eBook and push that updated file to everyone that has already bought a copy. But is goes farther by also allowing you to sell those eBooks and keep 75% of the price for yourself. Yes, that is not a typo... they want to let you keep 75% of the price of the book as income for you. Remember when I mentioned that Amazon wants to publish your next book -- well these guys want to get into that picture too.
Currently all eBooks produced are PDFs sized at 5.98 x 8.98, so they may not render perfectly on an eReader like the Kindle but I emailed Peter (co-founder of the site) to see if/when they might be able to produce Kindle friendly eBooks and this is what he sent back.
We're currently working on MOBI and EPUB support, so that we can properly support Kindle, iPad and the other e-book readers...We're probably 2-4 weeks away from releasing it, however.
So their eBooks will be Kindle/iPad friendly. That alone is a great reason to check this service out and why I'll be using it to produce my first eBook this summer.
By now you've been on my site for more than 10 seconds and as such, a little survey box has hopefully appeared in the lower right hand corner of your browser. It's a free little piece of java code from a group called KISSinsights that I found while checking out Leanpub's site.
It's an incredibly simple little survey tool that let's you insert (and suggest) quick one question surveys that you can place on your website, blog, etc. Best of all, you can place a different survey on each page of your site to capture different kinds of feedback. So for instance, I could put a "Got any cool things for me to cover here" survey on all of my Three For Thursday posts and then use a more general survey on other pages. While most folks probably won't go through the trouble of adding things via the comments section, it might be interesting to see if they'd add ideas via this tool. I might test that application of the tool next. There is also a paid version that gives you more control, which based on how many of my readers complete the free survey, I may upgrade to in the future.
So that is it for this week's "I'm getting ready to do something big next week" edition... let me know what you thought of the stuff I covered and be sure to point me to cool things you've found so I can cover it here.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=5b0298cf-32f8-4965-868d-4d6b764bae9b)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=02445345-ad5c-487f-8ac4-18e8724080f8)
Subscribe in a Reader
Get posts via email
Follow me on Twitter
