Monday, April 28, 2008

Clipmarks

Ahh, I see the folks at blogger.com have fixed some things.

I hadn't intended to look at Clipmarks, having already signed up for thingie, Furl, and something elsewhosenameI'veforgotten, but I got the info off of whatsit.

For some reason I can't turn off the html linking above. Blogger isn't completely fixed. Not even the "Remove formatting from selection" button helps.

I missed the article in the Sunday paper about the Día de los niños celebration which had two photos and a nice (if slightly inaccurate in places) article. We had the papers here, of course, being the library and all, and I made a couple of copies for the files, but then I thought I'd get myself a virtual copy! Save the trees, doncha kno'.

The problem in this scenario is not at all with Clipmarks, which worked easily. It was the Index-Journal's website. It's Monday now and the Sunday paper is nowhere to be seen. I was unable to find anything about the library in the search box except the pervert story. Oh, great. But for some reason, an article about the festival in McCormick two weekends ago was accessible. Go figure! Well, my wonderful genius of a husband just happened to be there so I gave it an eye-glazing and found his name. Now, I wanted to send this to him (he's in Baltimore this week), but why should he have to read the whole boring article just to see his name in print next to Y/Our Sparkle Heart (who will be performing at the library this summer, kicking off the reading program).

I knew there was a way to just mark the sentence, but I couldn't remember which of the thousands of helpful sites did that. So I went to the Learning 2.1 site to remind myself.
That's when I ran into Clipmarks again. I couldn't remember if it was Furl or Digg (just remembered the name of the other site) that did the highlighting and post-it notes (even my brain can't keep up with all of this) but I noticed that Clipmarks had what I was looking for. In two minutos I had the program installed and my profile filled out.

It was dead easy to use. I only had to scroll down the page with my cursor and it started selecting bits for me right away. When I had the right sentence in the crosshairs, I clicked it and then it asked me what I wanted to do with it.

And this is what you can do with it: embed it in a blog, send to MySpace or Facebook, or even march it straight to thingie (aka: del.icio.us, which I still consider a stupid name). Or e-mail it, and you can access your web e-mail (so long as it's a major one) from Clipmarks. So, I found Bob's e-mail (which I can never remember) and sent him just the bit I clipped.

Clipmarks is "powered by" Plaxo and I think they really missed the target by not calling it "Clipso" [Calypso]- but they didn't ask me, did they?

Now, the annoying part is that I couldn't find the article I wanted at our local newspaper's website, however, a search on the internet on my name brought it up elsewhere. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to view it. I'll give it a couple of weeks and maybe it will eventually become available. sigh. Stupid local paper. (Sorry, Richard.)

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Slideshare

Yes, I've signed up for something else! This time it's Slideshare, because there are many people on Second Life (yes, yes, I know you're tired of hearing about that) who use this. As you may recall, I have been using Zoho to create slideshows (PowerPoint type presentations) and embed them into this blog (and perhaps elsewhere).
Such as this latest one from Zoho:


In Slideshare, you have to create your slides elsewhere. Fortunately, I have PowerPoint available on this computer because the Zoho slideshow file format is not supported. Oh, dear! I'll have to start over. Perhaps with something easy:



Okay, that wasn't so bad, other than having to deal with PowerPoint, which was not as easy as Zoho nor as much fun and creative as Scrapblog. I was hoping it would be as familiar as Publisher, but I found it confusing. I should probably complain about PowerPoint in some other blog, but it was the main thing that slowed me down. I had to download each picture from Flickr to this computer. Zoho will take the url directly and has an actual link to Flickr (but I have almost 4,000 pictures up and they don't currently have a way to get at the sets, like Scrapblog does). Not even Slideshare's uploading and conversion (rather like YouTube in that respect) was that lengthy. Odd that. Slideshare can be uploaded directly to Blogger (as well as MySpace, Facebook, and LiveJournal, to name a few) on the sidebar, but we all know my sidebar here is full.
Good gracious! The slideshow has been looked at twice and I just got it up! I wonder if they're counting my previews while I'm blogging this ... Gottinhimmeldonnerwetter!* The count is up to 7!!! Just while I've been typing this bit! Well, that's why I put it up there: to be seen! This is so exciting! Hee. Ah, and the counter differentiates between views and views of embedded slideshow. Nice.
This could be useful (and fun) if you have any slideshows you want to share with the world at large. Also, you're supposed to be able to add sound to the slideshow. Don't have sound on this computer, so I'll give that test a miss for the moment.

* a little German swearing by the weather