seesmic

Add comments with your Twitter profile, or video comments via Seesmic

May 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton

One of the things I’ve had on my ‘todo’ list for quite a while was to revisit the various ways to connect my blog and related discussions and comments to the various social networks where they might be happening.

So I’ve now got Disqus running, which means you can log in and post comments via your Twitter and Facebook profiles, or even video comments with Seesmic. It will also hopefully aggregate any discussion taking place on sites including Friendfeed, which is also useful for getting an overview of all the conversations happening.

I’m also playing around with link posting via both Diigo and Delicious, and some other backend tools.

The end result should be a better and far more useful – and hopefully some better and more efficient ways to share information for me!

Comment with your Twitter/Facebook profiles

May 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve finally started upgrading the back end of this blog to start tackling the increasingly important issue of connecting with the discussions posts can prompt in a myriad of places.

Whereas discussion was generally confined to the Comments section in days of old, now it can spring up on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc.

As a commenter, I’ve found Backtype to be useful for aggregating the comments I’ve made, but when it came to starting to tie it all together here, Disqus was an obvious, and easy choice to install and start using.

All of the comments made directly have now been imported into the new system, and I’ve added the ability to post with your Twitter and Facebook usernames, as well as importing discussion around a post from locations like Friendfeed. You can even post a video comment via Seesmic.

I’ve also installed a Disqus widget to show the Top Commenters, Recent Comments and Popular Comments, so you should see that start to hopefully fill out in the next few days in the right side bar.

In addition, I’ve also started combining my saved bookmarks by posting to both Diigo and Delicious, to provide some cloud-based backup and to see which is the best route for publishing any links I want to share – as well as looking at which plugins/widgets might be contributing to long loading times.

All aimed at providing a better service to you, the readers that make all this worthwhile, so let me know if there’s anything you’d suggest, or things you think I should definitely keep or get rid of!

Interested in online video?

January 13, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If so, I heartily recommend friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar’s new blog – after several years of suggesting he shared his knowledge and insight into the world of video, he’s finally started committing to doing it.

So check out Angus Farquhar’s Online Video Producer blog. And if you want to see what he’s up to now, check out his videos for Which? from CES

And I’m still amazed that he actually managed to make my attempts at presenting a video show good enough that I can just about watch them without cringing – I’m just thankful he didn’t put together the outakes.

I’m still working on using my voice to actually convey enthusiasm – hence why I haven’t embraced the likes of Seesmic and 12seconds.tv yet. But having predicted that the added conversation and interactivity coming to video would give it a huge boost this year, I might not be able to hold out much longer…

Hello, I must be going… on holiday

October 31, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Just a quick update that I won’t be online much, if at all, for the next week, so updates might be quiet until my return…

Security North by James Cridland on Flickr (CC Licence)

Funnily enough, searching for a suitable image on Flickr just gave me the above picture by James Cridland, whose blog and Twitter accounts I started reading recently – and the discovery of each was almost entirely unrelated!

Anyway, a good friend and colleague is aiming to supply some guest posts for here and www.thewayoftheweb.net while I’m offline, so you shouldn’t be alone. And as he’s a video expert, hopefully he’ll redress a slight lack of Seesmic, 12seconds, and Mobatalk coverage due to my lack of good looks a webcam.

And after the soul searching I mentioned in my last post, there are several really good things which have renewed my commitment to the site in the jaws of posting something once a week to just keep it going. So this week is a great time to contribute ideas, suggestions, topics, applications, tools or anything else which might be of interest, as I should be online long enough to access my email and even print off some ideas to work onn for my return…just drop your input to thewayoftheweb at googlemail dot com

A useful new site, and a future prediction…

October 24, 2008 By Dan Thornton

If you’re reading this elsewhere, it’s from www.thewayoftheweb.net by Dan Thornton…

Had a really good day in London, and met some cool new people, both from within Bauer Media and externally. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of reasons to write about them all shortly!

I spotted a number of sites mentioning Backtype as I was catching up on my RSS feeds on the train home. It’s a fairly elegant way of keeping track of the comments you leave on other websites and blogs – something I tried doing via Delicious, but always failed to keep track of!

If you’re interested, you can keep tabs on me at Backtype.com/DanThornton. The way it tracks comments is by tracking the url you leave – which covers most blogs and similar sites. I doubt there are any Dan Thornton/BadgerGravling impersonators out there, but they’ll appear if they’re dropping my urls! I’ve looked at alternatives like Disqus, and coComment, but never quite saw enough value to invest the time and effort needed. Backtype is far quicker and simpler, and may well encourage me to re-investigate some of the alternatives, depending on what happens – although Friendfeed etc also give a home to comments and conversation about blog spots.

Now the predicition. I’ve been prompted to pick some of the things I think will emerge next on the web (and I’m always happy to also spout my ideas unprompted!). I’ve often made the obvious observations around mobile and smartphones, and the fact that Twitter and microblogging are being adopted by brands, enterprise, celebrities and the mainstream. But the third prediction is one that surprised me a little, the first time it launched out of my mouth!

Twitter has a fair way to go to become really mainstream, but the next site/application to follow it, in my opinion, will be Seesmic. Most people in the tech bubble will have heard of it and web celeb founder Loic le Meur. But, like many emerging sites and applications, it’s taken a little time for the value of the service to become apparent.

For the unitiated, it’s a tool for video conversations by individuals, enabling responses to be threaded into coherence. Which means it overcomes the downside of streaming your life via webcam 24/7 – the dull bits. It’s already popular with some people withing social media – like top journalism lecturer/social media/multimedia person Paul Bradshaw – but now it’s also being used by mainstream media. The BBC has now joined the Washington Post in using the service, as written about by Loic today, and not only have they outlined how it will be used in their first video, but they’re already gaining responses to their first conversation about the financial crisis.

Now listen up, journalist people. Not only can you get a response from the more engaged members of society without having to do ‘voxpops‘ in the local town centre in the pouring rain – but now they’ll even video themselves! See the benefit now?