Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Sunday, September 2, 2007

Screencasting Examples - The Best Screencasts From Master New Media

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Screencasting, the live screen-capture of you demonstrating a software or new application is increasingly the solution of choice when it comes to showcase, demonstrate, explain.

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A few hours ago Marshall Kirkpatrick of Splashcast twittered:

"my ? is:

what r some good methods 4 turning huge need for social media into real demand for it?
...for example, I'm going to start making screencasts - because visual demonstration blows minds better than words about huge new concepts
"

Indeed. Screencasting is a great way to showcase and demonstrate to anyone with a computer or playback device how your new service or application works without needing to improvise this every time you need to.

Screencasts are essentially digital recordings of your screen actions often accompanied by a guiding voice-over. Screencasts can be recorded by utilizing specific software tools like Camtasia or Jing.

Screencasting can be used for a number of other great applications including showcasing how to use just about any type of computer tool, how to provide assistance or how to configure and setup complex systems. So, whether you need to teach, show, demo or assist, screencasts can be a great way to communicate more effectively while saving a great deal of time.

Nonetheless the relative ease of operation that screencasting tools offer, producing a compelling screencast can be more challenging that you may expect. Issues relating to the timing, duration, background music, titling and about image framing and visual effects, all play a critical role in generating screencasts that are a breeze to watch and to understand.

In an effort not to be too theoretical and to further help those of you, like Marshall, who are about to start producing their first set of personal screencasts, here is a perfect screencasting reference collection, which should provide you with enough examples and ideas for producing your own.

Here is a perfect array of screencasting examples all produced in the last 12 months here at MasterNewMedia by Michael Pick. Use these screencasts as inspiration, guide, or even as models to copy and improve upon.



How To Create And Distribute Multimedia Web Presentations And Stunning Visual Photo Albums: Scrapblog - Video Review

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A new web-based service allowing powerful creation and easy online distribution of multimedia presentations and visual photo-albums is about to announce its official re-launch with a completely new feature-set, interface and components integration. The all-new Scrapblog is in fact a Formula 1 racer when it comes to assembling, enriching and packaging visual presentations for online digital delivery. In a whole different ball-game than typical photo-sharing services, Scrapblog competes somehow with higher end presentation-delivery applications such as Splashcast, and with lower-end photo- and presentation-sharing sites like Bubbleshare, Slideshare, SPresent and several other ones.

March 2007



Broadcast Your Own Live TV Station Online: Announcing Mogulus Video

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You can now broadcast your own live TV online with a number of tools and services. But a new contender takes things to the next level, giving you a feature-packed TV studio that works right out of your web browser. If you're looking for simple 'plug your camera in and play' streaming, you could do worse than UStream, which has made it possible for hundreds of web broadcasters to quickly put out live web TV. Then, taking things a step ahead you have services like Operator11 that let you mix in your web videos with live webcam broadcasts, and even bring in friends to take part in your show.

May 2007



Online Multimedia Presentations Get Interactive: Remix Your Photos And Videos With Vuvox

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Online multimedia presentation tools are a whole new exciting niche within the Web 2.0 landscape, letting you easily take your photos and videos and create great-looking visual mash-ups from them. It's one thing to sift through a page full of uninspiring, identical thumbnails, and quite another to navigate your media collection in a rich media environment. A new service lets you do just that, so that you can create multimedia presentations and interact with them in a hands-on way. If the first wave of Web 2.0 was comprised of services that made it easy for you to share your photos and publish your videos, this next wave of easy-to-use web applications is all about bringing your online media together, remixing them and presenting the results in beautiful looking compositions. Scrapblog lets you create visually rich, embeddable online scrapbooks and slideshows, Splashcast makes it easy to put together your own custom channels of images, videos and audio, and now Vuvox gives you a way to create multimedia presentations that your users can explore and interact with.

April 2007



Online Video Annotation Takes A Giant Leap Forward: Meet The All-New Mojiti

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Online video annotation has just taken a giant leap forward, giving you the opportunity to add subtitles, text, animated shapes and pointers, freehand text and drawings, images, webcam video and even RSS feeds directly into your web-hosted videos. Until now a range of online video annotation services have made it easy to take your source video and add subtitles, animated graphics and even voice-overs right from your browser. But none of them have combined all of these features, and added a great many more to the mix, until now. Today the latest release of Mojiti effectively gives you a simple-to-use mini-motion-graphics studio to play with, bringing to you a mixture of tools ranging from the incredibly useful - such as subtitling, dubbing and picture-in-picture video - to the quite simply fun.

April 2007



Community Building: How To Create Your Own Social Media Network With Ning

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Stop [social] networking: Build your own network! - If you ever thought about creating your own mini YouTube, MySpace or community site, in which members can upload media, write and contribute directly, the time of your dream has finally come... thanks to Ning. It is now possible to create your very own special interest social network in a matter of minutes, bringing together like-minded people from across the web. Social networks create easy to access online communities out of shared interests and passions. If you can think of a hobby, demographic or special interest chances are that there is a social network dedicated to it - whether you are an aspiring model, a young Muslim, a mother, or even a Japanese animation addict.

March 2007



Subtitling And Dubbing Your Internet Video - Part One: Subtitling Video Guide

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By subtitling or dubbing your Internet video output you expand its reach. This is a great way of adding value to your video, whether from an accessibility perspective, from the desire to reach an audience outside of your own first language, or even to add 'liner notes' to your content. There was a time when this kind of feat would set you back considerable money, and require professional equipment beyond the reach of your average independent online publisher. Those days are over, and it is now possible to make use of free online and desktop tools to create subtitled or dubbed video content without spending a cent. The growth of the blog network in recent times has meant that independent web publishers very often produce content on an international scale. While English would certainly seem to have the greatest reach in terms of gathering a large audience, the benefits of having alternate language versions of your content are fast becoming evident. Here at Master New Media, you can access the same content in English, Spanish or Italian, with Portuguese and Russian versions in the works. This is far from the exception to the rule - with websites such as Endgadget offering Spanish, Chinese and Japanese versions of their popular gadget blog. With the increasing shift towards Internet video content, that makes a whole lot of video that needs recontextualizing for different audiences.

February 2007



Subtitling And Dubbing Your Internet Video - Part Two: Audio Dubbing Video Guide

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Subtitling and dubbing Internet video is a great way of expanding the reach of your own video, and of bringing whole new audiences to pre-existing content originally created in another language. In this second part of my guide to subtitling and dubbing on the cheap, I talk you through the process of dubbing Internet-bound video. The focus of part one of this guide was on adding subtitles to your Internet videos using two completely free web applications. Subtitling can be a great way of adding comprehensibility to foreign language materials, not to mention the value added by bringing a new level of accessibility to your videos for those with hearing impairments (or indeed, the urge to watch videos on the sly at work). Subtitles are an excellent fit for content with a lot of people on camera, given that the results of lip-sync dubbing can often turn out unintentionally comic. However, there are other circumstances where dubbing is a far better solution.

February 2007



Online Video Publishing: Where To Find Free Corporate News Video Footage - The NewsMarket

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Finding broadcast-quality news and product-oriented video footage has been until now an asset available only to the major television networks. Major television networks around the world are indeed hooked to major video distribution feeds that provide them with an ongoing stream of video material, clips and news that they can record and re-edit into any number of news or video stories. The quantity of such material is so vast, that only a tiny fraction of it makes it to each television channel daily programming. On the other hand, online video sharing destinations and video blogs are rapidly increasing in number and relevance, and nonetheless the use of straight-to-camera talking heads are not always the most engaging type of content to offer, these video sites are often much more sincere and believable than major TV stations with perfectly rehearsed anchormen reading a teleprompter script and with great quality stock news footage in the back.

February 2007



Browser Compatibility Testing: BrowserCam Gets Better - Video Review

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Browser compatibility testing is a web development practice that allows a web site owner to verify how her web site or blog, appears on computers utilizing browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions that are different from the one used in originally designing / developing a web site. These visual differences is a critical element to consider when wanting to increase traffic, provide greater accessibility and allowing commercial publishers to extract the best from their online communication efforts. With Linux, Mac OSX and Windows machines all accessing your website through a range of operating system versions, and even more web browsers, how are you going to know that your web site is going to look the same across all these other computer setups?

January 2007



Web-Based Applications Go Offline: SocialText Unplugged Ushers Us In The Offline Web App Era

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Socialtext Unplugged is leading the way in adding a whole new level of flexibility to the world of web-based applications, by pioneering ways in which you will be able to work seamlessly with your favourite web apps even when you are not Internet-connected. Only a few years ago we were bound to our desktops, or forced to carry peripherals with us on every journey out of the office. But with the recent advent of Web applications, we are now able, like never before, to collaborate, create and share content quickly and efficiently no matter from where we connect and from which computer we log on to the Internet. The rapid proliferation of web-based applications has rapidly expanded our computer-assisted work capabilities, making it possible for anyone to work directly from a standard web browser, and independently of the location and computer type used. Web applications, have indeed increased productivity and flexibility by storing your data online, and allowing you to access it from just about any computer connected to the Internet. With it, you can access your Google Docs, Zoho Projects and SPresent presentations whether you're in Rio, Rome or New York.

January 2007



Share Designs And Visuals Online For Commenting And Group Review: ConceptShare - Video

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Online collaboration moved from strength to strength in 2006 with a host of free and paid services that allowed for rapid web-based sharing of ideas, documents and even desktops. Until now, though, web-based collaboration has tended towards emulating the function of office applications, at the expense of powerful tools for those more interested in fulfilling visual communication needs. If you want to share and edit your spreadsheets or documents over the web, there are a host of options available. Online presentation applications have grown to the extent that they are challenging their desktop counterparts. Furthermore, it has never been easier to take part in screen-sharing online meetings. But then, it isn't always convenient to convene online at the same time, especially as people increasingly work across timezones on the same project. A new service aimed at those working in visual communication - be they graphic designers, photographers, web designers or educators - aims to bring the power of online collaboration to the sharing, annotating and review of visual materials. In addition, the service is geared up to function whether those working on the project are all online simultaneously, or they log in to the project at entirely different times. Fusing the spontaneity of the web conference with the the flexibility of the wiki, while focusing on the specific needs of visual communicators, ConceptShare manages to bring something entirely new to the table.

January 2007



Corporate Newsmastering And OPML Reading Lists: The BlogBridge RSS Feed Library - Video Review

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For corporate newsmasters OPML reading lists are an excellent way of gathering and custom-distributing thematic collections of RSS Feeds within the organization. By being able to effectively aggregate, organize, label, and provide selected access to thematic RSS feeds collections, corporate digital information librarians are now given true power to provide highly customized and tailored information feeds to their key stakeholders. Not only. Such capabilities provide also the means to create multiple definitive source of RSS feeds on a given topic, be it the latest communication software or just a hand picked selection on the best news sources out there. Such features support the use of a RSS feed library also and well beyond the walls of internal communications, research and intelligence to the ability to serve and distribute high-value content feeds collection on any designated theme to the public at large or to paying audiences.

December 2006



Web Presentation Gets Better: Create Flash Presentations Online With SPresent

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Web presentation applications have really moved forward in 2006, but there are few contenders that challenge the excellent SPresent in terms of the ability to create powerful flash presentations online in a matter of minutes. With a rich feature-set that steps up to PowerPoint and doesn't look foolish for doing so, SPresent gives you an intuitive flash interface with every bit as much functionality as its desktop counterparts. What's amazing is that it packs these features into a free-to-use web application that runs entirely from your browser. This flexible tool not only replicates full desktop functionality - from its ability to resize to your chosen window size to the inclusion of an 'undo' button - but goes one step further, throwing in great web specific features like the ability to browse Flickr and grab photos for your presentations from the application itself.

December 2006



Screen-Sharing: One-Click Solution Lets Anyone Screen-Share Instantly From Any OS - LiveLOOK

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Want to share your screen instantly to somebody else, no matter what computer you or him are using? Now you can: a new real-time screen-sharing solution allows anyone to live share the contents of his screen with anyone else. No software to download, no setup or configuration, no commands or menus to learn, no buttons to press. One-click screen-sharing, just like the one recently invoked by Jon Udell, is indeed coming of age. LiveLOOK, which launches today, is a breakthrough solution for conferencing, online collaboration and information sharing that challenges competitors large and small on two key areas: speed to access and ease of use. For the first time, a tool allows even Mac and Linux users, to instantly share the contents of their screen to anyone without needing to download, setup or learn anything at all.

December 2006



Digital Content Distribution Made Easy: Web Widgets - What They Are How They Can Bring New Life To Your Blog - Video Guide

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Web widgets are tiny web applications that allow online publishers to easily distribute their content in a way that facilitates snappy integration by other blogs and web sites. In this video guide to web widgets I introduce you to these easy to use, highly interactive micro-applications that can be easily embedded in most any kind of site. In the Web 2.0 landscape, bland-looking, text-only blogs are having a hard time competing with the increasing number of blogs and news sites integrating slide-shows, scrolling news, videos, polls, and other visual and interactive information widgets.

November 2006



Share Video Online: Link Deep Into Any Video Clip With Motionbox - Video Intro

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Want to share only a specific section of a video clip? Now you can. Thanks to the latest feature release from online video editing and publishing service Motionbox (being released today), the syndicating, mashing-up and repurposing of online video content may gain some of the vast unrealized potential that deep linking into video would allow. What's deep linking? It is the ability to link not just to a video clip, but to link to a very specific point or "segment" within the clip itself. As we can't yet instantly preview or fast forward through audio and video content in any effective way, the ability to increase the granularity level at which video and audio content can be addressed, opens up enormous new opportunities for making much larger and more effective use of online video.

September 2006



Mobile Group Messaging Bridges Internet And Mobile Worlds Via IM, eMail, SMS, RSS: SwarmIt and SwarmPro - Video Review

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Swarmteams Ltd, a North Ireland-based company, has just released Swarm-it! and Swarm-Pro, two new services which allow groups of people to send and receive messages instantaneously across web, email, instant messaging, mobile SMS and RSS. An emergent behaviour is now finding its supporting technologies: swarming. The term swarm (schooling or swarming) is applied to fish, birds and insects and describes a behavior of an aggregation of animals of similar size and body orientation, generally cruising in the same direction. (Source: Wikipedia)

September 2006



Wiki Collaboration Tools Evolve Into Fully Professional Shared Workspaces: Near-Time - Review Plus Video

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Wiki Collaboration Tools Evolve Into Fully Professional Shared Workspaces with Great Accessibility and Ease of Use. I have now been using wikis for over two and half years, and frankly I couldn't do without them anymore. Their ability to facilitate my frequent needs to create shared workspaces in which I can easily add, edit and upload information and files of all kinds makes them absolutely vital to my highly collaborative workflow. In this direction I must thank above all, SocialText and Ross Mayfield, which have very generously supported, encouraged and facilitated my exposure to wikis and to all of their potential inside professional distributed teams as well as in many other professional contexts.

September 2006



Windows Live Writer: Video Review

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Windows Live Writer, which was released in beta yesterday, promises to make blogging from the comfort of your desktop as easy as sending an email. With a simple point and click interface that will be familiar to anyone who has ever used a word processor, seamless integration with all of the major blogging platforms, and powerful yet easy to use image manipulation features it is now easier than ever to publish your thoughts and pictures online. In this exclusive MasterNewMedia video review, I take a look at the main features that set this simple, free application apart from the crowd. For those of you not on a broadband connection and unable to view the video, please find here below Amit Argawal own first impressions along with the descriptions, as originally published on the Windows Live Writer Official Blog, of the key unique features of this new Microsoft blogging tool:...

August 2006



About Michael Pick - Screencasting Producer

Michael Pick is a technology reviewer, and a new media editor and producer. Former chief technology editor at Robin Good's Master New Media, Michael is now on his own and produces quality screencasts for startups and web media companies of all kinds. You can easily reach him through his new personal web site at: www.michael-pick.com

 
 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Sunday, September 2 2007, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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