An Experiment with uStream.tv

On Monday I’m going to be presenting Tweetcamp III, and instead of a phone conference call or using our Mayo Clinic AV department resources am planning to do a video Webcast using uStream.tv.

So I’m doing a little experiment tonight, and embedding the code from my uStream program, which I’ve dubbed ChancellorCast, here on the SMUG site.

At 9:30 p.m. EDT/8:30 CDT/6:30 PDT tonight, I’m going to do a brief test of uStream, for about 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re able to see and hear me, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment below.

I want to test this with a smaller group, so that for #tweetcamp3 we can have the kinks worked out.

Appreciate your feedback and help.

Update 9:15 CDT: Thanks to all who participated. I think you helped me prepare so we can have a good experience Monday. I’ve embedded a video below that I recorded with uStream, which gives a bit of an overview of Tweetcamp III.

Shel Holtz Ragan Presentation: What’s Next?

I’ve known Shel for several years, and I try to keep in touch via Twitter, his RSS feed and listening to his For Immediate Release podcast (with his sidekick Neville Hobson.) Still, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve heard him present, and this talk at the Ragan conference with SAS was really interesting and helpful.

As I sit in the Charlotte airport, loving the free wi-fi, I’m taking the opportunity to clean up my liveblogging post from his talk, and to add some links to the sites he mentioned.

The title of the presentation was, “What’s Next?” and he had ten key trends he saw as important. I missed #9, so if anyone else (or even Shel) can fill in the missing info, I would appreciate it. But before I get into those trends here were a few of Shel’s observations.

Shel says the high-end webcast is going the way of the DoDo, because now anyone can do a webcast using Qik or Ustream.tv.

Seesmic – lets you record videos at your Webcam. Put video up instead. Twitter for video. And WordPress now has a plug-in that lets people comment on your posts via Seesmic.

Integrated social networks. Websites, networks merge. Conversation with customers becomes part of the online presence.

Fastcompany.com has redesigned its Web site extensively to incorporate conversation. All of the content except one cover story is contributed by the community.

Tulane University is using LiveWorld.

Google Open Social will enable you to turn your Website into a social network, just by copying some code.

Shel says Web 3.0 involves these key trends:

Trend #1: Ubiquitous connectivity

  • Broadband
  • Wireless
  • Mobile computing – get to the Web anywhere you have a phone signal. Very few organizations have mobile phone strategies; they (we) really should.

Trend #2: Network computing. Web services, cloud computing, grid computing, distributed computing

Shel uses Live Mesh. I like Dropbox. Google has a video service just for corporations, available only to employees. Videos are hosted outside the firewall. Company IT departments will need to get comfortable with software as service like this. Shel uses Google Docs to develop and store his documents. He mentioned Yammer, too.

Trend #3: Open technologies – APIs and protocols, software, data. This is a huge trend. Why spend a half million dollars on a CMS when you can download a free open source package that is just as powerful, and pay someone $10K a year for support?

Trend #4: Open Identity – Open ID, Open reputation, Open portable identity

Business world doesn’t like this because companies want to gather your info.

Trend #5: The intelligent web. Use Pandora, for instance. It looks at music you like and finds similar songs that are what you’ll like. Recommendation agent. Natural language search instead of keywords. Semantic Web. Check out Twine.

Trend #6: Distributed Databases

Trend #7: Technology Populism: Tech has gotten so easy that you don’t need an IT person to help you implement it. That’s really one of the main ideas behind SMUG. “It’s Not That Hard.”

Trend #8: The information workplace. Getting people whatever information they need when they need it.

Prologue is a WordPress Theme that can be added to a blog you have behind the firewall.

TownSquare is a plug-in for Microsoft SharePoint that adds functionality like Facebook. Not available yet.

As Shel mentioned, FriendFeed is a great way to pull together information.

Yahoo Pipes is a really interesting service and Shel showed a video that demonstrates it. Here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3h6ROs__II]

Gotta play with that.

Trend #9: (Updated) Aggregation–Friendfeed, Dubpages, Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes (mashup feeds), Feedburner – (Thanks to sktuttle for providing in the comments.)

Trend #10: Widgets will also increase in importance for distributing your content.

Comcastcares uses search.twitter.com to do customer support. Symantec has a fan page on Facebook.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

Dennis Quaid Video on Medical Errors

Here are some video highlights of Dennis Quaid’s speech about medical errors and his family’s experience at Health Journalism 2008, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7vcYN-K0Dk]

I was in the back row, and there are a couple of jerky moments as my arm got tired, so I apologize if you have any fleeting moments of vertigo. Still, for SMUG students and journalists, it’s an example of what you can do fairly easily to share interesting and important information with the world. It’s not a live uStream (maybe I’ll work on that next). I’m not a trained journalist (and as you can see not a trained videographer, either), but this is a step between streaming everything and a deeper context piece. And maybe it can be a resource for real journalists to use in their reporting.