Let's Learn IT Blog » internet

The end of tech blogging?

Geert Bonamie — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:53:10 +0000

Jeremiah Owyang makes a number of great observations in this post that he interprets as the end of the golden era of tech blogging. I strongly recommend reading it as it’s indeed hard not to see a pattern after the sale of TechCrunch, of ReadWriteWeb or the departure of Ben Parr or Marshall Kirckpatrick.

Is this related to Tech only or is it a larger trend? Is blogging itself – and not just tech blogging – coming to an end?I think it’s fair to say that a number of these observations are valid for the whole blogosphere: lack of attention span of readers, news and content remixing, fatigue of some personal brands, emergence of new business models, etc…

Blogging will not disappear but new forms of expression are definitely stealing the show from blogging platforms. Curation among them.

Full post

Apply now for our summer workshops!

Geert Bonamie — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:54:00 +0000

If you are interested in attending one of our workshops on New Media, Moodle or Wikis & Blogs, and you want to visit either Athens or Ghent at the same time, then quickly fill in our preregistration form. With the support of your National Agency, you can have it all, for free! Free, as in: you would not have to pay for your plane ticket, accommodation, meals, course fee… The deadline for these workshops is January 16 -make sure you make it on time!

Visit Bruges and attend a New Media & Web 2.0 seminar for free!

Geert Bonamie — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:53:30 +0000

If you are looking for a thrilling learning experience in the wonderful city of Bruges, then preregister now for our seminar on New Media & Web 2.0. Thanks to the support of the Grundtvig programme, you can attend this workshop for free! For more information, please look at the pdf below!

Flubaroo: mark assignments with Google Docs

Geert Bonamie — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:02:13 +0000

Here at Let’s Learn IT we always encourage initiatives that give practical answers to problems teachers all over the world face daily. This time we put the spotlights on Flubaroo, which is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments. According to their site, Flubaroo also:

Computes average assignment score.
Computes average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions.
Shows you a grade distribution graph.
Gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

If you ask us, it’s definitely worth while checking out. Have a look at the video tutorial below and convince yourself!

xkcd.com: passwords

Bart Bonamie — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:56:59 +0000

Choosing strong passwords is very important – nothing new there. But how difficult should a password be, really? xkcd has the answer for us:

Viewbix: make your YouTube video interactive

Geert Bonamie — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:48:53 +0000

The Viewbix site reads, “It’s no secret that tons of people are watching videos online. But how do you get users to do *more* than just watch your videos? And, how do you do it for FREE?” If it’s free, then we’re always interested of course. Making your YouTube video interactive so that it also contains a Twitter feed, or an RSS feed, for instance, is quite simple, really:

First select any YouTube video.
Add photos, pricing, descriptions, landing pages.
Share your new interactive video on Facebook, Twitter or your own website.

Here’s an example of one of our videos:

If you like this, then why not try it yourself?

Captiontube: create subtitles for Youtube videos

Geert Bonamie — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:54:53 +0000

Up to this very moment I have always used Overstream to create YouTube subtitles, but today I have discovered a new service, Captiontube, which seems even better than overstream in quite a few ways…

Better integration with Youtube

First off, Captiontube ties better in with Youtube: you can simply sign in using your Youtube or Google account. And once you have created your captions, then it just takes you one click to add the caption to the Youtube video -simple and fast, which is how we like it.

Interface

The interface, while similar to the the one of Overstream, does seem much nicer, if you ask me, although that’s of course a judgement call. To the left is your YouTube video and in the right hand pane you have a button Add Caption, which will insert your caption wherever the playhead’s located. Next to it, there’s a button with which you can determine the exact point in time when you want the caption to disappear from screen.

Below everything is a timeline that displays which captions occur when -you can easily adjust the zoom settings using the slider to the left. Even more to the left you can set the language of the captions you are creating, which is a feature Overstream lacks. There’s also the possibility to add as many caption tracks as you like -especially handy if you are creating multiple captions in different languages. This, too, is not possible in Overstream. I do find it a pity that you cannot (yet?) copy and paste tracks so that you wouldn’t have to go through the procedure of adding x captions, tweaking time settings, and so on. A copy & paste feature would allow users to quickly create multiple captions for multiple languages, as they would only need to translate them.

One last thing regarding the interface: the timeline is just one possible view. Click on the List tab if you want to display all of your captions in a list view -especially for a quick review, right before you publish everything, this comes in handy.

Export

As I already said, you can easily upload the captions directly to your YouTube video, but if you want you could also download them to your computer, have them sent to you via email, or copy them to the clipboard. The default option is to upload them directly to YouTube, which does make sense.

My videos

In the top right corner you can find a button that gives you an overview of all your videos -much better than Overstream’s video organization where you have to select your overstream sub in a dropdown menu.

Conclusion

Excellent tool. I see that it’s still in beta, which means that in the future maybe even more features will follow.

Tutorial videos

Getting started

Creating captions

Exporting captions

Search faster: customize search options in Chrome

Geert Bonamie — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:07:25 +0000

We all know that searchbox in Firefox that you can customize with different search engines -forget about that. This here is the real thing: in chrome you can set up as many search engines as you like, so if you want a search engine for your own personal blog, then that’s no problem! On top of that, Chrome also allows you to assign simple keyboard shortcuts to each one of your search engines: look at the video to see how easy it is! Don’t forget to turn the captions on (press CC button in the youtube…

Picture time part 2: New Media & Web 2.0 Seminar, Ghent, July 2011

Geert Bonamie — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:51:45 +0000

And here are the pictures from our New Media & Web 2.0 seminar that we organised in Ghent in July 2011:

Memolane New Media & Web 2.0 seminar

Geert Bonamie — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:52:37 +0000

Below you can find the memolane for our New Media & Web 2.0 seminar which we organised in Ghent in July 2011: