Thanks for listening to my presentation.

If anyone would like to be involved in the beta, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you as soon as we are ready.

YouTube has annnounced major new features for their API. These include:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

So what does this mean to you? Essentially this makes it even easier for you to leverage YouTube as a video platform. You can directly integrate YouTube into your own website. The key difference is essentially YouTube has to date only really offered Read access to their videos. You can pretty much do everything you can do on YouTube itself.

Example

You want to allow visitors to submit video content to your site for a competition.

• Visitor fills in the competition entry form on your site.
• Visitor uploads video on your site.
• You use YouTube to transcode the video to Flash and store it on their platform (for free!).
• You retrieve the videos and display them on your site in a customised player.

It now makes even less sense to try and build your own online video capability. What’s not clear, is what advertising might be delivered around your video content, however, I imagine they’ll introduce an advertising free albeit paid option in the future.

What do you think you could use this for?

Technorati Tags: youtube

NewsGator, who in my opinion produce the best RSS software, have announced that they will make all their consumer products freely available.

Here is a full list of the products available:

Mac OS X

• NetNewsWire - This is my chosen RSS client and it is by far the best product available on that platform as far as I am concerned. All my feeds get backed up to their online service and I can access them via their website if I need to.

Windows

If you are on Windows here are the products available:

• FeedDemon - a dedicated desktop client
• NewsGator Inbox For Microsoft Outlook - get your feeds within Outlook. Outlook 2007 already has this functionality.

Web

If you prefer a browser based service, because you have multiple computers or can’t install software on your PC at work here is a good option for you:

• NewsGator Online

Google Reader, is also a very popular web-based alternative.

Mobile

• NewsGator Go! for Mobile (Blackberry, Java capable cell phone, Windows Mobile)
• m.newsgator.com - iPhone Web Application

I’m at the Barcamp event in Auckland today. This is a meet up for web developers where you turn up, and put your name and presentation topic forward and it goes up on the board in the available time slots.

There is a broad group of people from the industry here, including web dev/design shops, independent contractors, and guys/girls who work for corporates.

There is also a guy here from Mozilla, who are the organisation behind Firefox, who is presenting after lunch on what will be in Firefox 3. I’ll definitely attend that one.

My posts will be over on the Marker Blog, check out the photos on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampauck07

Thanks to Lucy, Shane and Rod at Xero for giving me the opportunity to present to their customers and partners on the subject of Web 2.0 for Small Business. It was a great session with lots of interesting questions and discussion.

Breakfast sessions with a smaller crowd around a table is by far the best format in my opinion.

Thank you to everyone for coming, it was great to meet everyone and I really enjoyed it.

Here are some of the links to site I discussed today:

• feedburner.com
• copyblogger.com
• brightcove.com
• Revision 3
• Twitter

Definitely read this post on Facebook Business by our resident Half-Geek, James Fleet.

Technorati Tags: xero

No I’m not talking about trophy wives, but how you can use web 2.0 technology to help with marital harmony.

Now my wife is okay with some things web 2.0 but certainly not all. When I first set up Twitter she thought it was the most disturbing, crazy thing that she had ever seen. We use Skype video calling when I’m away on business, which is great. I haven’t managed to get this used as a replacement for toll calls when calling her parents, but I think I need to get one of those Skype handsets for that to happen. She finally got into Facebook last month, but that was essentially so she could show that she had more friends than me.

However, nothing has generated quite such an enthusiastic response as when I set up an online to-do list at Backpack. We both work and sometimes co-ordinating personal stuff is difficult. The idea was that we could share a list of household tasks, shopping lists, reminders, the cooking plans for the week, etc. You can set up automated reminder emails to go out for specific tasks.

So wife is happy, me not so happy as now have very long to do list to work through over the weekend.

I recently gave a presentation at the yMedia Challenge event and they have sent me through some feedback from some of the people that attended.

"Really interesting - would like to talk to him some more."

"A key point in his presentation that stood out for me was building a community rather than marketing/advertising. Also his advice on avoiding CPM advertising and on using "geek marketing" like pay per click tools."

"I hung onto every word and realised that I had heard some of these words before but did not understand them. I learnt so much from Jon. Jon started a journey for me which will take me deeper into the world of computers."

"I enjoyed Jon’s presentation, but I felt he didn’t make enough allowance for the wide range of previous experience in the audience. Some of what he said was too technical for many in the room, especially many people from the not for profits who are not engaged with the topic. His examples were all interesting, but felt out of reach. On the other hand, his five things to do next week seemed very relevant."

"A very useful presentation, but sometimes Jon assumed too much prior knowledge and experience. However, of all the speakers I think his overall presentation was the most useful in a practical sense, once someone had translated the jargon etc."

"Great content about social- media, networking, capital. Loved the ‘Will it Blend’ vid."

"Engaging and enjoyable. the valuable message i took away from his presentation was to go where your audience already are rather than trying to drag them to you - particularly relevant when your audience are young people. "web

I thought that the presentation was aimed at an introductory level, but based on some of the comments I clearly need to re-look at this. Great to get this sort of feedback though.

I’m very excited to be invited by SaaS accounting system provider Xero to do a presentation to their customers and partners.

Xero is an amazing New Zealand company and if you haven’t already you should demo their product. Currently only available in New Zealand, but will be coming to the UK and Australia very soon.

Here are the details if you would like to attend:

The advent of social media, the increased uptake of broadband worldwide and the growing choice of communication tools have changed marketing forever - to a new era of customer participation.

Xero, along with interactive agency Marker, invites you to attend a breakfast to discuss this new participatory era and the impact for New Zealand businesses like yours.

Date: Friday 16 November 2007

Time: 7:30 am

Place: Xero, Level 1, Old Bank, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington, New Zealand

Register to: Lucy Hempseed lucy.hempseed@xero.com or phone: (04) 819 4837

Technorati Tags: saas, web 2.0 events, xero

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Uber:savvy event this morning to kick off the yMedia Challenge.

"the yMedia Challenge is a 2 week competition designed to connect media students with not-for-profit organisations."

I think my presentation went down okay, I got lots of questions at the end, but they did offer small bottles of 42 Below Vodka to anyone who asked one, so that might not be a fair reflection of interest from the audience!

I met some interesting people though:

Mike Brown who is the organiser of Webstock, easily the essential local event for the web community which is coming to Wellington in February. Very much looking forward to that one. Mike was the first speaker and did a fascinating intro into how people really drive web 2.0, not the technology.

Nigel Parker from Microsoft who gave an excellent overview of the emerging ways in which digital media can be consumed. This included demos of some of the latest Microsoft technologies including Siverlight, PhotoSynth and Microsoft Home Server. You can not understate the amount of investment Microsoft puts into research and development as well as the developer community.

I didn’t get a change to meet her personally, but Janet Mazenier, Programme Director, for the government’s Digital Strategy gave a speech. She admitted it was very hard to activate progress web projects, even within the organisation that is supposed to be leading the country. Three months to get a blog live. I can’t actually find the blog though. I think this organisation can make a real difference, if they can provide direction for government departments and state owned enterprises around blog policies. Tell the public sector that having a blog where people might make a comment that disagrees with your view is okay. This is still a democracy isn’t it?

It was well worth giving up a Saturday morning for this, everyone I met had something interesting to say and the organisers Pamela, Adele and Jade at yMedia are all exceptionally friendly people to deal with…plus they gave me Vodka as a thank you.

Technorati Tags: ymedia

This is a fascinating look, by GigaOM, at how Web 2.0 is playing a part in the tragic California Fire Crisis.