Google

 

I think that most organizations are a little bit afraid of video. And if they are a little bit afraid of video they are even more afraid of live video.  Video, the conventional wisdom goes, is expensive and hard to produce. Your chances of doing it wrong are higher than of doing it right, and either way the cost and time involved is probably out of reach. Live video, well that is just crazy talk! Anything could happen!

As we all know, the cost of video cameras has come way down, the once much heralded inexpensive Flip camera is now obsolute because of smartphones with high quality video cameras! And editing technology has also become cheaper and easier. For years now every Mac has shipped with iMovie, but today you can edit video with a range of online services including YouTube.

Video engages people. How many times a day do you want a few minutes of video on the web? That clip from the Daily Show, a segment from the local news, something on YouTube (perhaps involving a cute animal) a friend posted to Facebook? Or maybe you were glued to live streaming of the #occupy demonstrations this fall?

How can nonprofit organizations make use of video easily, and without great expense, to connect with their audiences? My, perhaps counter intuitive answer, is through live streaming. Yes, jump in on the deep end.  With live streaming video there is no post production necessary, just a camera and an internet connection. UStream has garnered much press because of the #occupy movements and it is a great platform, scales well, offers some good tools, but it also requires a bit more setup than, say, Google+ Hangouts.  

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Lots of buzz swirling around about Google+, Google's Facebook-like social networking site.  Much of the buzz surrounds trying to get invited into the test trial, especially as many have received "invites" but not been able to get in anyway.

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First thing is a bit of a housekeeping point: when running through the giveaways yesterday, I forgot to mention that attendees also got a Verizon Mobile Hotspot, with 3 months of free connectivity. Pretty sweet little unit!

Keynote

Though not terribly well rested, I did make it to the packed keynote on Wed., May 12. This multi-speaker presentation covered the three flavours of Chrome:

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Overview

Google I/O is always a fun conference to attend. Of course, there’s always the awesome giveaways for attendees. This year, the big gift was a Galaxy 10.1 tablet, customized with a distinctive Android pattern on the back. There was also, if you went to the right sessions, an Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK), to use your Android phone as an Arduino controller, and a Sony Xperia play phone. Rumor has it that tomorrow, they will be handing out another phone. [UPDATE: no phone, but a Chromebook, Jun. 15th!] (Last year’s early bird attendees got both an Evo and a Nexus phone, while regular attendees got just the Nexus.)

Then of course, there’s always the announcements of hot new software and hardware Google’s been working on. I went to the sessions on Android Based Businesses, Google Chrome Frame and Google Web Fonts. (It was a slow day because I slept in – hey, we arrived late and our hotel, The Petite Auberge, as wonderfully quaint and charming as it is, was plagued by the sounds of  trucks unloading at about 5 or 6 am.)

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We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2011. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are investing over $110,000 in the Drupal project.

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Last week Apple announced that since July 2008 more than 10 billion iPhone & iPad apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. For those counting at home, that an average of 18 million apps per day.

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CivicActions has been working with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team to make some (last minute) improvements that make Drupal 7 faster.

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There are a number of different authentication methods available for integrating with Google Apps. These include OpenID, OAuth and SAML amongst others. At a first glance, it's not always entirely clear on the differences between them and when you may wish to use one over another. Here's a brief overview which hopefully makes this a bit clearer.

OpenID

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On Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 (tomorrow) I'll be giving a lightening talk at Seattle NetTuesday on free tools that nonprofit organizations can use to develope and execute a listening strategy to enhance their use of social media and the web.

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If you haven't heard yet, Microsoft and Yahoo! have inked a 10 year deal to partner on search and advertising.  You can learn more about the details of the deal, which I won't go into here.  If the deal is approved by regulators, we could see changes in Yahoo and Bing search and advertising early next year, from the sound of it.

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