Archive for March 27th, 2007
Picasa+Web=Picasaweb+Blogger!!!
Consolidation, this has been the mantra for people at google for while, at least it seems from viewer angle. Gtalk with Orkut, then Orkut+Youtube, Reader+Blogger, and now Blogger+Picasaweb.
This time also they have done it nicely and it was a long felt need. I, always wanted to retrieve images I uploaded to blogger for posts and wondered where they went after I uploaded them, and now they have solved both of my problems. They have integrated both the platforms together. You can see all your photos which you uploaded on your blog on your Picasaweb page with a Blogger B logo on them. And them from there, you can use them for reposting.
This is still not done they can also make Picasweb a hub for my photos on Orkut, and can make them more secure.
There is one more thing which Google have added on Picasaweb, and that is community photo search. This now brings it in lines of Flickr, but still it is not very networking friendly, as you still dont have a single window kind of thing to view your favorites photos. But they are improving and that too on fast pace, and more importantly this king kong size organization is going for consolidation.
Jabbits. QnA using videos.
I have already mentioned, why I didn’t posted any thing for such a long time over here. And here is my first storming post after the lull. First thing I did after returning was to get online, and after that I opened Google reader…to go on reading spree to read posts in excess of 4k. And as usual I started with web2.0 blogs, and incidentally I went to Mashable and found about Jabbits.
Jabbits is a new take on QnA, that revolves around video. We all will certainly agree that video is best way to convey a message, and QnA on video is indeed a nice idea. You ask question in form of a video, and receives answers in same form. As I am writing about it, a simple yet powerful struck to me, that is in distant teaching. Students fire there questions to group of teachers and get answers in return, and similarly teacher fires question and get solution from his students, all this in an organized manner.
As mentioned Pete Cashmore, on Mashable, they should look into providing widgets to embed in ones blog and various profiles. But one thing is for sure that innovative ideas revolving around user generated videos is a new trend, and will stay for long time.
But, yes a but, when it comes to QnA, I will still prefer Yahoo Answers, though Jabbit is ready to award me $100 for my good answers. Why I will stcik to Yahoo Answers is because it is simple. When it comes to anything user generated, lesser the numbers of steps to achieve some thing more usable it becomes. For example, lets compare erstwhile Hotmail and Gmail, Hotmail had one step in excess to read messages whereas Gmail takes you directly to all the mails. Coming back to QnA, creating video is not a one step process, its a multiple step process on Jabbit. If I have a question then I may want answer quickly, and that happens on Yahoo, you get answers quickly , sometimes within seconds. Then there is another problem when it comes to asking via video, people tend to go for explaining in excess, and then asking a simple question at the end… what it had done is, it kicked many viewers out of your site. In case of written questions your eyes somehow focus directly on key words and then if you like the queestion you answer it otherwise go for another question.
One more thing which bothers me is fake answers, how would I know that answer which I am just going to see is for real or some phony blot. They do provide for some written floats for answers but still I would love to have more. Because if I visit Jabbit on my bad day then I may never visit it again, and here Jabbit have done nothing wrong. They will pay for what their users have done.
Do I have a solution for this problem…Ok I will take my chance…
Use some sort of speech to text methodology, which will at least work for questions in english and then provide some thumb up-down option for questions and answers.
All said, I will still give it a try, not as a source to get valuable answers but for controlled use within my group, because in that way I will get best I can, and here it will certainly score lots of brownies over any conventional QnA site.
And as of site designing they have done some neat job, and use a nice color combination, such things by no mean are small, they matter a lot when thousands of users fall on your site on seconds basis.
I was not down…
I was out and that too without computer. I was not at a place where computer would not have worked, but I simply did not took my lapy with me. To mention I was at IIT Roorkee to take part in their techfest. And was that cool…that was awesome. Though I was down and out in most of the events in 1st stages itself, ( i was under prepared ) but enjoyed every bit of my stay over there.
I did two wrongs…
Forgot to took my camera with me.
Forgot to took my laptop.
And from next time I wont repeat this mistake.
And from today post will start as usual… if you came over here in the lull time, then I am really grateful to you.
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