Social Blogging

Zumeo has launched Facebook Connect . The new feature allows users to login to Zumeo using your Facebook account and easily populate your Live Resume, invite professional connections from Facebook and share your Zumeo experiences with the Facebook community.

Hugh Jackman arrives in a blaze of glory. In a blaze of publicity, Australian actor Hugh Jackman zoomed in by helicopter and flying fox to an event to promote the latest X-Men movie, saying he was “heartbroken” that the film had been leaked on the Internet.

Be careful when deciding which colleagues to add as a Facebook friend as one throwaway status update about your employer could see you facing the sack.

Give your readers a way to talk to you straight from your web site with a single click of their mouse. That is the promise that several click to call web service providers are offering to bloggers big and small. By simply signing up for one of these free click to call services and embedding a hyperlink or widget into your web page, you can provide your audience with this convenience.

But why would you want to do that? A successful blog functions as a network. If you take a look at the top 100 blogs on the Web, one common feature comes to light. They are places where people can socialize and exchange information, the catalyst for that ad hoc network being the blog and its content. Sometimes the readers talk to each other, but most of the time, they are trying to talk to you.

Currently the only real way for this conversation to take place is by text via comments. Some innovative services like Google Friend Connect are bringing live text chat features to your blog, further facilitating the networking affect that is already taking place by allowing individuals to chat in real time with one another and with you. But glaringly absent from this mix is the ability for your audience to talk (and by talk I mean, really talk) to you.

So in this article, I have brought together seven services (Jajah, TringMe, Google Voice, Raketu, Jaxtr, Flaphone, and Jaduka) that bring voice to your web site. Each of the seven click to call web services reviewed below are evaluated using four criteria:

1. Privacy features: The ability to block phone numbers and / or set time of day availability to receive calls.
2. Customize buttons: The ability to alter text, color, and / or background image.
3. Multiple numbers: The ability to set up, multiple numbers (including SIP services and VoIP services) to which calls can be forwarded.
4. Ease of use: How easy it is to set up the widget and embed it on your site.
5. Availability: Countries where the service is active.

Furthermore, every one of these click to call web services is easily embeddable via a free call widget or simple hyperlink that can be placed on your website, blog, social network, etc., and they let you easily receive calls from your audience, friends, and strangers alike with a single click of a button.

Some of these services are more complete than others, and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, every single one of these click to call web providers hides your number so that telemarketers and other malicious characters cannot easily harvest it for their own purposes.

Here all the details:

General Motors Corp. and Segway today demonstrated a new type of vehicle that could change the way we move around in cities.

Wilderness guru Les Stroud is known for putting himself in extreme survival situations - he’s swum through shark-infested waters, been stranded in the Arctic with little more than a seal hook and marooned in the rainforests of Costa Rica.

Facebook is now offering users a distinctly French-Canadian version of the popular social networking website thanks to the efforts of hundreds of largely Quebecois users who helped with translation.

Milwaukee Art Museum visitors can hear about American furniture from the 18th and 19th century, and music from those periods in the new iPod Touch tour.

QUESTION: I work for a bank that was recently acquired by a larger bank. Management has told us that there will be layoffs in a few months, but we don’t yet know who will be affected.

To help you track what’s going on with video-conferencing A-listers, check out this new guide where I have reviewed and compared all the best free and low-cost video conferencing tools, conveniently separated in one-to-one and multi-party solutions.

Photo credit: Mac Doctors

Once reserved to pro users with big wallets, shiny hardware, and high-speed internet connections, video conferencing tools now let you create, host, and join online meetings completely free, or for a very reasonable price.

What is more, it’s not really a problem which kind of hardware or operating system you have. Most of the video conferencing tools are in fact web-based. You don’t have to install anything on your hard-disk, and be free to use any computer you run into. Some video conferencing tools even work on Windows Mobile-based phones or iPhones.

Video conferencing tools often integrate some complementary features, such as the ability to make VoIP phone calls, do screen-sharing, record sessions, transfer files, or whiteboarding. And all of this already at a free level. Anyway, if you are willing to spend a couple of bucks, some pro features like better video quality, more participants, or advanced control and customization for your conferences are usually available.

To select which video conferencing tool is the one for you, I have here selected some basic criteria for each one of the two main groups (one-to-one and multi-party solutions), and prepared two comparative tables so that you can easily evaluate what you need.

Here the criteria:

1) Platform: Type of tool (software / web-based).

2) Video channels: Number of parties that can participate to a video conference at the same time (refers only to multi-party tools).

3) Public conference: Ability to make a video conference fully public.

4) Embeddable widget: Flash widget embeddable on web sites or social media sites.

5) Session recording: Feature to record your conference session for later review or publishing.

6) Text chat: Ability to text-chat other participants.

7) Other features: File transfer, screen-sharing, live annotation, whiteboarding, etc.

8) Pro starting price: Price and additional features of the first advanced pricing level.

Here the best free and low-cost video conferencing tools:

POLICE have discovered a cache of illegal weapons at the home of a Westcountry firefighter suspected of shooting dead his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself.

Three suburban New York city police officers suspended over posts they made on Facebook want a judge to limit an investigation into their online habits.

Harrison Detectives Richard Light and Frank Massaro and police officer Michael DiLauria filed suit this week, saying the town’s inquiry is an invasion of privacy.

Attorney Donald Feerick says the officers worry the town will want to look at all of the officers’ posts on the Facebook social networking Web site.

The officers were suspended with pay in February after officials say they found racist and sexist comments on the sites. One detective reportedly made watermelon and fried chicken jokes about President Barack Obama, while other posts made sexual jokes about the town’s 74-year-old mayor.

The RCMP has removed information about a banned terrorist group from a social networking site.

The microblogging service has spawned a vocabulary all its own, with words such as tweople , twirting and tweeps showing up in tweets .

Copyright issues, the online collaboration tools map, visual search engines, and the crisis of newspapers are just some of the fascinating topics of this new issue of Media Literacy Digest by George Siemens.

Photo credit: romeisfamily4

The pointers about copyright are particularly worth mentioning. Intellectual property is a serious issue in Web 2.0 era. Each time you publish something on the Internet you consciously put yourself at risk of someone stealing your content.

Creative Commons licenses try to solve the problem where traditional copyright fails. But it’s still a long way to go before you can protect your work and sleep well at night.

An example? Recently Lee LeFever of Common Craft lamented some of their copyrighted material (an explanatory video for Twitter) was used in mainstream media without any permission granted nor attribution to the original authors. The work in question is licensed under a non-commercial, no-derivatives CC license.

As George Siemens sadly points out:

“Copyright and intellectual property is a mess. And it’s not getting better in the near future. Creating and sharing resources works well when it’s with a network of individuals who value reciprocity.“

If you want to make sense of how new technologies are changing our society, and the impact new media have on the educational landscape, this weekly Media Literacy Digest provides you with pointers, facts and resources to help you analyze the important changes we are undergoing.

Here all the details: